…The time came for the baby to be born, and [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in swaddling cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
– Luke 2:6-7
– Luke 2:6-7
They say Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, but you know, sometimes it can be tough to feel it. This will be my family’s first Christmas without my mother, who was always at her best every Christmas. I know many of you are facing similar situations this Christmas, and I want you to know that my heart is with you. You are not alone.
One of mom’s favorite Christmas songs is a carol called “What Child Is This?” I must be my mother’s son, because I love it, too. I especially appreciate how sweetly its lyrics illustrate the sacred bond between a mother and her newborn child. (I also admit that, when I was a kid, this song was my favorite because it was the only time we were allowed to say the a-word in church. My friends and I giggled every December as we sang, “Why lies he in such mean estate, where ox and ass are sleeping…”)
The story behind “What Child Is This?” goes back over 500 years to an old English drinking song called Greensleeves. The original lyrics to that tune weren’t Christian at all; the scuttlebutt was that King Henry VIII wrote them about his lover, Anne Boleyn, and how her sleeves turned green by, well… rolling around in the grass. Greensleeves remained the most popular pub song in England for the next two hundred years.
Fast forward to London, 1865. A middle-aged insurance salesman named William Chatterton Dix sat behind his desk, and he felt a cold coming on. It turned out to be much more than a cold; he contracted a life threatening illness that knocked him flat on his back for several months. That disease was just the latest example of how William’s entire life had not gone according to plan. His father had been a published author whose most popular book was a biography of the great English poet, Chatterton (thus William’s middle name). Throughout William’s childhood, his father encouraged him to follow in Chatterton’s footsteps and become a great poet in his own right. And so, William went to a prestigious university, where he majored in Poetry.
But the young man never became the extraordinary poet his father hoped he would be. He wound up selling insurance for a living, just like so many other Poetry majors before and since. When he fell ill, he also became very depressed. All he could do was lay around, thinking about what a failure and a disappointment that he had become. His family put him on suicide watch, but then one day he happened to pick up a Bible and started reading the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament. Something about the tender bond between Mary and her infant Jesus sparked his creative imagination, and he wrote the verses to “What Child Is This?” in less than 20 minutes.
His words immediately caught the attention of publishers, especially here in America where churches read them in worship services, and magazines and newspapers distributed them far and wide. William’s words were everywhere, but they were still just a poem until the 1870s when, somewhere in England – most likely a pub – somebody figured out that his poetic verses fit quite nicely with the melody of Greensleeves, and a new Christmas carol was born. One hundred fifty years later, on the most sacred night of the year, Christians across the world still sing the words written by a depressed insurance salesman, to the tune of England’s most popular drinking song.
As crazy as it sounds, I think it’s the perfect way for a song about Christmas to have come about: not through some holy “man of the cloth”, but through an ordinary insurance salesman. And not sung only in sacred spaces, but also in the bars and pubs, where the people were. The whole point of Christmas is that God broke free from the limitations of holy men and their rigid religions and into the arms of a terrified young mother singing lullabies to her newborn baby boy.
The question this song raises is a fundamental one: What Child Is This? Or, to put it another way, “Who is this kid?”
Even now, Dix’s carol confronts each one of us with the most consequential question in human history: What do you actually believe about Jesus?
