Rudolph vs. O Holy Night
a showdown over finding true worth
“Did you realize that Rudolph is, like, the worst Christmas song for kids?” my friend asked.
“Um, because it’s annoying?”
“It’s totally conditional love, it’s a terrible message. Hey kids, you can earn your Dad’s and Santa’s approval by being good enough!”
Mark this as the year that Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’s glow shattered for me. It’s actually fine. It’s good to recognize where you’ve fallen for lullaby effect: repeating something so often and for so long you no longer think about its meaning. We can be lulled into missing both truth and lies; Rudolph being a classic, Christmas example of this.
Rudolph’s ballad begins with his origin as a glowy-red-nosed reindeer, mocked by all the other dull-black-nosed reindeers. “They never let poor Rudoph join in any reindeer games,” children have sung for years without discomfort- it’s just a classic example of playground hierarchy!
Rudolph’s fortune starts to change as fog rolls into the North Pole (though this is probably not climatologically accurate). Santa realizes that all his color-conforming reindeer are incapable of navigating the night sky and thus fulfilling the ardent dreams of the world’s youth. But wait! At the back of the crowd is a shining, red light. It’s Rudoph! His color-nonconforming nose is the solution to their predicament! Thus, Santa bestows upon Rudolph the invitation he’s been longing to hear: “won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
Soon, the reindeer are flying off in the night with Rudolph in the lead, securing his place in history and securing the song’s message that worth can be earned. The more useful you are, the more you are worth.
That’s awkward.
The message seems oversimplified, but it really isn’t unlike the way we are conditioned through culture to perceive, and acquire, worth. Receive words of affirmation? Feel worth. See a like on your post? Feel worth. Swap out your skinny jeans for the season’s wide leg trousers? Definite worth. Worth and value through performance are baked into our modern, progress-driven culture, which includes evangelical subculture. In The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior traces the history of how evangelical society became just as focused on improvement and progress as society at large. It’s a bit shocking to think that there once was a time when new wasn’t always better and usefulness didn’t translate into worth or spiritual maturity. If Rudolph had been born with a red nose that didn’t shine, the song would have a very different ending. The color of his nose, or who he was as a reindeer, wasn’t what made him valuable. But the brightness of his nose, his usefulness, did.
And so, we take up the quest for worth, validated when our efforts produce improvement and invalidated when we don’t put in effort at all.
Let’s leave the North Pole for a non-denominational church auditorium where I had a memorable, worth-related experience on Father’s Day a couple years ago. My pastor at the time opened his sermon with a video his wife had gifted him that morning. She had filmed their two, giggling young daughters answering her questions about their dad- the final question being, “What has Daddy taught you about God?” The oldest daughter answered (complete with head and hand motions, emphasis her’s),
“My Daddy taught me that God is holy, and God is worthy. Whoever doesn’t believe in Jesus isn’t worthy and can’t go to heaven. Whoever is worthy and believes in Jesus can go to heaven.”
The video cut out, the congregation sighed and “ahhhhed” and I gave my husband my most dramatic, silent side-eye. That was not how our kids would answer that question, were we tying millstones around their necks (Matt 18:6)?? I hope not. But we were, yet again, bumping up against the heaven-centric theology we longed to move beyond. So many times, we had been taught what this child repeated: your worth is found in Jesus and you can be confident of your eternal home with him. Getting from point A (confession of unbelief) to point Z (belief worthy of heaven) was the name of the game. The in-between faded into the background, not necessarily contested, but not nearly as urgent as the message of heaven. I knew that was also how they were talking about worth downstairs in children’s church: a worth of category and belief rather than worth by design. It was wearying.
The last place I want to visit worth comes at the beginning of a well-known Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, as opposed to Christmas songs (Rudolph) are where rhyme, meter, and imagery are not comical but rather transcendent. Poetry really. And, while poetry may not always teach accurately, it doesn’t teach inaccurately. N.T. Wright, speaking on the No Small Endeavor Podcast, said the following about poetry and poetic license,
“Poetry enables you to say things that cannot be said any other way, to evoke things. And also, a good poem will put two or three things together either by making the lines rhyme or by a pattern of words or phrases which, if you had to say them all out in flat prose, would be much harder to do…there are so many layers of meaning. It’s like listening to a great symphony, you can’t possibly come out and immediately hum all the bits that all the instruments are playing. That doesn’t mean that you weren’t affected by the whole symphony. It’s the whole experience.”
O Holy Night is one of those poems for me. I can endlessly turn the lyrics, and their melody, over and over in my mind, reaching for the meaning the translator intended (the hymn has a rather interesting past). The hymn has quite a lot to say about worth, and I find it drastically different than what is found in either Rudolph or the Father’s Day video:
In the first stanza we sing,
“Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”
This is radical. When Jesus appears, worth is felt. The soul doesn’t do anything, perform anything, achieve anything, prove anything. It is just what it is: a soul. And Jesus is who he is: the light. When John writes, “The true light, which gives light to every human being, was coming into the world.” (John 1:9), he’s capturing this very encounter. Jesus’ light is enough for us to see treasures shrouded in darkness: you are made in the image of God, you have so much worth.
I love this line so much because it doesn’t just capture the “what” of what’s going on; it captures the feeling of it. What does it feel like when you realize the worth of your soul? It feels like a thrill of hope, as the song goes on to say. It’s very much an experience and an emotional response. It brings to mind the gospels’ stories of the woman at the well and the bleeding woman reaching for healing. Imagine the thrills they experienced as Jesus’ presence brought their souls to life! Their worth had been there all along, waiting to be illuminated by their Maker.
As poetry, the hymn doesn’t capture all that’s involved in the realization of worth, but that is the beauty of experiencing Jesus in this way. We’re never done and much of it is not explicitly spelled out for us. We must seek to find.
I am so compelled by the connection of Jesus’ presence to seeing our worth. What keeps us from fully realizing it? Perhaps it’s because we’re immersed in a culture of Rudolph-style worth, or perhaps it’s because our theology hasn’t spoken to our own Imago Dei. And perhaps it’s due to another reason entirely. But the worth we carry, no matter how deeply buried, is capable of being revealed in Jesus’ light:
here is the one who created you
who sees you,
who gives life to you,
who heals you,
O holy night.