Essays from West of 98: O Holy Night
Author’s note: this essay was published on Christmas week in 2019 and is one of the most popular essays I’ve ever written. I felt called to share it again on this Christmas week and I hope the lyrics touch you as deeply as they continue to touch me.
“O holy night! The stars are brightly shining. It’s the night of our dear Savior’s birth.”
I have complicated feelings about Christmas music. As I’ve written in past essays, Christmas can be a difficult time for many. Grief and loss, strained family relations, financial difficulties, feelings of inadequacy, and mental health struggles all take their toll at Christmastime. Rather than celebrate and bask in the joy of the holidays, too many of our friends and neighbors simply hope to survive the season. For a variety of reasons, that always weighs heavy on my heart around Christmas. As a result, I choose my Christmas music carefully. Contrary to what my wife thinks, I DO enjoy Christmas music, but it takes the right mood and the right songs. But the right ones, boy do they ever touch me.
On that point, I have no shame in telling you that I cannot listen to “O Holy Night” without crying. I don’t mean that my eyes get a little misty around the edges. I mean that I devolve into full-on, uncontrollable weeping. “O Holy Night” is not an easy song to sing, but when it is done right, it is incredible. It is an incomparable testimony of Christ’s birth and our salvation. Like any truly divinely-inspired song, the lyrics of “O Holy Night” are filled with complexity and layers. At different times in life, different parts of the song can strike you in different ways. On my most recent experience with the song, something new stood out to me. Some popular renditions of the song have been re-arranged and don’t include all of the verses, so not every version that you hear contains this verse, but the original third verse contains something incredibly gripping to me:
“…His law is love and His gospel is peace,
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,
And in His name all oppression shall cease…”
When I hear them, these lyrics overwhelm me, like a ton of bricks dropped on my head. The background of the song makes the lyrics even more remarkable. The original lyrics and music were written in France in 1847, only a few months before King Louis Phillippe was deposed in the February Revolution, as the working class and middle class rose up against the oppression of the French aristocracy. Eight years later, the song came to America and the lyrics were translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, an ex-minister and music critic living in Massachusetts. A French society smothered by oppression. A pre-war America only a few years from abolishing slavery. Now read those lyrics again: the slave is our brother. In His Name, all oppression shall cease. Those lyrics are not accidental or random. They’re made even more powerful by the era in which they were revealed.
Slave as brother is a Biblical truth. In Philemon 16, Paul writes that a certain slave was “more than a slave, a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” Paul wrote this to a church leader who owned the slave in question. Not only that, but the slave had recently run away. And yet, Paul makes it clear that the slave and the owner are brothers.
I praise the Lord that we no longer have physical slavery in America, but many of our brothers suffer under different forms of slavery—sin, addiction, poverty, despair, hopelessness and more. It must have been jolting when Paul told Philemon that Philemon’s slave was his brother. In that same way, it is jolting for us to recognize our brothers today: the addicted, the unpopular, the ragged, the “icky” people of society. And whether we like it or not, our society still struggles with oppression.
As Christmas nears, I encourage each of us to consider the lyrics of “O Holy Night.” Are we treating the slave as our brother? Are we truly working for all oppression to cease, in Jesus’ holy name?
Merry Christmas! Our savior is born.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the “West of 98” website and forthcoming podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com.