Unless you have a classical choir background (or are or have ever been a Lutheran), there’s a good chance you’ve missed out on one of the lovelier Christmas songs in Western hymnody.

Like dozens of other German chorales, this one owes its title and most popular translation to Catherine Winkworth, whose three collections of German hymn translations in the middle of the 19th century brought a treasury of Christian verse to the English-speaking world (“Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates,” “Now Thank We All Our God,” and “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” are among them). It’s Winkworth’s translation of Paul Gerhardt‘s “Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen“: “All My Heart This Night Rejoices.” (For my Presbyterian friends, it’s #217 in the Trinity Hymnal.)

In the first place, the tune to which it’s usually sung in English (written for another Gerhardt hymn, “Warum sollt’ ich mich denn grämen?”) is a beauty, stately and sweet at once, in the best German tradition. But in Winkworth’s fine translation, Gerhardt’s personal and pastoral engagement with the miracle of the Incarnation takes center stage.

The first verse strikes a note of personal joy in response to the Christmas proclamation; in the stanzas that follow, the meaning of “Christ is born” is unpacked in striking ways:

Forth today the Conqu’ror goeth,
Who the foe, sin and woe, death and hell, o’erthroweth.
God is man, man to deliver;
His dear Son now is one with our blood forever.

No “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” this – Christ’s incarnation is an Advent, the arrival of the rightful king to execute vengeance on the enemies of his people. It is the invasion of a Conqueror (the German refers to him as “God’s Hero”). “God is man, man to deliver”: is there a better summary of Christmas? And the remarkable truth of Christ’s ascension and session are woven in as well. Christ remains “one with our blood forever,” so that on the highest throne sits a man, one of our own.

Christ’s victory and solidarity with us have massive implications for our relationship with God:

Shall we still dread God’s displeasure,
Who, to save, freely gave his most cherished Treasure?
To redeem us, he hath given
His own Son from the throne of his might in heaven.

Here is one place where it’s hard for the translation to convey the starkness of the German original. That first line reads more literally in German, “Shall God now be able to hate us?”

It seems rhetorical, but perhaps Gerhardt really did think in such terms. He was an orphan by age 15, lived through the Thirty Years’ War (during which his hometown was completely destroyed), and endured the loss of four of his five children as well as his wife. What could all of this be but a sign of God’s displeasure, opposition, even hatred? He found the answer in the Gospels’ testimony to the Incarnation: how can God hate us, if He has given what He loves beyond anything else, sent His own Son out from His presence to conquer sin and death?

The one verse that seems to verge on saccharine testifies to this:

Hark! a voice from yonder manger,
Soft and sweet, doth entreat: “Flee from woe and danger.
“Brethren, from all ills that grieve you,
You are freed; all you need I will surely give you.”

Yet the saying is harder than it sounds at first. The voice from the manger is the testimony of the Incarnation itself; it means that with us, as one of us, is the One for whom, to whom, we are set free from all our ills, all that grieves us. It sounds lovely, but it carries with it a demand. “Let go,” says Christ, “of your griefs; all you need I will give you, and that means you may not need your parents, or your hometown, or your wife or your children or your health. You must believe that the loss of these things does not compare to the grief of being a sinner under God’s curse; you must entrust all your griefs to me, in the hope that I will set them right.”

The rest of the hymn is a call to do just that, to entrust all grief to the one who came to bear our sorrows. I can’t do justice to all its riches here, but I commend it to your meditation this Advent season. Rejoicing in Christmas isn’t about the sweet parts of the season; it is about seeing God’s Self-commitment to doing what it takes to undo every horror of a dark world, to render us men and women “meet for glory.”

-Ben