What Child Is This?

William Chatterton Dix

Who is that child asleep in Mary’s lap?  That’s the question asked by our beloved hymn this week, as the poet, William Chatterton Dix, gently invites us to think about who Jesus is, who we are, and why his birth is good news indeed.

Many of our most beautiful hymns assume that Jesus was born in the night, and that’s reasonable enough, since the shepherds were keeping night watch over their flocks when the angel of the Lord appeared to them and spoke to them, heralding the astonishing news.  And they went into the town to see the event for themselves, and they found the baby lying in a manger, with Mary and Joseph and the animals roundabout.  The old masters too were fond of portraying that lowly and glorious birth, and they especially loved to present to us those good animals, as Giotto does in his Nativity, in his famous series of frescoes on the life of Jesus, in Padua.  You’ll see the ox and the ass eagerly looking toward the child, and you may think of the humility of each of those animals.  It’s the patient ox that pulls the plow along as you till the fields, and that treads out the corn, and it’s the lowly ass that Jesus will ride when he enters Jerusalem, and the people strew his way with branches of palm.  All that’s to come to pass in the future, of course, but it’s right there too, in the mysterious providence of the Father.

Night suggests also what is hidden to us, or what we want to hide from God and ourselves and one another.  But the angel had commanded Joseph to name the child Jesus, which in Hebrew means “God shall save,” because Jesus would save the people from their sins.  And our friend Giotto paints one billy-goat, in the shadows, looking away from the stable, as a reminder of the goat that the Jews would drive into the desert, as burdened with the people’s sins, on the Day of Atonement.  That’s the “scapegoat.”  But what the ancients did in shadows, Christ would accomplish in reality, giving himself for the sins of the people.  He is doing so even now, says the poet Dix, begging us to be silent in holy fear, because the eternal Word of God, even as an infant child – the word infant means “unable to speak” – is pleading, interceding for us sinners.  Then everyone, whether peasant or king, should “own him,” meaning “acknowledge him,” because he is the King of kings and Lord of lords, who desires to ascend the throne of our hearts, in love.

Most of the time I’ve heard or sung this carol, the refrain has been the lines that end the first stanza, “This, this, is Christ the King,” and so forth, and I am happy with that, but once in a while it is good to sing what Dix wrote, because it is deeply moving and powerfully dramatic.  Dix reminds us, in the second stanza, of what this child is going to suffer, yes, the nails and the spear and the cross, and yet the last words of the third stanza bring us back to the lovely and quiet scene at the stable, where Mary does what any mother would do, singing her child a lullaby.

What Child is this who, laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping?
Whom Angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and Angels sing;
Haste, haste, to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come peasant, king to own Him;
The King of kings salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.
Raise, raise a song on high,
The Virgin sings her lullaby.
Joy, joy for Christ is born,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

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