This hymn carries the Lutheran Service Book back to eighth-century Constantinople and its Patriarch, St. Germanus, a courageous defender of icons during the iconoclastic controversy. In Orthodox use the Greek text forms two short stichera sung during the Christmas Eve Vespers procession, opening Mega kai paradoxon thauma, “A great and paradoxic wonder.” John Mason Neale translated it in 1862 for his Hymns of the Eastern Church, mistakenly crediting the text to St. Anatolius because a manuscript he consulted placed that name just after Germanus’s verse; Neale also reversed the order of the two original stichera and expanded the short Greek prose into six English stanzas. Lutheran Service Book uses Neale’s stanzas 1, 2, and 4 through 6, and adapts his third stanza into the hymn’s repeating refrain, “To God on high be glory and peace on earth to men.” Its tune, familiar from “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” first appeared in a Cologne hymnal in 1599. As the Hymn of the Day, it carries the ancient East’s own wonder at the Virgin Birth into a Western Lutheran service, its refrain echoing the very Gloria the shepherds heard.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025