Good Christian Friends, Rejoice! / He Is Born / Sing We Now of Christmas

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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at three songs that are, in one way or another, about singing: “Good Christian Friends, Rejoice,”, “He Is Born,”, and “Sing We Now of Christmas.”

If you want to listen to these songs before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

Let’s start with Good Christian Friends, Rejoice.

This one feels like a tavern song to me. This is full-body worship—”heart and soul and voice”—not polite background choral music.

Before we start, a quick note on the title. It used to be Good Christian Men, Rejoice, but Friends works better for two reasons. First, it’s more obviously inclusive. But second, and more importantly, it’s relational. These are my people, not just random guys within earshot.

What I find truly beautiful about this hymn or carol is the structure. It’s simple and repetitive and easy to sing, and that repetition lets you focus on what changes between the refrains.

And those three refrains are basically Christmas in a nutshell:

Christ is born today.
Christ was born for this.
Christ was born to save.

This carol doesn’t just describe joy. It commands it.

But we should ask why we are singing. And the hymn gives us a few lines with very clear scriptural punch.

First: give ye heed. This is doing the same job as “hark” in Hark the Herald Angels Sing. It’s saying, Listen up. Something’s happening.

Second: he hath opened heaven’s door. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the one who opens and no one shuts, who shuts and no one opens. He has invited us into heaven.

And as a consequence:

now ye need not fear the grave.

Once again, this is Hebrews 2. I never knew Hebrews would show up so much in Christmas carols, but here it is again—freedom from the fear of death because Jesus has come.

And then:

he calls you one and calls you all.

Christmas widens God’s family beyond the bloodline of Abraham to all who have faith in Jesus Christ.

This is a mead-hall Christmas. Bang your tankard on the table. Don’t whisper it.

The origin story of this hymn is the messiest one I’ve ever seen.

It starts off in the early 1300s, probably, with a German mystic Catholic named Heinrich Suse. The tune is In Dulci Jubilo, a medieval song that mixes Latin and German.

That blending of languages is called macaronic, but it creates a problem: How do you translate a song that already lives in two languages into a third language without losing it?

Well, there are lots of attempts and translations over the centuries. But the version most English speakers know came in the mid-1800s from John Mason Neale—a name we’ve heard before—and it becomes more of a free adaptation than a strict translation.

The tune is old enough that, as far as we know, it was first written down in Piae Cantiones in 1582, which is basically a Finnish medieval Billboard chart. You know, all the hits.

So that’s our first song: a rowdy German-and-Latin joy, singing, Sing louder.

Next, let’s move on to some French bagpipes and answer the question, “Why sing at all?”

This carol tells us: it’s because the waiting is over.

This is He Is Born—or in French, Il est né le divin enfant.

In French, this is a beautiful song. The words fit the melody nicely. But the English translations kind of feel like someone was just staring at a rhyming dictionary in mild distress.

So we’re going to set the translation issues aside and look at the song we have.

It’s still high-energy festival music, right? Not nursery music.

It says,

Play the oboe and bagpipes merrily.

Bagpipes are not background ambiance. Bagpipes are a choice.

This song focuses on that long Advent wait—the longing for Jesus. It says,

The prophets foretold him.

And as I said back when we looked at Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus, “foretold” goes way back. Back at least to Genesis 3. This is centuries of promise, centuries of waiting, fulfilled in this night.

The French lyric actually says we’ve been waiting four thousand years. I don’t think that’s a literal date, but man, it does feel like forever, right? Especially if you’re Israel.

Here’s a piece of this song that I don’t love—the verse that goes,

Oh, how lovely. Oh, how pure.

For me, it’s a little bit Hallmark. You could say that about any baby. It doesn’t really say anything about Jesus.

This is a Christmas carol. We should be focused on the Christ child.

But then the ending lands beautifully:

Jesus, Lord of all the world.

And isn’t that where it’s heading? Absolutely.

This little child will be king of the earth. In fact, He’s king now. We just haven’t fully learned to live like it yet.

And that gives us our “why we sing.”

We sing because the promise didn’t stay abstract. The prophets weren’t talking about a concept. They were talking about a person.

Finally, let’s move from longing to movement—from singing about that birth to becoming the kind of people who actually respond to it.

Our third song is Sing We Now of Christmas, which feels to me like two different songs stitched together.

The verse is simple, teachable. It’s chanty. It’s kind of pub-friendly, like that first song: “Sing we now of Christmas…”

But the refrain is this tremendous choral explosion—which I will not attempt to sing—but it goes,

Sing We Nowel.

You can almost feel the Gothic architecture in that refrain. It sounds like it needs a thousand-person choir and a cathedral to do it justice.

But even though the music is amazing, the thing I love most about this carol is its narrative movement.

The angels don’t just announce to the shepherds, as they do in so many other carols. In this one, they give directions.

They say, “Go to Bethlehem.”

That’s in Scripture—we just tend to skip over it. It’s in Luke 2:10-12. They basically say, Good news. Great joy for all people. And here’s how you’ll find him.

And this song actually includes the shepherds going to Bethlehem—Luke 2:15-16.

They obey.

That’s how they end up in every nativity set. They don’t just hear. They go.

Then we get another movement—a very different one—visitors from the east.

This song calls them kings, which a lot of songs do. They’re not kings. They’re magi or wise men.

They come from the east. They bring gold and myrrh.

This song skips the frankincense, probably because they were already having trouble trying to fit English words into French music. So I’ll forgive them for now.

But the point is this: these are costly gifts, appropriate to bring a king.

Isaiah 60, for example, mentions gold and frankincense as worthy gifts to bring the Lord.

And then the final line of this song might be the most important:

There was ne’er a place on earth so like paradise.

At first I thought, really? The manger doesn’t feel like paradise to me. It feels dirty and cramped and possibly partly outside. It’s not exactly where you expect the King of the universe to arrive.

But then I realized: this is temple language.

Temple language means God’s people in God’s place with God’s presence.

In Eden, God walks with them in the cool of the day. And here we are again: God has become the most present he’s been since Eden.

So you’ve got God’s people—Mary, Joseph, shepherds, magi, poor and rich.
You’ve got God’s presence—the child himself.
And you’ve got God’s place—even though it doesn’t seem like it—Bethlehem.

Let’s look back at Micah 5:2:

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel.

So it turns out this is paradise—because God came near, here, to us.

These three carols give us the imperatives for Christmas singing:

Sing louder.
Sing because God kept his promises.
And sing because Christmas turns us into the kind of people who respond—who go, who gather, who become a people of praise.

All because, that night, God came near.

And that is why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.

We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

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