Who Was Good King Wenceslas?

It’s December again and millions of Australians will attend a carol service or three. It remains a much-loved tradition, even in today’s secular times, but how many people will fully understand the words they are singing?

Almost everybody knows that Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (c. 6 BC–c. 30 AD), the central figure of the religion now known as Christianity. Carols, it’s generally assumed, are sung for the purpose of recalling the circumstances—real or apocryphal—of that far-off event. Beyond that a lot of people are cheerfully apathetic.

In fact, the lyrics of our most treasured carols go way beyond poignant scene-painting. They contain many references to concepts of profundity and importance. Everyone should try to grapple with those concepts, even if they’re not much in vogue in Australia today.

First, a little history. The practice of communal carol-singing as we know it first emerged in Europe in the early 1200s. One of its pioneers was St Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226). The word carol is derived from the French carolle, meaning circular dance: for centuries carols were mostly sung outdoors by groups of Christian revellers, usually drawn from the lower echelons of society. It was only in the late 1800s that carols began to be sung regularly in churches.

Nowadays in Australia the same dozen or fifteen carols are sung every year. Putting to one side the saccharine non-religious ones (such as “Jingle Bells”, “White Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) all were composed by devout Christians between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Europe or North America.

“Silent Night” (1816) and “O Christmas Tree” (1824) are of German/Austrian origin. “Angels from the Realms of Glory” (1816) was written by an Irishman, and the music of “Good King Wenceslas” (1853) originated in Finland in the sixteenth century. “Ding Dong Merrily on High” is believed to be French and also dates back to the sixteenth century. Several classics, including “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (1868) and “We Three Kings” (1857), were written in the United States, but, as might be expected, most of our most cherished carols are English.

Georg Friedrich Handel, the composer of Messiah, settled in London in 1712 and ultimately became a British citizen. He penned the sublime melodies of “Joy to the World” (1719) and “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night” (1703). Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol (1843) immortalised the English carolling tradition.

What, then, are these carols about? It’s inadequate to say they are about the birth of the baby Jesus. They are, of course, but that’s far from the whole truth. The core assumption of all of them is that Jesus was, in human form, God—the Creator of the Universe in whose divine likeness mankind was made. In the famous words of the Apostle Paul, Jesus was “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).

The technical term for this extraordinary belief is “the Incarnation”, and it’s at the centre of all the best carols. “God with man is now residing,” is the expression used in “Angels from the Realms of Glory”. But perhaps the clearest reference to the Incarnation is in Mrs C.F. Alexander’s “Once in Royal David’s City” (1848), my personal nomination for the richest and most beautiful carol ever written:

He came down to earth from heaven,
Who is God and Lord of all …

There are layers of meaning behind these words. For hundreds of years the early church had struggled to reconcile Jesus’s divinity with the Jews’ bedrock belief in monotheism. Eventually, its best thinkers settled on the “trinitarian” conception. God, they reasoned—while One—must be three-personed: Father, Son (Jesus) and Holy Spirit.

This idea wasn’t plucked out of thin air—it was already there in the Gospels and Paul’s letters. (See Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14.) But, like all brilliant and revolutionary ideas, it required careful refining over time. By the fifth century the Trinity was established doctrine, and it still is.

In “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (1833), Jesus is referred to explicitly as the “Son of God”. In “O Come All Ye Faithful” (1751), He is described as “the Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing”—terminology drawn directly from Chapter 1 of John’s Gospel. (“The Word” was a concept in Greek philosophy, signifying the creative, intelligent life force which brought about and sustains the Universe. John, one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, equated Jesus with the Word.)

Another, closely-related notion runs through all religious Christmas carols. Not only was Jesus divine: He was Yahweh, the Jewish God. Moreover, Jesus’s coming to Earth had been specifically and repeatedly predicted, centuries in advance, by the Old Testament prophets. Jesus seems to have understood his mission in that light (Matthew 5:17; Luke 24:27).

One of the twentieth century’s finest Christian thinkers, J.I. Packer, once opined that “the chief proof of the divine origin of Christianity [lies] in its fulfilment of the prophetic Scriptures”. This now-unfashionable belief was certainly held by several of the finest carol-writers.

The words Christ, Messiah and Lord, all of which appear throughout the New Testament, connote the divine personage foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures—an all-powerful prince who would, one day, be sent by God to rescue the embattled Jewish peoples from their captivity and to judge them and their enemies alike. Psalm 98 was one of many to predict this momentous future event, and the carol “Joy to the World” is based upon it.

As it happened, most Jews of Jesus’s day did not appreciate who he was during his lifetime; they expected a far grander and more combative personality, a military conqueror who would champion their cause against the Romans. Instead Jesus died a humiliating death by crucifixion.

