Hark! The herald angels sing is one of the most popular Christmas carols, and justifiably so. The words, originally drafted by Charles Wesley but improved upon by his friend George Whitefield, celebrates the purpose of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem.
It begins with the distinctive line: to ‘hark’, meaning listen, because angels, doing the work of a ‘herald’, or messenger, have something to sing about.
But the big idea of Christmas comes out in the third verse, when it says:
Born that men no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of Earth,
Born to give them second Birth.
One thing we don’t tend to come across these days is the fourth and final verse, and probably because it’s not instantly understandable.
In Whitefield’s 1758 edit of the song, we see lyrics – almost identical to Wesley’s original ones – which say:
Come, Desire of Nations, come,
Fix in us thy heav’nly Home;
Rise the Woman’s conqu’ring Seed,
Bruise in us the Serpent’s Head.
Adam’s Likeness now efface,
Stamp thy Image in its Place;
Second Adam from above,
Work it in us by thy Love.
In those words, Wesley is connecting the Christmas message directly with the fall in Genesis. Christmas isn’t just a nice story: it’s God’s strategy for rescuing creation from sin, as predicted in chapter 3 of the first book of the Old Testament and elsewhere.
After Adam and Eve disobey God, after the serpent tempts Eve, God tells the serpent (Genesis 3:15 NIV):
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring [or seed in the King James Version] and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
Well, the result of the first three lines could perhaps be seen in the Indiana Jones phrase: “I hate snakes!” But, in fact, it’s a reference to enmity between humankind, on the one hand, and Satan and the forces of evil, on the other.
What are the final two lines about? It’s a reference to Jesus, who comes to earth in human form, to die on the cross. This sets in motion the end of sin, and the start of that episode of Jesus in human form is what we celebrate at Christmas.
So Jesus crushes, or strikes, the head of evil on the original Good Friday. Evil, however, merely strikes at his heel. The use of the word heal suggesting a less serious wound, and we see on Good Friday that the pain of the crucifixion lacks the power to keep Jesus from coming back to life.