Thoughts on Christmas Carols I

“Joy To The World”

One of the great hymn writers in the English language is the British minister Isaac Watts. Born in 1674, Isaac grew up in Southhampton’s Above Bar Congregational Church, but he had a problem with the music. It was uninspired and archaic. They kept singing the psalms of the Bible in outdated language, without any feeling. His father challenged him to offer something better, and Isaac responded with over six hundred hymns in his lifetime. “Joy to the World” was one of his efforts to bring the language of the psalms up to date, and to mesh those Hebrew prayers with the message of the New Testament.

Joy to the World is based on Psalm 98, especially verse 4: “make a joyful noise unto the Lord; all the earth.” The psalm imagines the entire creation joining in praise to God: let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it. "Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy" (verses 7-8). And so the hymn also includes the whole world “heaven and nature sing,” “fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains.” The joy of God is a celebration for all the world, we’re all included. It reminds me of when Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and the Pharisees tell him to rebuke his disciples for shouting their praise for God. Jesus says “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

So, all of creation is rejoicing in God, but then we reach the third verse, and we’re not sure what to make of it.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make his blessings flow,

far as the curse is found.

Sometimes we sing this, and you can see people get more perplexed each time they have to repeat it: “far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found, far as, far as….”

You have to go back to Genesis, chapter 3, the story of Adam and Eve who live in Eden until they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is a more complex story than we usually give it credit for being. We don’t have time for it now, except to say that eating the fruit is not all a bad thing. It introduces the knowledge of evil, but it also allows them to understand good, and this kind of moral discernment is what maturity is all about. I think God meant all along for this to happen. But with maturity comes the reality of life’s hardship. In the story, when they leave Eden, God puts a curse on the ground. Listen to the curse, because this will explain that mysterious third verse:

“Cursed is the ground…through painful toil you will eat of it…it will produce thorns and thistles, and you will eat the plants of the field” (Genesis 3:17-18).

But when God comes again, the curse will be removed, and world is made new. That’s the promise of Christ, to make all things new, and so we sing that God’s blessings will flow far as the curse is found.

One last point: did you ever notice that this is not a Christmas hymn? It’s an adaptation of a psalm, and other than one meaning of the phrase “the Lord is come” it has nothing to do with Christmas. But sometime in the last century we decided that Christmas was the perfect time to rejoice, to share our joy with all of the world, and to receive God in our hearts.