After the transformative experience of the Resurrection, the early Christians scoured the writings of the prophets and found many remarkable allusions to the actual events of Jesus’s life. Several pertaining to the circumstances of Jesus’s birth were highlighted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Thus, Jesus was of King David’s line (cf. Jeremiah 23:5), his mother was a virgin (cf. Isaiah 7:14), and his birthplace was Bethlehem (cf. Micah 5:2). The baby Jesus was presented with gifts by three wise men from the East (cf. Numbers 24:17; Psalm 72:10; Isaiah 60:6) and his birth precipitated King Herod’s massacre of the innocents (cf. Hosea 11:1; Jeremiah 31:15).

The authors of Christmas carols drew liberally upon these details. They also made use of other features of the Gospel accounts, those which anticipated Jesus’s humility and egalitarianism as an adult.

In “Away in a Manger” (1885) the new-born baby Jesus is “little, weak and helpless”. His parents, travelling far from home, cannot find accommodation or even provide their child with the basic luxury of “a crib for a bed”. They improvise by using a manger, a feeding trough for animals. Thus is Jesus identified from the outset “with the poor and mean and lowly” (“Once in Royal David’s City”).

Yet another key strand runs through the great carols. They proceed on the daunting premise that there is an afterlife and that everyone must ultimately face God’s judgment.

Christians believe that the purpose of Jesus’s death on the Cross—a recorded historical event which took place on the outskirts of Jerusalem in or about 30 AD—was to rescue mankind from the consequences of sin. If judged by God on our true merits, each of us would fail dismally. We would deserve to be punished in the afterlife for our myriad transgressions on Earth. Instead Jesus, the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53, willingly took that fearful burden upon his (human) self.

The term for this radical idea is “the Atonement” and many Christmas carols allude to it. Jesus’s ultimate role is variously described as “cast[ing] out our sin” (“O Little Town of Bethlehem”) and “to redeem us all” (“The Holly and the Ivy”). In “The First Nowell” (1823) the concept is put thus: “With his blood mankind has bought”.

Perhaps the best-known reference to the Atonement appears in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”:

To save us all from Satan’s power
When we have gone astray

At this point, still more difficult theological questions arise. Who of us will enjoy the benefit of Jesus’s sacrifice? Who of us, when we die, will follow Jesus to “the place where he has gone” (“Once in Royal David’s City”). What, in other words, is the “test” of salvation?

Grace is utterly central to Christianity, especially the streams of Protestant theology inaugurated during the Reformation by Martin Luther and John Calvin. The basic concept is that no one can “earn” salvation by acts of good behaviour, however well-motivated, let alone by adherence to the formal practices of their church. Salvation—the product of “redeeming grace” (“Silent Night”)—is a gift bestowed by God at His absolute discretion. As St Paul insisted, “God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy” (Romans 9:18).

But upon whom will the gift be bestowed? Here some very tricky issues are at play. Because most Christmas carols were written by Protestants they tend to reflect the Protestant “take” on the question, which is that what saves a person’s soul is faith alone. (See John 3:16; Ephesians 2:8–9.)

In this vein, “O Christmas Tree” includes an exhortation to “trust in God unchangingly”. In “O Little Town of Bethlehem” there is a prayer that Jesus should “cast out our sin”. And more explicitly still:

Where meek souls will receive him still
The dear Christ enters in.

In the Catholic tradition greater emphasis is placed upon virtuous conduct. St James—Jesus’s brother or cousin—famously wrote that “faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:26). This is best understood as an observation that true faith will inevitably be evidenced by good works, a notion consistent with countless verses in the Bible praising non-violence, generosity, purity and forgiveness.

Jesus and the Apostles taught that the rich and powerful are at greatest risk of flouting these injunctions. In a number of Christmas carols we find exhortations towards charity. Indeed, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” were carols sung by poor townsfolk to the gentry in hope of, or in gratitude for, their benevolence at Christmas time.

The matter is stated plainly in the concluding verse of “Good King Wenceslas” (1853):

Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
Wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.

These words are exquisitely relevant in 2012, when the gap between rich and poor appears as wide as ever.

Wenceslas, by the way, was a tenth-century ruler of Bohemia—the modern-day Czech Republic. Being a good medieval Christian, he observed the Feast of St Stephen on its traditional date of December 26, mid-winter in the Northern Hemisphere. This is one of the few religious carols in which references to snow, frost, pine logs and the like are thoroughly apt; the Gospels, in fact, are silent as to the time of year in which Jesus’s birth took place.

So, this Christmas, pay heed. There’s much more to those nice familiar carols than may first meet the eye.