A hymn for Christmas, wondering at the mystery of the infinity of God contained within the tiny frame of a new-born child.
In the eighth century, monk John of the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem wrote a hymn to Mary, in which he remembered in wonder how the infinite God became a tiny child, making her narrow womb ‘wider than the heavens’. The same paradox struck Charles Wesley, and it prompted him to write a hymn of his own.
The most famous of all Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymns celebrates the birth of Christ, in company with the shepherds of Bethlehem.
‘Hark how all the welkin rings’ was the first line of this famous hymn, when Charles Wesley first composed it in 1739 — welkin being a word of Anglo-Saxon origin meaning the vault of heaven. The subsequent change was Charles’s own; the decision to omit the last two verses from most hymn books was not, and it has sadly diminished the poem as a whole.
A meditation on the birth of Christ, as the light of heaven come down to earth.
There are few Christmas hymns to match this one, by Charles Wesley; yet it is rarely sung today. It deserves better. The central theme is the Sun of Righteousness from the prophecy of Malachi, who would dawn upon the faithful of Israel ‘with healing in his wings’.