Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming (Es ist ein Ros Entsprungen) (arr. Mark Hayes)
This advent carol tells of Jesus’s royal genealogy, which bears importance because Jesus’s birth, perfect life, sacrificial death, and glorious resurrection fulfilled all of the prophetic scripture that was written hundreds of years before Jesus’s birth, and his royal lineage is one such type of fulfillment. Isaiah wrote 700 years before Jesus’s birth:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. – Isaiah 11:1
The carol also affirms Christ’s fully divine and yet also fully human nature – the hypostatic union of Christ – which is significant to us because the justice of God requires that the same human nature that sinned must pay for the sin (therefore, be human), but he must be righteous because a sinner cannot pay for others (Heb 2:14, John 12:27, Heb 2:17-18), and yet he must be “true God from true God” (Nicene creed) so that He might bear God’s anger towards our sin and earn for us and restore to us righteousness and life, and only One who is divine can be raised from the dead to apply the benefits for us (1 Cor 15, 1 Tim 2, Heb 2, Rom 5).
Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming
As men of old have sung.
It came, a flower bright,
Amid the cold of winter
When half-gone was the night.
Isaiah ’twas foretold it,
The Rose I have in mind:
With Mary we behold it,
The virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright
She bore to men a Saviour
When half-gone was the night.
This Flower, whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor
The darkness everywhere.
True man, yet very God,
From sin and death He saves us
And lightens every load.