The Songs: The Timelessness of Christmas Carols
By Jack Wyman
They are among the best ever written.
They tell the story and proclaim the glory.
So many authors with so many dimensions. United across history by the passion to tell of the greatest event in history.
They are the timeless words and melodies that transcend the shifting tastes and styles of sacred music. They alone are the songs we go door to door singing at this time of year. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century.
Christmas carols.
The same words. The same music. “Contemporary worship” is powerless to stop them. Smoke, loud noise, darkness and blinking fluorescent lights cannot drown them out. Or update them or modernize them.
Their simple beauty and purity endure. Unlike with everything else, age is their friend.
Christmas carols are very old songs - some are hundreds of years old.
The word carol originated around A.D. 1300 from the Old French word “carole.” This referred to a “kind of dance in a ring, [a] round dance accompanied by singers.” It was used to refer to any festive songs. Only later did it become associated with holiday and religious music.
Today, carols are almost exclusively connected with Christian holidays - especially Christmas.
The sacred Christmas songs are unchanging and unchangeable. They can never be separated from the old, old story they tell - the story that remains always new, yet always the same. Always refreshingly relevant, yet always ancient and mysteriously lost in wonder, love and praise.
We’ve mostly jettisoned hymns and hymnals from the church of the 21st-century.
But woe to those who say we must sing no Christmas carols! It is one of the precious few musical traditions to have survived the history of the church. As long as there is Christianity they will never be banished.
We sing them when we’re 8 - and sing them when we’re 88. They stand as the towering redwoods of Christian composition.
We know them. If we can’t sing them all, we recognize their tunes and we hum. They are universally recognized across the world.
Christmas carols bring the world together to celebrate one transformational event - an event global, celestial and cosmic in its reach and impact. These majestically written songs bring us together like no other force can. It’s a phenomenon of unity.
They even united the enemies of World War I - briefly - on one special Christmas Eve. Across the horrific lines of battle came the words of the carols, breaking the silence of a clear midnight.
Music unites - and never more beautifully or meaningfully than at Christmas. The heated vitriol, angry divisions and grasping ambitions grow quiet and peaceful - for just a day or two. The Prince of Peace is born in Bethlehem, and the rich and powerful stop to bow in acknowledgment. They will soon take up their clamoring again, but for now, “all is calm, all is bright.”
It’s the universal nod to God. It’s not just wise men who seek him. We all do, in this frustrated, weary and pining world. We wish he’d stay a bit longer. The spirit within us yearns for him with an emptiness that cannot be filled by anything else. The whole creation groans to be set free by the new-born king.
We may not know all four verses of these great hymns by heart but we usually know the first or maybe the second, and we all know the chorus.
The songs bring joy - to the world but also to our hearts.
We know to raise our voices a little louder when we sing, “oh, come, let us adore him!” Three times we sing it and three times it grips our souls.
Together, the old familiar carols paint the beautiful, picturesque mosaic of God’s divinity and humanity. Mostly, they tell the story of God’s eternal love for you and me. An endless and unchanging love that is celebrated every season as if it’s the first time. We see the peace and calm of the snowy silent night, the faithful making their way to the manger, to bow in adoration before the Savior of the world.
The beauty and glory of Christmas are expressed - and amplified - poetically through the carols. How could we ever celebrate as we should and want were there no Christmas hymns? How bleak and bare the holiday without them. How splendid with them!
Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts gave us two of the greatest. Rich with the profundity of scripture and the eloquence of truth. They are the “tidings of comfort and joy.”
“Joy to the world,” Watts wrote, “the Savior reigns.” “Let the “fields, and floods, rocks, hills, and plains” - all of creation - “repeat the sounding joy” - which Watts does - twice. I can see the homely little genius laughing with joyful exaltation as he pens furiously.
“No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground.” Enough! For Jesus Christ has come to “make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found.”
Christmas isn’t just the birth of Jesus - it’s God’s entrance into the world he made to save the world he loves. And to defeat forever the devil and his power. We celebrate this too - with Watts.
Wesley exalts the humility of God in coming to earth:
“Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die; born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.”
And his mission:
“Rise, the woman’s conquering seed, bruise in us the serpent’s head; Adam’s likeness now efface, stamp thine image in its place.” Victory! That’ll preach!
We stand in awe of this holy night; the herald angels singing, the shepherds watching over their flock by night, on this first Noel.
Thank God for Christmas!
May we keep it all year long.
Praise God for the gift of His Son!
Thank God for the songs that celebrate his birth.
Let's sing them again next year - for the first time.
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