The Question That Started Everything — Why I Wrote MARK! The Herald Angel

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MarkTheHerald.com

✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦

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I have been singing the same Christmas carol since I was old enough to stand in a church pew and hold a hymnal with both hands.

I have sung it in children's programs and Christmas Eve candlelight services and shopping mall food courts when Muzak was still a cultural institution. I've sung it at the top of my lungs in the car and in the quiet of early December mornings and probably somewhere in between during at least three separate Christmas pageants where I was simultaneously directing other people and mouthing the words myself.

I have sung "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" probably five hundred times over the course of my life.

And it took me until my forties to stop — really stop — at the second word.

Herald.

The Word Nobody Stops At

Not heavenly. Not happy. Not hallelujah or holy or any of the other obviously Christmas-adjacent words that surround it in the carol.

Herald.

That's a specific word for a specific kind of thing. In the ancient world, a herald was not just any messenger. A herald was an official, credentialed communicator — someone bound to deliver news accurately and completely, without personal embellishment, representing the authority that sent them.

A herald was, in the most precise sense of the term, a reporter.

So when Charles Wesley wrote "Hark! The herald angels sing" in 1739, he wasn't describing a generic angelic chorus. He was describing a specific category of angel. A press corps. A group of beings whose entire existence is built around the accurate documentation and delivery of what is true.

And I thought: what would it have been like to be one of them?

What would it have been like to be the smallest reporter in the celestial newsroom — precise, meticulous, deeply committed to facts — when the editor sent you to cover the most significant event in the history of the universe?

What would it have been like if you'd never sung a note in your entire existence — and then you stood in a field outside Bethlehem and something erupted from a place so deep that no amount of professional composure could contain it?

That question followed me for years. And eventually it became MARK! The Herald Angel.

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Why Christian Authors Write Christmas Books

People sometimes ask why Christian authors keep returning to the Christmas story. There are, after all, thousands of Christmas books already in existence. The nativity has been told and retold from every conceivable angle, illustrated by some of the finest artists who ever lived, adapted into films and musicals and animated specials that have become beloved annual traditions for millions of families.

What could possibly be left to say?

Everything, as it turns out. Or at least one thing that had never been said.

The Christmas story is not a story that exhausts itself with retelling. It's a story that deepens with retelling — that reveals new dimensions with every fresh angle, every unexpected voice, every new point of entry. The best Christmas books don't compete with the nativity. They create new access points to it. They find the door that a particular reader hasn't been able to open yet and offer them a key.

For me, the door was a word in a carol. One specific, overlooked, deeply interesting word that had been sitting in the opening line of a three-hundred-year-old song and waiting for someone to stop at it.

Herald.

I stopped. And everything that followed came from that stopping.

What MARK! The Herald Angel Is Really About

On the surface, MARK! The Herald Angel is a Christmas novelette about a small angelic newspaper reporter named Mark who is reluctantly assigned to cover the birth of Jesus Christ. He's grumpy, precise, and deeply skeptical about Earth. He loses all his pencils in a stable in Bethlehem. He gives away his most prized possession to a newborn King. And then — for the first time in his entire existence — he sings.

That's the surface. It's a good surface. It's funny and warm and I'm genuinely proud of it.

But underneath the surface, MARK! The Herald Angel is about what happens to a person — or an angel — when they stop being a professional observer of something sacred and become a participant in it. It's about the difference between reporting a story and being inside one. It's about how the things we think we're going to give the smallest piece of ourselves to sometimes turn out to be the things that undo us completely.

It's about fair dinkum. Genuine. True. The real deal. The standard that Mark holds everything to — and that Christmas ultimately holds him to.

I wrote this book because I believed that standard deserved a story. I still believe it. And I'm glad the question of who the Herald Angel was finally got an answer.

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✦ MARK! The Herald Angel is available in print, eBook, and audiobook at MarkTheHerald.com. Download the free 12-day Advent devotional guide while you're there.