O Come All Ye Faithful

 We weren't able to live-stream or record our "Christ in the Carols" presentation this afternoon due to audio challenges, so I thought I would post my reflection on O Come All Ye Faithful. Since I encourage you in the talk to look up a particular Luciano Pavarotti rendition, I have added a link to it at the end of the text.  Enjoy!

         John Francis Wade left England for France in 1745 to escape anti-Catholic persecution. To support himself, he took up work copying music scores by hand at the renowned Roman Catholic College and Ministry Center in Douay, France, famous for producing the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible. Two years earlier, Wade published a Latin Christmas carol that became popular among his fellow exiled Catholics in France. While historians long thought that Wade had merely transcribed an ancient hymn by an unknown composer, most now believe that he wrote the song himself. About 100 years later, in 1841, an Anglican priest named Frederick Oakley, who was deeply moved by the hymn, took a crack at translating the original Latin version into English. He dubbed the rousing hymn, “Ye Faithful, Approach Ye.” That didn’t catch on, so four years later, after becoming a Roman Catholic priest and thereby improving his Latin, Oakley tried again with much greater success.  From then on, Adeste Fideles would be known throughout the English-speaking world as O Come All Ye Faithful.

         Although its lyrics and score are fairly simple, O Come All Ye Faithful is laden with deep theological meaning. As a little background, Christology, the study of Jesus Christ, has two basic starting points: ascending and descending. Ascending Christology starts with Christ’s humanity, moving with Jesus as he grows in wisdom and understanding, ministers to God’s people, suffers, dies, rises from the dead, and ascends to the Father. The synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, present predominantly an ascending Christology.

Descending Christology starts with Christ’s divinity. God’s eternal Word present at the beginning and through whom all of creation came into being, humbles himself to take human form, experiences every aspect of human life, except sin, and remains obedient to the Father through suffering and even death on a cross. As a result, God highly exalts him and gives him the name “LORD” so that every knee shall bend before him in adoration, a gesture reserved only for God. John's Gospel is solidly in the descending Christology camp.

As for our hymn, O Come All Ye Faithful is descending Christology at its best. In it, we learn that the “King of Angels,” was “born this happy morning,” and that the “Word of the Father” is “now in flesh appearing.” We join the “choirs of angels” as we “sing in exultation”: “Glory to God, glory in the highest,” together acknowledging the name that is above every name, “Christ the LORD.

The clearest indication of Christ’s divinity in the hymn is found in the refrain, when we’re invited to “come” and “adore him.” While we venerate the saints, we only adore God. So, in true trinitarian fashion, each refrain bids us three times: “Come let us adore him.” Note that we’re not called to adore individually, but together. This beautiful hymn profoundly proclaims a fundamental tenet of our faith: Christ the LORD, the Word made flesh, dwells among us and calls all of us to find communion and salvation in him.

O Come All Ye Faithful is, by far, my favorite Christmas hymn. I love it loud and proud, the way Luciano Pavarotti sang it at Montreal’s Notre Dame Cathedral in 1978 (look it up on YouTube, it’s magnificent). I love it soft and soulful, the way Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole croon it on their still-popular Christmas albums. I love it sung solo, by the likes of Celine Dionne, Luther Vandross, and Susan Boyle, and I love it sung in groups—like the Irish Tenors, Il Divo, and the Priests. I love O Come All Ye Faithful so much that I have twenty-five renditions of it on my playlist, including two by Josh Groban, three by Andrea Bocelli, and two by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They may not be Catholic, but they sure can sing! I listened to all twenty-five recordings while preparing this talk, and I’m not sick of it at all. I can’t wait to hear Katie and David perform it. I have no idea how they’re going to present it this afternoon, but I do know that I’ll love it.

            I will admit, though, that there is one version of O Come All Ye Faithful that I love the most. It’s the version that gives me goosebumps every time, and it never fails to put a lump in my throat and a tear on my cheek. It’s the version we sing right here at Immaculate Conception as the processional hymn at Christmas Mass. It’s the version that we sing on that most blessed day when together, as the body of Christ in Annandale, NJ, we “come” to “adore him.”