2020 Advent Series: O Emmanuel

“O Emmanuel, King and Lawgiver,
Hope of the Nations and Savior Thereof:
Come to save us, Lord, our God.”

God is with us. God—who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see (1 Tim 6:16)—is with us men, whose span is seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong; they pass swiftly, and we are gone (Ps 90:10).

The arresting reality of Christmas, heralded by the haunting antiphons of Greater Advent, is that the newborn child Jesus is Emmanuel (which means, God-with-us) (Isa 7:9, Matt 1:23). In the Incarnation, God shows us his divine solidarity. Having created us, he would not but be with us: in nature, sustaining us in being and causing our every good thought and deed, and in grace, elevating us to supernatural life. Despite Israel’s persistent Old Testament infidelity—despite our persistent present infidelity—God’s fidelity persists: if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself (2 Tim 2:13).

Indeed, it is only because God simply is—I AM WHO AM, as he revealed himself in botanical fire to Moses (Exod 3:14)—that he can be with us in so profound a manner as to assume our own flesh, “for us men and for our salvation,” without incurring the slightest injury to his divinity. “Loving man, he became a man, not being one before; but remaining God, he became man without any change” (Saint Proclus of Constantinople).

From the very moment of Jesus’s conception, God, in Christ, was reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19). In the sinless womb of his Mother, God made him who knew no sin to be sin for our sake, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). Because he so loved the world, God, in Christ, made our primordial problems—sin and death—his own, that we might be delivered from their power.

Christmas, of course, begins the full unveiling of this fact, of I AM WHO AM united to a wee infant in swaddling clothes, the very poster child of a grace sufficient for you, a power made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). In that blessed child lying in the wooden trough at Bethlehem is the totality of grace and power, the very same grace and power present in that blessed man hanging upon the wooden cross at Calvary. In birth and death and everything in between—in baptismal death and rebirth and everything thereafter—God, in Christ, is with us, impelling us to find eternal life in him.

In its definitive manifestation of divine solidarity, the Incarnation is ultimately a mystery of salvation: of our need for God and of God’s lavish goodness in offering himself to us—the ineffable extent of his being with us, choosing us (not we him), loving us unto the end in his body, blood, soul and divinity, even still Eucharistically, even unto the end of the age (John 15:15, John 13:1, Matt 28:20).

At Bethlehem, the shadows of prophecy finally gave way to reality. The one who is infinite Wisdom (Sapientia), Lord of all creation (Adonai), eternally shining Son (Oriens) actually became the flowering Root of Jesse (Radix), the unshackling Davidic Key (Clavis), the King of the nations (Rex). Even that last prophetic title, Emmanuel, defers to a yet greater name before which every knee shall bow: Jesus, which means “Yahweh (I AM WHO AM) saves,” for he will save his people from their sins (Matt 1:21). 

In two days’ time, the Lord our God—the Eternal King and Lawgiver, the Hope of the Nations who is Emmanuel, the Savior—shows us his face, which Abraham, Moses, and David so dearly longed to see (John 8:56, Exod 33:23, Ps 27:8). No one has ever seen God, but the only begotten one, God, the one existing in the bosom of the Father, has made him known (John 1:18).

In the glorious human face of Jesus Christ, we behold our Beloved. Our distinct privilege is to cleave to that Holy Face—God invisible made visible—both in the sweetness of his cherubic cheeks and the scorn of his plucked beard (Isa 50:8). Though ascended into heaven and appearing to us now dimly, as in a mirror (1 Cor 13:12), he remains truly with us. Christmas changed everything. And because of the salvation it brought, we know that when he appears again, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is, face to face forever (1 John 3:2, 1 Cor 13:12). Emmanuel, Savior, Jesus, come. Make us to be with you.

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Photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. (used with permission)