Listen to the CarolPermalink
Sting - Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming
TranscriptPermalink
Welcome back to Advent of Carols from [VerseNotes][vn]. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, a song that refuses to pick a time signature and doesn’t seem to care.
[vn]:
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
This hymn, when you listen to it, feels like it wandered out of a renaissance madrigal and into your Christmas Eve service and just decided to stay. It’s weird, but it is super Advent.
So, let’s start with the melodic weirdness. If you’ve ever sung this song, especially from sheet music, you know it’s really hard to pin down. In my hymnal, it just switches back and forth between something like 6-4 and 4-4 time, and my hymnal just doesn’t even print a time signature. They just gave up.
The melody was written in 1599, so, you know, maybe that has something to do with it. I’m just going to blame the whole situation on the fact that musical notation wasn’t really standardized yet, and the piece is held together by, let’s say, candlelight and hope.
And the lyrics don’t really even improve the situation, which is possibly because they’re another century older, from the 1400s. The poem is set in this goofy meter that doesn’t really fit music very nicely. So maybe it’s not the melody’s fault. Maybe it’s the words. I don’t know.
Either way, this hymn feels ancient, but, you know, that’s because it is. Maybe this rhythmic weirdness can help us feel the mystery and the strangeness of Advent.
So, let’s talk about those words. This is a theological podcast, sort of.
The rose is Jesus. At least in my English version, and in most English versions, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. But it’s already a little weird, because rose is not a biblical name for Jesus.
Yesterday, in O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, we saw all these ancient scriptural names for Jesus, but this isn’t one of them. But you probably didn’t notice, because the feeling is totally biblical.
A flower blooming in the dead of winter, a sign of hope when the night is half spent, the coldest and darkest hour of humanity. And here comes Jesus. So, we don’t even bump on it. We’re waiting for this light. We’re waiting for this rose. We want color and beauty when the world is at its bleakest.
And yeah, roses are red, and blood is red, and Jesus shed his blood on the cross. That is an evocative and beautiful image. But it’s still not really biblical.
Where do the roses come from?
Here’s what is biblical. Jesse, from Isaiah 11:1.
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, the ruined kingdom, the failed royal line, Jesse, and David, and Solomon, and then a bunch of kings I bet you can’t even remember the names of, and then Jesus.
I mentioned this yesterday, and here it is again. Why Jesse instead of David?
I think it’s because Isaiah is looking backward to the root of the promise, the place where all of this kind of began. Jesse is the father of David, and so Jesse is also, kind of in the prophetic sense, the father of Jesus.
The other scriptural root here is the Davidic promise. You know, David says, hey God, I’m going to build you a house. And God says, I don’t need a house, but your son is going to build me one anyway.
And David starts gathering materials, maybe, you know, not fully understanding that the real house will be the body of believers, the living temples of God.
David’s son, Solomon, does end up building a giant temple. It’s beautiful, but it gets knocked down. And yet the promise continues.
That promise shows up in this hymn. The king who reigns, the child who comes, all kind of woven together with Isaiah’s prophecies of Emmanuel into one beautiful image.
Now I mentioned earlier that the rose refers to Jesus in the English version, but something interesting happened in the end of the 1800s when this hymn was first translated into English, because the original German text from the 1400s actually presents Mary as the rose springing from the stump of Jesse to bear the Christ child.
The Protestant translators adapted it so that Jesus is the rose because Catholics are really, really into Mary and Protestants mostly aren’t. So they switched the meaning, which means you’ve got this little theological tug of war baked right into your Christmas carols.
And then later other stanzas were added. My hymnal, which is the United Methodist hymnal, adds a third verse, which is tied to Isaiah 35:1, the desert shall blossom, which is great because there’s a flower from scripture.
And it’s actually probably the closest the Bible gets to floral Messiah language.
And typical for Methodists, even our carols come with footnotes.
Here’s the thing to remember about this song. Jesus comes into the darkness. He doesn’t wait for us to escape it. He doesn’t wait for some other light. He just comes into the darkness and changes it.
He comes true man, yet very God, as that third verse says, which lands squarely on the incarnation, which should remind you of what Charles Wesley wrote in Come Thou Long Expected Jesus.
Jesus shows up in flesh and blood from Hebrews 2:14, and then he bears our burdens from Matthew 11:28, and he shares our every load from this song.
Whether it’s the fragrance of roses filling the air or light breaking into the gloom, the image is the same. Darkness is dispelled.
So this hymn trains us to look for life where life shouldn’t be, in the middle of winter, in the dead of night, on a dead tree stump, in the ruins of the temple, maybe even the ruins of our lives.
It invites us to marvel at the tender, fragile, impossible arrival of God with us, Emmanuel. The rose, I guess.
And finally, this song reminds us that the hope of Advent is not loud or triumphant, or at least not at first, not at Christmas. It’s quiet, it’s tender, and it is alive.
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 Advent Commons at versenotes.org/commons. And 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.