Songs for the Season

Friday, Dec. 23, 2016

Three times in the past week I have heard one of my favorite Christmas hymns, “People Look East,” and each time the wording of one verse was slightly different. I learned the lyrics as “Angels, announce to man and beast, him whom cometh from the east.” However, this week I also heard it as “Angels, announce on this great feast …” and “Angels, announce with shouts of mirth, Christ who brings new life to earth.”

Regardless of the words used, they reflect the true reason we are preparing to celebrate: the feast of Incarnation, of God made man, of the Christ child come among us, “of him whose name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (That would be Isaiah 9:6, but I only know it because Handel set it to music in his great “Hallelujah Chorus” from the “Messiah” oratorio.) 

This glorious presentation of the Incarnation has always been how I have viewed Christmas: with angel choirs streaming glory from the heavens. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “the life of the Word incarnate is surrounded by the adoration and service of angels.” Our hymns echo this, with angels appearing in “While Shepherds Watched,” “The First Noel,” and of course “Angels We Have Heard on High,” to name just a few.  They aren’t present in another of my favorites, “Joy to the World,” but their message is clearly evident, even in the first lines, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come.” 

This emphasis on Christ’s divinity is, I suspect, a primary reason I’ve always had difficulty with his humanity. While we’ve plenty of hymns and other great art depicting Christ’s godhead – even as a baby in the manger he usually has a halo – the “man like us in all things but sin” gets short shrift.

The Church teaches that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. However, I’m more comfortable with God as a god than with God as a man. It’s easier to accept a being of power and might reigning in heaven than it is to see him as a puling babe in the straw of a manger, needing milk and a diaper change.

Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that he came as he did. If he had come to earth as God, a consuming fire with a voice that breaks cedars and rays flashing from his hand, then there would be no mystery. If he came as the son of an earthly king, he would have been humbled as a god but exalted as a human. Instead, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave …” (Phil 2:7) 

By becoming flesh as a child of an unwed mother of no particular social standing, born in what may have been a cave because the government decreed they could not stay at home, Jesus without hypocrisy could criticize the scribes and Pharisees who “preach but they do not practice.” By his own actions he gave his disciples – which includes us – a model to follow. He told us to do as he has done for us. He came not as God but as man, born of woman, so that we might know that we can follow in his footsteps, even to the cross.

I don’t think it matters which of the various lyrics we choose to sing, but which version of God we see is essential. Christ is not only God, he is not just man, he is God incarnate, human and divine.  This is the truth that ends the song verse no matter how it starts, this is the mystery we celebrate this season, that “Love, the Lord, is on the way.”

Merry Christmas!