We Praise You, Jesus, at Your Birth

By Molly Lackey

This year we commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther’s great Christmas hymn, “We Praise You, Jesus, at Your Birth.”

Christmas Day, 1523, must have been a much-needed moment of (mostly) calm for Martin Luther and his Wittenberg circle. It had been a quieter year for the reformer: He had published a few works, assisted in the flight of Katharina von Bora and other nuns from the convent in Nimbschen and marked the tragic murder of the Belgian Lutherans Heinrich Voes and John Esch, first known Lutheran martyrs of the Reformation, with his first hymn. But compared to the raucous events of the years preceding and following, 1523 was an island of calm in the tumultuous world of religious reform, political strife, social anxiety, and cultural upheaval taking place across Europe and in Saxony’s fledgling university town of Wittenberg.

Imagine coming to Christmas Day mass at St. Mary’s, the city church of Wittenberg, 500 years ago. Perhaps you are a student in the choir, or come from an educated family, and can read. Someone hands you a freshly-printed broadsheet with a new hymn by Martin Luther. Or maybe (and statistically more likely) you can’t read, but overhear pre-service chatter about this new chorale and then listen as a choir or cantor teaches it. The tune and first stanza are familiar to you: German-speakers have been singing this translation of a Latin chant at Christmas for over a hundred years. But Dr. Luther has added six new stanzas, words that leap off the page to tell the story of Christ’s miraculous Incarnation. Old and new, God and man, Law and Gospel: this is surely a Reformation Christmas hymn!

1523, comparatively quiet as it was, was a year that saw much development in Luther’s ideas of worship and music. After writing his first-ever hymn in the summer, Martin would go on in the autumn to lay out his first sketch of a Reformation worship service, his Formula Missae (literally “Form of the Mass”). While Luther would make additional revisions, write his own original pieces of music and put the entire service in the vernacular in 1526, in 1523 he was still being rather conservative in his changes, relying on ancient and medieval Latin texts.

It probably didn’t come as a surprise to those in Luther’s circle when he took up the traditional Latin chant from Christmas Midnight Mass, Gates nunc omnes (Let us now all give thanks), which had been sung in German translation for over a hundred years by the time of Luther. Luther added six stanzas to the original one, each ending in a refrain of Kyrieleis — a German transliteration of the Greek kyrie eleison (“Lord, have mercy”). In our modern translation in Lutheran Service Book, these have been replaced with alleluias. “Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ” (literally “Praise be to You, Jesus Christ”) appeared in Luther’s second hymnal in 1524, though scholars believe Luther wrote his hymn the previous year for use in Christmas service. You can even see the citation — Eyn Enchiridion oder Handbüchlein, Erfurt, 1524 — in Lutheran Service Book as the source of the tune!

Luther’s tune is adapted from the medieval chant tone that went with the original text and sounds archaic, but the text describes the Incarnation in a timeless way: We, like the angel band at Bethlehem, join in singing praise to the eternal Son, who took on our flesh for our sake. The Christ Child, at once the Lord of hosts, mighty over sky and sea and time, here lies in Mary’s arms, asleep at the creche, in anticipation of lying in her arms, dead, at Calvary. He did not stay there, but instead rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

If you happen to sing this hymn during communion on Christmas Day, you, like Mary, and like those Germans who learned Luther’s Christmas hymn 500 years ago, will also hold the Lord of Lords, concealed in bread and wine but revealed as the very medicine of eternal life.

Martin Luther wrote dozens of hymns, many of which will be turning 500 in the next year or so. 500 years can feel like a long time, and from our limited, individual perspective, it is. But marking the anniversary of a hymn or other historical event isn’t ultimately about remarking on how super-old something is or making ourselves gloomy in contemplating our own finitude.

When we mark a historical anniversary, like the 500th anniversary of “We Praise You, Jesus, at Your Birth,” it serves as a way to mark and give thanks for God’s indefatigable mercy, coming to us through the means of people, places, historical events, art, music, words. If you sing “We Praise You, Jesus, at Your Birth” at church or with family this Christmas season, take a moment to reflect and offer a prayer of thanksgiving for your God-made-man, Christ Jesus, who was born over 2,000 years ago for your redemption, and whose love continues to work in the hearts, hands, mouths and pens of man to draw sinners to Him.