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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, a Christmas carol that brings the Great Commission right into the manger scene.

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

Now, this is one of the very few Christmas carols whose core message is proclamation, not just describing the birth of Jesus.

We’ve already looked at some of the others—you know, Good Christian Friends, Rejoice, He Is Born, Sing We Now of Christmas—songs that say not ponder quietly the majesty of the birth, or feel warmly the manger scene with Mary and Joseph, and not even just come and see because it’s really cool, but go and tell.

Now, I’ve said earlier that Judaism is largely a come and see religion, and Christianity is largely go and tell, and this is one of those songs that reminds us that Christmas doesn’t end at the manger. It spills across the fields and over the hills.

So let’s start with this question: Why a mountain?

Okay, maybe it’s a stupid question, but I think the reason is both important and simple: that’s where messages get announced in Scripture. They are not whispered or gossiped through the cities. Someone goes up high to proclaim something across a whole region.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Isaiah 18:3 says:

When a signal is raised on the mountains, look.

And “look” is basically “hark”, right? We can’t fly like the angels, so we’ve got to get on top of something.

Isaiah 40 is even clearer:

Go up on a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news.
Lift up your voice with strength. Fear not.
Say, Behold your God.

And then it goes on to talk about God as a shepherd, which is a perfect attachment from mountains to Christmas.

That passage, by the way, is from the famous section that starts:

A voice crying, “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.”

What an amazing connection in this carol.

And then there’s Isaiah 52:7:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news.

Man, Isaiah really likes mountains.

But all of these connect mountains with bringing good news—the voice of a prophet speaking the words of God to the people of God.

And it’s not about the geography, right? The mountains themselves probably don’t matter, because there probably aren’t people up there. It’s about volume and visibility, announcement and heralding.

If it’s good news, it needs altitude.

Let’s look at the very first three verses—the famous ones that we sing every year— quickly, and then we’re going to see something hopefully new and interesting.

These verses are pretty basic. They’re straight from Luke 2: Shepherds, angels, fear, manger.

A couple of neat details, though, that I want to pick out.

First, silent flocks. We like this idea in Advent—the silence of the world, and then God breaking it open—and here it is again.

And then there’s throughout the heavens. Not a subtle revelation exactly. Not one-to-one. This is announced to everybody.

These verses, you know, set this excellent scene, and then the refrain tells us what to do in response.

In O Come, All Ye Faithful, we heard, “O come let us adore him”. That was our response.

Here the response is: “Go tell it on the mountain.”

That’s come and see versus go and tell. And the manger is where those two worlds collide.

The shepherds, you see, they don’t respond by writing poetry about the angels. They don’t sit and compose lyrical songs. They get up and they run to Bethlehem. They become messengers and seekers.

The gospel doesn’t just show up in the world; tt recruits you to its cause.

So that’s the usual three verses.

But did you know there are actually five verses to this song?

I did not.

Up until this week, I had no idea there were two more verses I’d never heard before. And these verses don’t sound like Christmas at all.

And if I haven’t heard them, I’m guessing you haven’t heard them either. So let me read them to you here, and then we’ll see how they fit in.

Verse 4:

When I am a seeker,
I seek both night and day.
I seek the Lord to help me,
And he shows me the way.

And verse 5:

He made me a watchman
Upon the city wall.
And if I am a Christian,
I am the least of all.

So Christmas here isn’t just something that happens to you. It’s not just a story that we retell.

It creates seekers, and it creates watchmen.

Now, I think the seeker part is clear, right?

We already saw the shepherds go seeking the baby in the manger in Bethlehem so that they can then tell about it.

But the watchman is what I want to talk about.

It reminds me of Ezekiel 33:7. This verse is beautiful:

So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel.
Whenever you hear a word from my mouth,
you shall give them warning from me.

Now, God is talking to Ezekiel here. A watchman: what does he do?

He looks out for what’s going on outside the city walls, and then he passes the word to everybody inside because they have to prepare.

In this song, it’s not Ezekiel. It’s us.

And it’s not an invading army, but the arrival of the Son of God.

Christmas turns spectators into heralds and sentries and seekers, and we are all of the above.

We are the shepherds being sung to by the angels.
We are the seekers and the watchmen.
And then we are the church.

Because this hymn can’t survive without the Great Commission. There’s a version in every gospel, but I like Acts 1:8 the best. Jesus is talking to the disciples right before he ascends, and he says:

You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

He means: You can’t stay here. You have to go and tell about what you have seen.

So what are we watching for today?

Not just the first coming. The shepherds had something to look for then—go and see the baby in the manger in Bethlehem.

No, today we look out for the second coming. Not that it is possible to miss it, but we want to be prepared, and we want everybody else to be prepared with us.

So here’s what the song is telling us: “Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born.”

And: watch; he’s coming again.

Where did this song come from?

If you listen to it, you can kind of hear its origins, right?

It’s an African-American spiritual from sometime in the 1700s or 1800s, but it wasn’t written down until 1907 by the first Black collector of Black folk songs, John W. Work Jr.

He was a professor and musicologist at Fisk University who collected enslaved spiritual songs, and he actually published three books of them.

The second one was called New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the American Negro, and it contained the very first printing of Go Tell It on the Mountain.

We can now trace that song back to at least 1865, but it’s almost certainly even older than that.

Back to the carol.

Christmas announces something that is too large to stay local. It’s too hopeful to stay quiet. It starts out quiet, of course, in a manger with silent flocks by night, but it doesn’t stay that way.

And that’s kind of where we are.

John Wesley said he wanted the Methodists to be loud Anglicans, but yelling isn’t really what we’re doing—not screaming on street corners or trying to win arguments.

What we’re doing is telling the truth with enough energy, from high enough ground—maybe even from a mountain—that the folks around us look.

When the signal is raised on the mountains, they look, and they see not us, but Christ.

In this hymn, Christmas isn’t asking us to feel more.

It’s asking us to speak up.

And 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].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.

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