After 400 years of silence, God opens his mouth in song, and the story that unfolds is a musical performance that turns the world upside down.
This is the first in a series of blog posts about the songs of the nativity story found in the Gospel of Luke.
Imagine taking your family to see a new production of The Wizard of Oz. Twenty minutes into the show you realize there are no songs. There is no “We’re Off To See The Wizard.” The Scarecrow doesn’t sing, “If I Only Had a Brain,” and Dorothy never sings, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” What would you think? Imagine the row this would cause in the press. This remake of The Wizard of Oz would quickly melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Can you imagine a Christmas season without any Christmas music? Though some would love this, imagine how strange it would feel to experience an entire Christmas season in a town lavishly decorated Christmas lights, decorations and eggnog lattes, without so much as a Christmas themed bumper on the radio. You might begin to suspect that you’re on an episode of The Twilight Zone where the Grinch managed to steal the music from Christmas.
What may surprise you is that we are guilty of doing just that — our generation has stripped the original music from Luke’s nativity story.
The Musical Nature of the Nativity
There are 2277 words in the ESV translation of Luke’s nativity story. More than one-third, 877 words, are the poetry of four songs. Some scholars say there are as many as eight poetic passages, which would make poetry, or song, the dominate genre of the nativity story. I would call that a musical, wouldn’t you? In fact, there is nothing else like it in all of Scripture.
By using the term ‘musical’ I don’t mean musical as in Andrew Lloyd Webber or Rogers & Hammerstein. According to stage producer Scott Ostrow, to determine the musical potential of a story one must simply ask, “Does it sing?” Is the heart and soul of the story rooted in song? Do the major turning points demand to be sung?
This is an easier question asked of a fictional story than a true one. There aren’t many based-on-a-true-story musicals, but those that are usually are about musicians or performers, such as A Chorus Line, Funny Girl or Jersey Boys, or the history is simply a loose canvas for the invention of wonderful musical moments, such as South Pacific, The King and I, or The Sound of Music.
Luke’s history of Christ’s birth is musical right out of the box, complete with a minimum of four powerful, emotion-filled songs. No, we don’t have the musical score, so how do we know they were sung? We don’t. But we only have two options — they were poetry recitations, or they were sung by the original voices. Given the context of each song, I have a hard time imagining any being spoken rather than sung. It seems to me that the spoken word isn’t fitting to the text or the context. Yet, sung or not, these poetic proclamations are central to the nativity story. Without them much of the meaning of the nativity story is lost.
The Lost Music of Christmas
Can you name the four original songs of the nativity story? If you need a little help, neither “Silent Night” or “Joy To The World” are correct answers. If you can you are among the few who breathe that rarefied nativity air, but can you also explain what each song is about?
The irony is that the most musically fitting historical moment in all of Scripture is one we celebrate as a festive holiday that is almost completely emptied of it’s original music. In fact, we are so distant from these songs that we don’t know what they mean when someone reads them to us. Much of the Old Testament language, pictures, metaphors and historical references that they contain are obscure to us.
As we enter another Christmas season, many will raise the banner “Jesus is the Reason for the Season,” and remind others to “Put Christ Back Into Christmas” But the pressing question we must ask ourselves is this: will we make any effort to recover these original Christmas songs in our celebrations? Will we act to remove the veil that has covered our eyes for decades? Will we for the first time see the magnificent beauty of these divine songs that announce God’s plan of redemption at the dawn of the New Covenant age which was designed to prepare the world for his Son?
Will the musical that changed the world find room in our celebrations so that this Christmas will “sing?” I pray that it does.
Follow this blog series for the month of December as we look at each of these forgotten songs of Luke’s nativity story.
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Glorious Films 