O Holy Night

Tasha Cobbs Leonard's reading keeps this hymn's nineteenth-century language fully intact, and the opening verse still does something unusual for a Christmas song by naming worth before relief: "long lay the world in sin and error pining, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth."

The second verse moves from the manger to ethics without much transition — "truly He taught us to love one another, His law is love and His gospel is peace... chains He shall break, for the slave is our brother." A birth announcement becomes, within a few lines, a claim about ending oppression.

Luke's account of angels announcing good news of great joy, and Isaiah's promise of liberty proclaimed to captives, both sit behind the hymn's two central images — the "night divine" itself, and the chains it promises to break. Cobbs Leonard's gospel-inflected delivery doesn't change any of that inheritance; it just adds one more voice to a carol that keeps making the same claim differently each time it's sung.