O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Expected of the
Nations and their Saviour, come to save us, O Lord our God.
O
Emmanuel—it is a resonant name, “God and man hyphenated,” one author calls it.[1] It means, “God is with us,” and the One whose
coming we expect, Jesus the Messiah, His name, Saint Matthew tells us, is
Emmanuel.[2] You know this name perhaps, from the prophecy
in Isaiah chapter 7, which we have just heard.
But you probably know it best of all from the great Advent hymn, “O Come,
O Come, Emmanuel.” It is a translation
of a medieval Latin hymn, which is in turn a versification of a series of
beautiful antiphons. These are one
sentence anthems designed to be sung before and after Mary’s Song, the
Magnificat at Evening Prayer during the last eight days before Christmas. In that series of antiphons, and in the
original Latin hymn, O Emmanuel is the last one, the antiphon for the Eve of
Christmas Eve. But when the great John
Mason Neale was translating the hymn, he put it first instead, and so we know
the whole hymn by that immortal plea, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”
It was a
wise choice, I think, for it is the finest of the antiphons, and in a way it is
the summary of all of them. The
antiphons and the verses of the hymn chart a series of images, drawn deep from
the well of Old Testament prophecy, mostly from Isaiah, the greatest prophet of
the Old Testament. O Wisdom, O Lord of
Might, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Dayspring, O Desire of Nations: but
together, in their prayers for wisdom, for protection, for fulfillment and
deliverance and peace—all of them can be summarized, O Emmanuel, O God be with
us.
O, O, in a
sense too, they all come to just this.
O-It’s a cry of misery and sorrow, perhaps, but of longing as well, for
desire for what we can just barely see, for what we have just begun to hope
for. We call for Christ in this great
variety of names, celebrating different parts of the gift He is to us. He is all these things, He fulfills all these
promises, but above all He is God with us, God in our own flesh. “A virgin
shall conceive and bear a Son”-the laws of biology are suspended for His
arrival, angels fill the skies with song to announce His arrival, wise men come
from across the distant mountains to bring Him sacred gifts, because here, in
Him, we find the satisfaction of mankind’s noblest dream and most passionate
hope.
We need God with us. This is a life of suffering, a vale of
tears. Our technology and complicated
social systems aim to make it less so, but for most of us, at least
occasionally, reality has a way of poking its unwelcome head in the door. We suffer pain. We are lonely. Promises made to us are broken. And suffering seems to diminish us. We don’t just hurt, we are discouraged. We feel cut-off in our suffering, afraid to
unpack the burdens that will darken the pleasant lives of the other people who
claim to care for us.
But God turns up in the lives of
suffering people. That the story of the
faithful in every generation. “Nobody
knows the trouble I’ve seen,” the old spiritual has it, “nobody knows but
Jesus.” Sometimes God is the healer, who
removes the suffering and restores us to wholeness. But sometimes He simply comes to be with us
in the midst of it, showing us that we are not alone, and that He is not just
with us, but for us.
God is the helper of His people—“a
very present help in trouble,”[3] the
Psalmist confesses in that great song of faith.
And He had long assured His people of His concern, that He heard their
sorrows and would deliver them. But to
come and take on flesh, to live among us as one of us, well that was almost
beyond what could be imagined. And to
come, not as a powerful man, but a humble one, “a man of sorrows, and well
acquainted with grief”—to endure what we endure, and still more. Well, in those dark moments, what we wonder
of course, is if He really does love us, if He really will remain with us? And here is the demonstration of that
love. He is with us to the very last, in
all our sorrows, bearing all our griefs.
And yet, He is not merely our
companion, this Emmanuel. The antiphon
calls Him “our king and lawgiver.” And in
part, that’s just good poetry, pulling together the themes from earlier in the
series for an appropriate conclusion.
But He is also God with us as the One who must be obeyed, the One who shows
us the way of life and then calls us to follow behind. And He is with us in judgment as well as
comfort: He is with us as one who will tell the truth about our sin, and call
us to true repentance, so we may stand prepared in the great Day. When Isaiah talks about Emmanuel, and he does
so only twice,[4]
it’s never quite clear if he’s sharing good news or bad—or better perhaps,
whether he’s emphasizing the judgment or the comfort. It’s all good news really, even the judgment,
because He smites only to heal. He lays
bare only to strengthen and renew. Love
takes trouble, doesn’t it. We wouldn’t
want less from a true God.
He is also with us in drawing us
together, to be with one another.
Emmanuel is not only the Savior of the Jews, God’s long chosen
people. He is to be Lord of all, the one
expected of the Gentiles, the Savior they’ve been craning their necks to greet
down the long sweep of history. And He
draws us together, “where or two or three are gathered, I am in the midst of
them.”[5] I am God with you, He means, when you are
with each other, for each other.
Ours is such an age of
loneliness. I was struck, and disturbed
by the cover of the Atlantic a few years ago.[6] It showed a beautiful woman and a handsome
man, wrapped only in sheets in each other’s arms, obviously ready for a most
intimate encounter, but actually staring past each other into the dim blue
lights of smartphones. The headline was
“Is facebook making us lonely?” What a
parable of these days, when we seem to have forgotten how to be with each
other.
This
is the world calling out for what we are trying to share, I thought. This is the Church’s great opportunity. We’re pretty good at doing community. We’re learning together how to be with each
other. But it is Him that they really
long for, He who is still “expected of the nations,” whether they can remember
it or not. If they find what they are
seeking in us, it’s only because He is with us before. Emmanuel, He draws us together, and we look
together to Him and the promise of being with Him in all His fullness.
No comments:
Post a Comment