Once in Royal David's City

I'll continue blogging about lesser known Advent and Christmas hymns, turning to one of my favorites: "Once in Royal David's City." You can listen to a beautiful version from King's College, Cambridge by clicking here. The music was composed by Henry Gauntlett in 1858, and the lyrics by Cecil Alexander in 1848 (also the author of the lyrics to the hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful").

Here are the lyrics to this wonderful hymn:

Once in royal Davids city,

Stood a lowly cattle shed,

Where a mother laid her Baby,

In a manger for His bed:

Mary was that mother mild,

Jesus Christ, her little Child.

He came down to earth from heaven,

Who is God and Lord of all,

And His shelter was a stable,

And His cradle was a stall:

With the poor, and mean, and lowly,

Lived on earth our Savior holy.

For He is our childhood's pattern;

Day by day, like us, He grew;

He was little, weak, and helpless,

Tears and smiles, like us He knew;

And He feels for all our sadness,

And he shares in all our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see Him,

Through His own redeeming love;

For that Child so dear and gentle,

Is our Lord in heaven above:

And He leads His children on,

To the place where He is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable

With the oxen standing by

We shall see Him, but in heaven,

Set at God's right hand on high:

There His children gather round

Bright like stars, with glory crowned.

What I love about this hymn, besides the music (which is beautiful and stirring, without being sentimental), is the simple way in which the humanity and deity of Christ are put together. Christmas hymns usually emphasize one of these aspects of Christ

Notice in the second verse: "He comes down to earth from heaven, Who is God and Lord of all" emphasizing His pre-incarnate divinity. Yet the rest of that verse goes like this: "And his shelter was a stable, and His cradle was a stall. With the poor and meek and lowly, Lived on earth our Savior holy."*

The juxtaposition of His divinity and humanity continues in the next two verses (3 & 4), one beautifully emphasizes His humanity, the other His divinity. Verse 3 notes (among other things) that He was "little, weak, and helpless." We more often prefer to reflect on Jesus' power and strength, His majesty and authority - all of which He certainly has! But there was a time when He became very little, very weak, and completely helpless. Philippians 2:6-7 emphasizes this point, which sends some Christian thinkers and theologians squirming for reinterpretation. How can this be!

Yet if He became one of us, truly one of us, He had to grow up "Day by day, like us..." He had to learn to speak, to eat, to dress Himself, to take care of His bodily needs. Even at 12, when He was at least beginning to understand something about Who He was, He was still growing in favor with God and people (Luke 2:52 - the Greek imperfect tense emphasizes that His growing up took place over time).

Did He shed tears and did He smile? Yes He did! In Luke 10:21 we read that Jesus was "full of joy through the Holy Spirit." This joy was noticed by those who reported it to Luke. It's likely that His facial expression was much more than a mild grin! He wasn't just happy, He was "full of joy!" He also shed tears next to the grave of His friend Lazarus. The shortest verse in the Bible records that "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). Unlike the perhaps sentimentalistic "No crying He makes" of Silent Night, Jesus probably cried as an infant too. How else does an infant let its mother know that its hungry, or needing a diaper change, or needs to be burped, or is in some other way in need of something?

Do I even need to mention Hebrews 4:15-16?

That third verse needs to be set along side the fourth, where this same dear and gentle Jesus is now our Lord in heaven above. For those who prefer their Jesus merely human, Mrs. Alexander re-emphasizes His divinity. She reminds us that this very same Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us, and will return to take us there (John 14:2-3).

The last verse (lamentably absent in some versions of this hymn), points us to the whole purpose of the incarnation: the family reunion of God the Father with His children. Not only that, but God's intention and plan is that we will be crowned with a never fading glory (1Peter 5:4). Like the prodigal son returning home to be a slave, the Father will greet us with joy, welcome us as His children, clothe us with righteousness and crown us with glory and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:6)!

He came down and became one of us, to lift us up to be with Him and the Father and the Holy Spirit, and all the heavenly hosts in never ending bliss and glory!

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*For the purposes of this blog, I'll disregard the likely inaccuracy of a cattle shed, a stable and stall (verse 2). He was laid in a manger, but there is no other indication that this birth took place in anything we would recognize as a barn or cattle shed (regardless of the traditional manger scenes so familiar this time of year). It's very unlikely that it was a "shed," since wood is very scarce in the region. Most homes were built of stone (limestone, basalt, and similar indigenous material). Even the manger was likely hewn from a block of limestone, rather than built of wood (many of these mangers, dating from even before this time, have been excavated in the holy land). Certainly the Biblical account does emphasize the poverty into which Jesus was born and these cultural reinterpretations certainly don't damage that important part of the message.