Hail Th’Incarnate Deity
This is Part Four of our 2025 Advent series. (You can find the other parts here: One. Two. Three.)
Memories of the Christmas season from my childhood are set to a particular soundtrack: Michael W. Smith’s first Christmas album, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s performance with the New York Choral Society, and, of course, Amy Grant. Any child who grew up in an evangelical Christian home in the 80s and 90s had his or her fair share of Amy’s Christmas albums. The first one featured some memorable originals, like “Heirlooms” and “Tennessee Christmas.”
(If I have just sent you down a nostalgic Spotify rabbit hole, you’re welcome. If you’re scratching your head at how old I am, that’s OK too.)
There are two standouts on this album for me: one is called, simply, “Christmas Hymn.” Amy and Michael W. Smith wrote it. It’s a call-and-response with a choir, and the lyrics are lovely: theologically sound and joyful. I think it should get more attention, but given that it was penned in 1983, that doesn’t seem likely at this point.
The other standout on this album is her straightforward arrangement of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” which any observer of Christmas music knows is best allowed to shine all on its own. Charles Wesley jammed so many Scriptural references into this one that it’s hard to cover them all. I will zoom in on my favorite bit: here we have perhaps one of the greatest combinations of theology and poetry in English:
Veil’d in flesh, the Godhead see,
Hail th’ incarnate deity!
Pleas’d as man with men to dwell,
Jesus, our Immanuel.
What a statement. It’s John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” It is also 2 Corinthians 8:9, “ For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.”
In his classic book Knowing God, J. I. Packer reminds us of this truth, that Jesus was poor both physically and spiritually as he was “pleas’d as man with men to dwell.” Packer expounds:
For the Son of God to empty himself and become poor meant a laying aside of glory; a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice, and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony—spiritual, even more than physical—that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it. It meant love to the uttermost for unlovely men, who “through his poverty, might become rich.” This Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable so that thirty years later he might hang on a cross. It is the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard, or will hear.
Wesley wrote this hymn—with its original ten verses—within a year of his own conversion. It may be easy to see the joy shot through the message here: the Christian faith had not gone stale for the author. He was overjoyed at the sheer wonder encapsulated in the Christian message of the Incarnation.
“Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” was not set to the tune we now know until later, when it was paired with a tune by Mendelssohn. The music itself was originally composed in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg’s printing press. When this secular tune about the written word was matched to this sacred poem about Word Made Flesh, the world was given a gift: a doctrinally weighty, yet joyfully light, celebration of Immanuel, God Come Near.
Packer again:
We talk glibly of the “Christmas spirit,” rarely meaning more by this than sentimental jollity on a family basis. But what we have said makes it clear that the phrase should in fact carry a tremendous weight of meaning. It ought to mean the reproducing in human lives of the temper of him who for our sakes became poor at the first Christmas. And the Christmas spirit itself ought to be the mark of every Christian all the year round.
To echo Charles Dickens, may that be truly said of us, and all of us!
When she’s not behind her laptop, Kelly enjoys live music, baseball, reading great books, and traveling with her husband, David. Kelly hails from beautiful snowy New England, but after nearly two decades in North Carolina, she feels right at home.
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I know exactly what you mean! I also grew up on Amy Grant\’s Christmas albums. I found one at the thrift store a few years ago and snatched it up for myself. That version of Hark the Herald Angels Sing is incredible. Thanks for deepening it for me with the history behind it. I love learning about hymns that way. And now I\’ll settle into pondering more about how the incarnation made Christ poor and what a wonder that is for us.