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Wheaton College Choirs and Symphony Orchestra - Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (Arr. Willcocks)
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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, one of two Christmas carols that makes us ask questions about punctuation.
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
Before we get started, as I was typing out these lyrics—and I always rewrite them for this series to force myself to slow down and actually read every word, which is the whole point of this podcast, but which I still have to practice because these carols are just so familiar—anyway, I realized that they are chock-full of theology: incarnation, names of Christ, arguments about Christology and theology. So I should have known before I even looked it up that, of course, these lyrics are by Charles Wesley—that senior faith master of hymns.
What that means for us is that this is going to be a little bit of a more detailed look at exactly how scriptural these lyrics are, and this episode will be just a little bit longer than usual.
It’s going to be great.
Here we go.
Let’s start with that title.
I’ve never really considered the punctuation for this title, but who is saying “Hark”, and to whom are they saying it?
I think the easy version here is that the angels are the heralds—you know, those angels in the fields in Luke 2—and they’re singing, glory to the newborn king, peace on earth, and they start with “Hark”, basically meaning, listen up, we’ve got news.
But it occurred to me this year that maybe we are the ones saying “Hark”: Hey, check out those singing angels. I bet they’ve got something important to say.
Here’s a quick definition of herald for you, by the way: an official announcer—in this case from the King of the universe.
That means important news is dropping, as if, you know, the angels weren’t already an easy sign.
Verse 1 of this song is the entire plot of eternity in a couple of lines.
Wesley starts out heavy:
Glory to the newborn king
Not just a baby with potential, but a king now—today—the moment he’s born.
And then:
Peace on earth and mercy mild
Not a claim, necessarily, that everything is peaceful now—because obviously it isn’t—but that mercy has arrived.
You know: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, raising the dead. All those lines from [Mary, Did You Know] that—you know—Mary knew.
And peace, in this case, is the end game.
I’ve said before in this series that Jesus says that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword. But I say today that Christmas peace is real, and the point is that it’s just not finished yet.
The next line—
God and sinners reconciled
—that is the mission statement of the incarnation, summarized into four words.
And then our response to that incarnation is:
Joyful all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
Which connects to that global worship song of every tribe and creature in Revelation 5.
And Wesley cleverly brings back that joy of all nations—you know, his obsession with Haggai 2—with those angels in the skies in Luke 2, showing that all of this is one triumph, one song.
We’re still on verse 1.
Let’s move to verse 2, where we start with:
Christ by highest heavens adored
For me, at least, that clearly indicates Hebrews 1, where we learn that the angels worship him, and not the other way around.
Late in time, behold him come
doesn’t mean that God is being late. It means that God is being patient and precise. He sends Jesus at exactly the right moment in history.
Wesley continues with:
Offspring of the virgin’s womb
reminding us of Isaiah 7, where Isaiah prophesies that the virgin shall conceive and bear a son whose name will be Emmanuel.
Now, in the context of Isaiah and his life, that prophecy was almost certainly about Isaiah’s son, Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, who was born in Isaiah 8. But Matthew 1 very clearly identifies it as referring to Jesus. You know, Matthew loves to take Old Testament prophecies and point us to how they reference Jesus.
Then, next, we get this pair of lines that’s very, very challenging:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate deity
Now, “Godhead” here just means the three persons of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And of course, for me, you know, that opening—”veiled in flesh”—reminds me of Hebrews 2. I said that Wesley was obsessed with Haggai 2; apparently I’m obsessed with Hebrews 2, where Jesus takes on flesh and blood to defeat the devil and destroy death itself.
But the point here is that Wesley beats us over the head with who Jesus is. He won’t let us reduce him to some great moral teacher. He is God with us in the most literal sense.
Listen to all the phrases from this verse: “veiled in flesh,” “incarnate,” “in flesh to dwell.” Jesus is very human.
And Wesley pairs those lines with “Godhead,” “deity,” “Emmanuel.” Jesus is also very God. Wesley is picking us up and shaking us until we get it through our heads:
Jesus is Lord.
Jesus is God.
Jesus is man.
But it’s not as simple as you might think.
See, working out the right way to say that Jesus was literally God was an important argument for centuries in the early church. And it resulted in lines in all those creeds you’ve heard—the Athanasian Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed.
And Wesley just tosses it into this Christmas carol like it’s normal.
The phrase to remember here, in case you don’t want to memorize those three creeds all tonight, is:
Jesus is fully God and fully man.
Wesley just puts it a lot nicer.
Let’s look at verse 3.
There are a lot of names of Jesus in this verse, starting with Prince of Peace, which is an obvious quote from Isaiah 9.
But then here’s what I want to focus on: this outrageous pun in the next line.
Son of Righteousness
S-O-N. The title of Jesus. The Son of God.
But Malachi 4 spells it S-U-N—the rising dawn, the day star—rising with healing in its wings.
And we’ve heard other carols refer to Jesus as the day star.
And in this case, Malachi says that that day will set evildoers ablaze, leaving them neither root nor branch.
Coming back to the song, Wesley gives us S-O-N, and then he proves he knows he’s making this incredible pun by following it up with:
Light and life to all he brings
—obviously, you know, referring to the dawn.
And then:
Risen with healing in His wings
—which is a direct quotation from Malachi.
I missed that pun for years, and I am so excited to have seen it this year.
But this verse isn’t over.
The next line is incredibly controversial. It’s this:
Mild He lays His glory by
And let me tell you—theologians have opinions.
Does he somehow lay aside his divine glory temporarily to be incarnated?
Is he somehow less glorious as a man than he was as God?
That sounds crazy.
But then again, if he’s not less glorious, then shouldn’t we die when we see him? Because God told Moses that no one can see God and live. And John tells us that no man has ever seen God.
So somehow, God accommodated our humanity so that we can survive dinner parties with Jesus.
And you know from the Gospels, Jesus is all about the dinner parties.
The important thing here to remember, I think, is that the Son does not stop being God.
This is the same phrase from earlier: He is fully God and fully man.
And then Wesley finishes this verse beautifully:
Born that we no more may die
Born to give us second birth
This is John 3:16—maybe the most famous line in all of Scripture. Jesus came that we should not perish, but have eternal life. Not to condemn us, but to save us.
Wesley is absolutely crushing it with this hymn.
And most of us probably just think about how awesome that chorus is.
Not anymore.
Wesley wrote this song in 1739, originally titling it “Hark How All the Welkin Rings,” where “welkin” just means the heavens or the sky.
Our title comes from George Whitefield—yet another foundational Methodist, and a transcendent speaker.
I mean, this guy was buddies with Benjamin Franklin, and it was said that he could bring a grown man to tears just by pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.
And later historians have called this guy “the first transatlantic celebrity.”
Anyway, he published some songs in 1754, and in that book he changed this title to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” for which I, for one, am forever grateful.
It’s another thirty years before we get that nice refrain:
Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn king
And it’s nearly one hundred years—up until 1855—until we get the modern tune.
That comes from a man named William H. Cummings, an English musician who adapted a piece by the famous composer Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote the melody to celebrate the invention of movable type—you know, Gutenberg’s printing press.
So this song is the story of all of history.
It’s a summary of the incarnation.
It’s an intense theology lesson.
And it’s the entire gospel all in one.
God came near.
Mercy arrived.
Reconciliation started.
The nations are being gathered.
And the angels are basically saying:
Hey.
Listen up.
This changes everything.
That’s 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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