15) Mary, Did You Know - Part 1

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics, the podcast where we break down English language song lyrics to help YOU improve your English. I am your host Jake, and this week we are going to break down one more Christmas song, in honor of the holiday. If you've never listened to the podcast before, I'd recommend listening to the episode titled "Introduction" before continuing, so that you can get a good idea of how this podcast works. And if you are one of our regular listeners, thanks for listening! We'd love to hear from you, so if you've been enjoying the podcast, send us a message and let us know! You might even get a shoutout on the podcast! And please don't forget to tell your friends about the podcast!

This month we've been focusing on Christmas songs, and this week, the week of Christmas we will look at one final Christmas song together. We already talked about "Last Christmas", which was a Christmas pop song and we just did an episode about "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" which is an old Christmas time classic talking about the mythical character Santa Claus. But of course, Christmas is a religious holiday, and we haven't really worked through a Christmas song that talks about the religious setting of the holiday.

For the next two episodes, we will be breaking down the song, "Mary Did You Know?" originally performed by Michael English. There is a lot of great vocabulary in this song, so I'm excited to get started. Prepare yourself though, we are going to talk about a LOT of different thing. It might be helpful to pull up the transcription as we work through the song.

I'm going to take a moment here to explain a bit about the holiday, and the tradition and belief around it. There is some interesting and useful vocabulary here as well and these things will all come up in our song, so pay close attention. I'll also include some links to where you can read the story in the description.

Christmas is a holiday that traditionally celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, as found in the Bible. According to the Bible, Jesus was the son of God himself. God sent him to earth, where he was born to a Jewish woman named Mary. Jesus was perfect, which means he never did anything wrong, because he was God. His goal on earth was to teach people about himself, to prove that he was God through miracles, and then to sacrifice himself for the sins or wrong things that humanity does.

Two quick points of vocabulary that are important here, and then we will get to our song.

A "miracle" is an action that is performed, or an event that occurs that is impossible. You are probably thinking "isn't that the same thing as magic?". The difference is, a miracle is usually associated to God or some other religious figure. When we talk about Jesus "performing" or "doing" miracles, these are things like healing blind people, or bringing people back from the dead. More on both of those things in a minute.

What does it mean that Jesus sacrificed himself? To "sacrifice" something, means to give up something that you didn't have to give. The most traditional usage of the word relates to animals that were sacrificed to the gods. In other words, they were killed and usually burned to please the gods. In Jewish tradition, lambs, which are young sheep, were often sacrificed to God for the sins that the people did. Regularly, they would sacrifice a lamb, and they would ask forgiveness for their sins. God would accept their repentance as well as their sacrifice. But according to Christian tradition, this was only a temporary solution. God had made it clear that the penalty for disobedience and sin was death. The world needed something more than just lambs to save them from death.

So when we say that Jesus "sacrificed himself", we mean this in the traditional sense of an animal sacrifice. Jesus voluntarily, or willingly gave up his life, he allowed himself to be killed, so that the world could ask God for forgiveness for their sins directly and no longer suffer the penalty for their sins: death.

I think that should be all that we need to explain right now, you should be able to understand the song pretty well if you understand all of that.

This song came out way back in 1991, but in 2014, its popularity exploded when Pentatonix released a cover of the song. With over 250 million views on YouTube and millions of song downloads, this version of the song very quickly became the most popular cover of the song ever made!

For those who are not familiar with the group Pentatonix, they are an acapella group, which means that they don't use any musical instruments in their songs. No guitars, no drums, nothing. All of the sounds that seem like instruments are made by the singers themselves. It's very impressive!

I will be linking to both versions, but I highly recommend the Pentatonix version! It's very, very cool.

The song doesn't really have a chorus or even verses. For the most part, it's broken down into simple lines. For the majority of the song, the lines all start with the beginning of a question, which is always "Mary, did you know that your baby boy...", so we will see that repeated a lot during the song. Let's talk about it for a moment.

"Mary" in this case is referring to Mary, the human mother of Jesus. The "baby boy" is of course the baby Jesus.

So this song is asking Mary if she knew that her son would do miracles, and if she knew that he was God's son.

In pretty much every written account of Mary, she was aware before Jesus was born that he was God's son. So these questions aren't meant to be taken literally.  They are intended to point out the fact that Jesus had a human mother, who cared for him and loved him as her son.

