Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming

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-spent 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 Savior,

When half-spent 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.

GERMAN CAROL (SIXTEENTH CENTURY)

Stanzas 1 and 2 translated by Theodore Baker (1851–1934)

Stanza 3 translated by Harriet Krauth Spaeth (1845–1925)

“I AM THE ROSE of Sharon,” says Song of Songs 2:1. Medieval interpreters assigned these words to Christ, and the rose became another epithet for our Lord. In Isaiah 11, one of the best-known messianic prophecies speaks of a shoot coming up from “the stump of the line of Jesse.”

This beautiful hymn, which may go back even as far as the fourteenth century, takes the rose image and the branch prophecy and weaves a lovely meditation. The repeated “half-spent was the night” gives us the sense of a beautiful event going almost unnoticed. It also suggests a more theological point, that the night is still with us. This Rose sprouted and blossomed in the middle of the night, and its fragrance is already wafting through the world. But the world will not see it in all its beauty until morning, when Christ is fully revealed as Ruler of all.

Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot—yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root. And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Isaiah 11:1-2