“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests.”
Do you know the joyful story of discovery behind Charles Wesley’s famous carol Hark! the herald-angels sing?
The young Wesley, who had grown up in a Rectory in Lincolnshire, went to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1726. There he formed a student prayer and study group aimed at encouraging a holy life. With a strong emphasis on devotional discipline, the group was disparagingly labelled “the Holy Club”, and its members “Methodists”. Wesley was joined in it by his brother John, and George Whitefield, amongst others. All three of these men were ordained as clergymen in the Church of England. Both Wesleys took up work as missionaries in America.
However, their religion, despite its rigour, was not New Testament Christianity. It was only later, after years of struggle, that stopped living by dependence on their good works for their standing before God, which the Bible tells us to be impossible. The big change came in May 1738, when both Charles and John came to understand for the first time God’s free offer of justification in Christ, given to all who trust Jesus. This change marked their real conversions.
Wesley’s wonder at his discovery is reflected in a hymn he is thought to have written just after his conversion, And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savour’s blood?. Hark! the herald-angels sing followed not long after, in 1739. Both brim with the enthusiasm of someone who has heard wonderful news.
In Hark! the herald, Wesley begins with the message of the angels to the shepherds near Bethlehem, recorded in Luke 2. Peace on earth has been widely misunderstood to be an announcement that Christ came to end wars, but the peace envisaged is in fact between God and people. Wesley nails it: Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled. This is what he had himself come to discover in personal experience just the year before.
The carol continues with a sense of wonder that God should come down to dwell on earth, as a man: Immanuel, God with us. The final verse takes two quotations from the Old Testament – hundreds of years before Christ’s coming – and applies them to Jesus. It concludes with a reference (the only one in any carol I can think of) to the second birth, the regeneration by the Holy Spirit that marks the beginning and wellspring of every real Christian life; the experience so fresh in Wesley’s own mind.
Have you made that discovery for yourself?
Happy Christmas!
