Christmas carols need careful attention. There we often find the unexpected. Instead of Christmas being all bright, light and cheery, we find a darker backdrop which is quite central to Christmas, but often forgotten.
Wilfred M. McClay points out that the French carol "O Holy Night" reads "Long lay the world in sin and error pining,/Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth." Hmmm. Did the world in fact lay "in sin and error pining"? Yes, indeed.
And what about "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"? The words in the first verse read:
"To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray."
McClay says,
"The merriness being urged upon the gentlemen. . comes amid a great darkness, a darkness that never disappears, that beckons and threatens, a darkness whose presence is subtly conveyed by the minor key with which the song begins and ends. The black ship with black sails lingers on the far horizon, silent and waiting."
. . . We are constantly reminded to 'keep Christ in Christmas" and to remember "the reason for the season." And of course we should. But, if I may be permitted to put it this way, we must also keep Satan in Christmas, and not skip too lightly over the lyrics that mention him.
For he and the forces he embodies are an integral part of the story. It utterly transforms the way we understand Christmas, and our world, when we also hold in our minds a keen awareness of the darkness into which Christ came, and still must come, for our sake.Later in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” the visiting angel tells the shepherds in the field that Christ has come
"To free all those who trust in him
From Satan’s power and might.”Being subject to that “power and might” is, as we are likely to put it these days, the default setting of our human existence. But the Christmas story plays havoc with all such defaults.
It reveals the putatively normal and settled features of our world to be something very different: the ruins and aftereffects of a great and ancient calamity, the tokens of a disordered order. It lifts the veil of illusion about who we are and what we were made to be. Which means that the “comfort and joy” of which the song speaks are not merely outbursts of seasonal jollity.
They bespeak the ecstatic gratitude of captives and cripples who recognize that, in and through Christ, the entire cosmos has been transformed, and their lives have been made new. Nothing can ever be the same again.
The darkness does not go away. Not now, not yet. But the light that shines into it can make even the bleakest midwinter into a landscape glistening with promise. So may it be for each of us, this and every Christmas.