Author: Mark Woods, 30 October 2024
If ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ feels like a vivid picture of Christ’s birthplace, that’s probably because the author, Brooks Phillips, had been there.
Phillips was an Episcopal priest, abolitionist, and teacher of preachers who witnessed to Helen Keller and became an ecumenically popular Bishop of Massachusetts.
On Christmas Eve 1865 he went to a midnight service at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. Here’s what he said about it: ‘I remember standing in the old church in Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices I knew well, telling each other of the wonderful night of the Saviour’s birth.’
In that pre-electric age the streets would indeed have been ‘dark’, and the stillness would have been much deeper than today. Phillips took this powerful sensory experience and peopled it with the characters of the Christmas story.
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Here is Christ born of Mary (Matthew 1.16) and the angels keeping their watch of wondering love (Luke 2.13–14).
The carol is also full of theology, not in a heavy-handed statement of doctrine, but in a preacher’s interpretation of what the doctrine really means in the life of the believer. ‘How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given; so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.’
There is a deep feeling and poetic vision in these verses, arising from a profound engagement with the events they describe. The theme which runs through them is that Christmas is not just a single historical event: it is God breaking in to the world, which happens not just when his Son is incarnate, but when his will is done.
A verse which is not generally found in hymnbooks today (or in your Bible Society carol booklet, so you’ll have to add it yourself) runs:
Where children pure and happy
Pray to the blessèd Child,
Where misery cries out to thee,
Son of the mother mild;
Where charity stands watching
And faith holds wide the door,
The dark night wakes, the glory breaks,
And Christmas comes once more.
You may be more familiar with these lines from the third verse: ‘No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him, still, the dear Christ enters in.’ And here’s part of the final verse, a prayer that really brings us into the story: ‘Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.’ There is a profound truth here, that Christ comes into the world, not only at Bethlehem 2,000 years ago but through us, his disciples, wherever we are.
You can find the words to ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ with those of 11 other classic carols in the booklet Come and Sing the Christmas Story, which is new for 2024. Order now and share the Christmas story in song.
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