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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”, a song that refuses to rush us to Christmas morning.
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
Now, I was originally going to put this right there on Christmas because it brings Christmas into the present day. But I decided that because it talks about the stillness and the silence, the cold and the dark, it felt like maybe we could get one more day of anticipation out of it if I placed it just a little bit earlier.
So let’s sit here in Advent and listen to this beautiful melody keep us right where we want to be.
This is a listening song, not a shouting song. It’s about anticipation, but not just anticipation like the rest of Advent. It’s about learning how to be still long enough to hear.
Let’s look at these lyrics.
What came upon the midnight clear? It’s the angels’ song. It’s the angels themselves.
There are angels in the fields, right? We know this story from Luke 2. And here we get this interesting image of them along with their harps of gold, which are beautiful and kind of traditional, but not at all biblical. Almost certainly these are leftovers from, you know, images of Apollo, the Greek god with his lyre. And they just kind of ended up in Christian angel imagery.
But the angels are still saying the things we expect them to say:
Peace on earth, goodwill to men.
And then there’s this unexpected line:
From heaven’s all-gracious King.
Not just the message, but the author of the message.
Remember when we talked about Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, and I told you heralds are royal messengers? Here we get the royalty behind them.
This song reminds us of the stillness of the world—not for the sake of silence, but so that we can hear the angels sing.
This is hark as a spiritual posture.
Now verse 2 brings us directly into the present day.
Still now, today, through the cloven skies they come.
They didn’t stop after Bethlehem. The song doesn’t expire with the shepherds. But we are in a weary world.
This is not an awe-filled silence. This is the silence of exhaustion and burnout and grief.
The author says that the angels have to sing over these Babel sounds. It’s either the Babel of confusion or the Babel of corruption—that is, Babylon. Either way, it’s noise.
And the angels don’t replace it.
The angels can’t replace it.
They can only sing over it.
It’s interesting to me that Longfellow, when he wrote I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, says that war drowned out the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.
The war may drown out our hearing, but the song is still there. The song cannot be silenced.
The problem, I think this author is saying, is not that heaven stopped singing, but that the earth stopped listening.
And if you feel weary—like you can’t listen because of your grief or sorrow, your exhaustion, your overwhelm, your burnout—then verse 3 speaks to you.
It names that weight: life’s crushing load. Work. Grief. Family. Chronic stress. Disappointment.
Whatever your load is that makes your steps painful and slow.
Here’s what verse 3 tells you: Look now. Rest. And hear.
This is the echo of Matthew 11.
Jesus doesn’t scold the weary; He says, “Come to me. I will give you rest. My yoke is easy. My burden is light.”
The verse doesn’t deny the pain. It just says, Hey—pause. Because glad and golden hours are coming.
The angels announce the peace, and they invite us to stop long enough to receive it.
So, we’ve talked about ancient times, modern times, what’s in your head.
Let’s zoom out to what I’m going to call prophetic time.
For lo, the days are hastening on.
The kingdom of God is near—not just then when Jesus walked the earth, but today and now—pressing in, forming thin places where you can feel the world as it ought to be, as it wants to be, as it will be.
The song says that the time is coming when peace shall fling its ancient splendor over the world.
This is imagery of Eden—the rest that Israel never quite got back.
We’ve talked about it before, but Joshua promised rest after the conquest of the Promised Land. Then David promised rest, and so did Solomon, and so did many others. And yet, the rest comes only from Jesus.
A rest remains for the people of God.
When Jesus comes back, he brings us into it.
Christmas peace, it says, is not a shallow happiness. It’s not a pause of war; it’s an eschatological peace. A second-coming peace. An abiding peace.
Now, who is it who wrote these words that feel so full of peace and silence?
His name was Edmund Sears, a Unitarian pastor and abolitionist, writing in 1849. The song was published December 29th, 1849, and the next year he invited a friend, Richard Storrs Willis, to set it to music.
Willis actually trained under Felix Mendelssohn—the same one whose melody, celebrating movable type, became the basis for Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.
Here’s the context you need to know for 1849. There were at least two wars in mind.
The first is the Mexican–American War, which had just concluded in the United States.
And the second is one that we’ve talked about before with O Holy Night—the French Revolution of 1848, where O Holy Night became a revolutionary anthem. It was called, “a religious Marseillaise.”
These wars explain why this song says it’s so hard to focus on peace, and why it does focus on peace today instead of Bethlehem and the Nativity.
Now, I should mention very briefly that the tune Willis wrote is the one that’s now popular in the United States, but in Commonwealth countries—the UK and Canada and others—the tune you know was written by a man named Arthur Sullivan.
The important thing to remember here is that this is another war-shadowed carol.
And ironically, we often omit the verse that’s most about war.
It’s the third of the five original verses. Most hymnals only include four, including the one that I’ve been primarily working out of this year.
Let me just read this verse to you, because you need to hear what we don’t sing:
But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!
Isn’t it ironic that we remove the verse about war because we don’t like it, and in doing so, we recreate the problem Sears mentions?
This verse exhorts us, Quiet the noise. It goes with the rest of the song: Hush the noise. Lay down your load. Stop fighting—even briefly—and listen.
Because even if you can’t hear them, the angels are still singing.
And Advent asks of us: Will we hush the noise long enough to hear them?
Today, listen to them 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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