Paul Gerhardt was a German pastor in the 17th century. Here is his hymn, All My Heart This Night Rejoices:
All my heart this night rejoices
As I hear
Far and near
Sweetest angel voices,
"Christ is born," Their choirs are singing
Till the air
Ev'rywhere
Now with joy is ringing.
Forth today the Conqueror goeth,
Who the foe,
Sin and woe,
Death and hell, o'erthroweth.
God is man, man to deliver;
His dear Son
Now is one
With our blood forever.
Shall we still dread God's displeasure,
Who, to save,
Freely gave
His most cherished Treasure?
To redeem us, he hath given
His own Son
From the throne
Of his might in heaven.
He becomes the Lamb that taketh
Sin away
And for aye
Full atonement maketh.
For our life his own he tenders;
And our race,
By his grace,
Meet for glory renders.
Hark! A voice from yonder manger,
Soft and sweet,
Doth entreat:
"Flee from woe and danger.
Brethren, from all ills that grieve you,
You are freed;
All you need
I will surely give you."
Come, then, let us hasten yonder;
Here let all,
Great and small,
Kneel in awe and wonder.
Love him who with love is yearning;
Hail the star
That from far,
Bright with hope is burning.
Dearest Lord, thee will I cherish.
Though my breath
Fail in death,
Yet I shall not perish,
But with thee abide forever
There on high,
In that joy
Which can vanish never.
The first stanza traces joy through the night, first through the singer's own heart, then through angel voices, and finally through the air itself. This quality of the creation praising God returns in stanza six, when all are beckoned to love Christ and even the star burns bright with hope.
Gerhardt powerfully expresses the great cost to both the Father and to the Son in the economy of salvation. In stanza one, Christ's victory is expressed in the terms that he has made a binding covenant with humanity. Salvation is as surely ours as he has truly and eternally become human - "His dear Son now is one with our blood forever." Humanity isn't a mask he at some point intends to remove. Before dying on the cross, the decision to become human, to be born, is for Christ a marriage covenant with his bride, the church. He will never go back on it. When Jesus ascends into heaven, as recorded in the beginning of Acts, a human being enters God's highest heaven for the first time. Because he is there, we have hope to be there too! Likewise, in stanza three, Gerhardt invites us - if I can stretch the rhyme a little farther - to measure God's displeasure against his treasure so that we may see that the Father was willing to incur great cost to reclaim us. I find this quite powerful. I'm sensitive to others' displeasure. Aren't we all? That's why Gerhardt meets us there first, and then so pastorally and comfortingly rhymes the word he'd rather leave in our ears, the Son of God, the treasure of the Father - leaving the displeasure to evaporate like a passing mist.
The seventh and final stanza touches on death and expresses a clinging to Christ which persists despite our own failure to cling to our own breath. George Grant provides some helpful context:
"This carol was written during a difficult period in Paul Gerhardt's life. Soon after he had been ejected from his pastorate for political reasons, his wife and four children died. He went with his one remaining child to a small parish in Luebben, Germany, where he continued his preaching and hymn writing until his death in 1676." (George Grant, Christmas Spirit, 120)
Gerhardt's writing bears no trace of heavy-handedness to me. I, for one, wouldn't be able to intuit personal tragedy in such lines about death, which I find to be typical of great, Christ-centered hymnody. Yet, he finds a splendid place within the stanza to speak of the unspeakable loss of his family. Through the entire hymn, the first and fourth line rhyme, while the second and third, sandwiched in between, also share their own scheme and have consistently far fewer syllables to accomplish their task. Here, in the last stanza, this works powerfully, speaking of the horror of loss and death precisely where he has the least words to express it in, and also where it is bound before and after, in the first and fourth lines by words of stirring hope - "thee will I cherish," and "I shall not perish." And this captures the soul's experience of Christ's preeminence: we are sad people bound on all sides by losses, regrets, and sorrows. But even in this we are sandwiched, bound on all sides by the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord who goes before and after, the one who has gone deeper into the sorrow than any of us have. And Paul Gerhardt came to love Jesus Christ even more over the course of his life because deeper sorrows brought deeper understanding of the lengths to which God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - have gone to make a fallen people like us fit for glory again.
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