We are meant to be thinking of Jesus having just been born, and Mary holding him. The baby is small and helpless, but he is the son of God, and he is going to do great and miraculous things and eventually, he is going to save the world. To use a word from our series on "Last Christmas", we are meant to be thinking of the CONTRAST between his humanity and his divinity, or the fact that he is God.

So in the song the question is always going to be "Mary, did you know that your baby boy..." followed by something that Jesus was going to do, or something about him.

The first question Mary is asked is, "Did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?"

The phrase "will one day" is a very useful one, but it can be a little bit confusing. It means "sometime in the future". If you will do something "one day", it means that eventually you will do that thing. For example, I could say to my wife "One day, I am going to fix this broken door!". I am telling her that one day in the future, I will fix this door! But I'm not committing to a day. I'm just planning to fix it, sometime in the future.

In the case of our song, since it's being sung to someone in the past, from the perspective of the future, we already know that the events that we're describing have passed. Remember, the idea is that the singer is singing to Mary when she has just had the baby. It's telling her things about him, that is going to do. He "will" one day walk on water.

To walk on water is actually meant literally. This is the first miracle that the song mentions. Jesus walked on the sea. Now you might think that this phrase is pretty useless for you, because how often does someone walk on water? But you would be wrong! We can use this phrase metaphorically as well.

Because this is such a well known story, we use the phrase sarcastically to refer to somebody that another person treats as though they are perfect. For example, perhaps your boss has a favorite employee, and no matter what the employee does, good or bad, the boss is always kind to them. The other employees might complain to each other and say "The boss treats him like he walks on water!". That is to say, the boss treats him like he is perfect, like Jesus was.

Do you know anybody like that?

The next question asks, "Did you know that he will save our sons and daughters?"

To save in this case, simply means "rescue". This is related to what we talked about earlier, where Jesus sacrificed himself for the world. In this case, "our sons and daughters" means "all future humans".

The third question asks "Did you know that he has come to make you new?"

To make something new means to recreate it. In this case, to make someone new, means to destroy their old self, and replace it with a new fresh and clean one. This is a very Biblical image, the old version of you being the sinful one. However after you repent of your sins and ask God to forgive you for them, and then follow him, you are "made new". That is, you are now a new person. Saying he has come to make you new. That is to say, to get rid of the old you, the sinful you, and replace it with a new you, who wants to be obedient to God.

Although the next line doesn't ask a question, we can read it in the same way. "Did you know that the child that you delivered, will soon deliver you."

This is a good play on words, and it has some important vocabulary for us.

You might know the word "deliver" as in "deliver a package" or "My mailman delivers my mail". That is to say, to bring something to where it needs to go.

But there are some other meanings of the word deliver, and those are what our singer is using here. We'll start with the second part of the phrase. The phrase "he will soon deliver you", is using the word "deliver" to mean "save" or "rescue". You can be "delivered" from danger. You can be "delivered" from death. Someone can "deliver you" from something that is going to harm you. You might have heard the Biblical phrase "Deliver us from evil!". This is a request to "protect" or "rescue" us from evil. So in this case, "He will soon deliver you" means that he will soon "rescue" or "save" you. Save you from what? As we talked about earlier, Jesus would rescue the world from death.

But what does the first part of the phrase mean? "The child that you delivered". Did Mary also save Jesus from something? No, not exactly. This is another meaning of the word deliver. The writer of the song is playing with the words a bit. "Deliver" can also mean to birth a child. When we talk about birthing a child, or "giving birth to a child", we often use the word "deliver". "She delivered a healthy baby boy!" which means she "gave birth to" a health baby boy.

So let's reword the line with what we know now. "The child that you birthed, will soon rescue you from death." Not as interesting without the play on words, but maybe a little easier to understand.

We have already talked about a LOT today, so we're going to pause here. Join us next time, as we finish up this song, just in time for Christmas!

As always, you can find the transcript for this episode in the description. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate it and subscribe! We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday! And of course, don't forget to tell your friends about us! We would love to hear from you! e pot even more English learning related content every day on Instagram, username "lelpodcast". There you can interact with us, as well as other English learners. There are weekly questions, as well as helpful images related to our podcast episodes. We’re also active on Reddit and Twitter under the same username, lelpodcast. Finally, if you have any questions, comments, critiques, or suggestions for songs, send us a message to any of our social media accounts, or to our email address "[email protected]". We hope to hear from you soon!