December 23, 2021 - Advent week 4
O Emmanuel: O Emmanuel, our King and lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour: Come and save us, O Lord our God.
The O Antiphons are ancient prayers that have been said and sung in the days leading up to Christmas for centuries – perhaps even as far back as the 6th century in Italy. The prayers all refer to the prophecy of the coming Messiah found in the Old Testament text, Isaiah, but each one also references other scriptural passages. Each prayer starts with a title given to the Messiah and, if you lay out the first letters of each of these titles, from last to first, it spells out the Latin phrase Ero cras, which means “tomorrow, I will be [there]”. This is thought to be an intentional acrostic – something early medieval writers were fond of:
O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
O Adonai (O Lord)
O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
O Clavis David (O Key of David)
O Oriens (O Dayspring)
O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations)
O Emmanuel (O With Us is God)
Our O Antiphon for today is the final one: O Emmanuel. The idea of God being with us (the meaning of the name, Emmanuel) is such an awe-inspiring one that I found it striking to see that two other images of Christ follow closely after it. The Antiphon refers to Christ, to God with us, as “our King and lawgiver”. What does it mean to say that Christ is our King? That he is our lawgiver? These seem like such formal and powerful images, but the one we are expectantly waiting for will come to us not as a powerful king or a judge, but as a baby, born to a poor, unwed teenage woman in a stable.
Today’s reading from Galatians 3 also speaks of the law. Here, Paul tells us “for if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law” (3:21). There is no law that can make us righteous – that can make us whole and as we were created to be – loving God with our whole heart, our whole mind, and our whole strength, and loving our neighbours as ourselves. Perhaps it’s not just that there is no law that could do this, but rather that there is no law that we could follow that could heal us from our brokenness, that could restore us to God and to one another.
So, again, I ask – what then does it mean to call Christ our lawmaker? I thought we just established that there is no law that can make us alive. The passage assigned from Luke for today might be able to point us in the right direction:
Thus he has
shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered his holy covenant,
the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,
to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of
our enemies,
might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness
before him all our days…
… By the
tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
In our lives we have many kings; and we live as though we were under many lawmakers. But our texts for today, and our O Antiphon for today, remind us that, in actuality, we have no other king and no other lawmaker than Jesus – the one born in a stable in a backwater town in the midst of the Roman empire. This is a king that we can serve without fear, whose tender mercy breaks into our darknesses with dawn-light, even those of us who sit in the shadow of death. This is a lawmaker whose law is unlike any laws we have known and any laws that we have attempted to follow in order to heal ourselves. This king is merciful; this law is grace.
I am reminded of the words of one of my favourite Christmas carols, O Holy Night:
Truly He
taught us to love one another;
His law is Love and His gospel is Peace;
Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother,
And in his name all oppression shall cease,
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful Chorus raise we;
Let all within us praise his Holy name!
May it be so. Amen!
- Rev. Gillian
