Category: emmanuel

OEmmanuel, Rex et legifer noster, exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.
O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all nations, and their Salvation: Come and save us O Lord, our God.
– English from Divine Worship: Daily Office

JMJ
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As was mentioned earlier, the word gentium, Latin for “nations”, is the source of our word “gentiles”. It is the translation of the Hebrew word for nations, גּוֹיִ֔ם, goyim. So, this antiphon sings of God as the Savior of the Gentiles, the desire of the Gentiles… and then says (we are all one) come and save us! The verse sings of Emmanuel, “God With Us” – with both Jew and Gentile. How is God with us? Let’s start with the Catechism.

“All that Jesus did and taught, from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven”, is to be seen in the light of the mysteries of Christmas and Easter.
– ¶512

Jesus’ words and actions during his hidden life and public ministry were already salvific, for they anticipated the power of his Paschal mystery.
– ¶1115

We like to focus on Christmas as if it’s different from Easter as if the Death of Jesus on the Cross is it’s own thing. We look at the “blood sacrifice” as the real deal and everything else is prelude or aftermath. But the Catechism makes it clear that everything Jesus did was our salvation in process. Jesus is God before his birth no less than on the Cross or at the Ascension.

In the eastern Churches, they sing on 25 March – the Annunciation – “Today is the beginning of our salvation.”

Today is the beginning of our salvation,
The revelation of the eternal mystery!
The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin,
As Gabriel announces the coming of Grace.
Together with him let us cry to the Theotokos:
Rejoice, O Full of Grace, The Lord is with You!

Our salvation is accomplished by the entire movement from the Incarnation (at Mary’s “Yes”) to the Cross and Resurrection, to the Ascension and the Sitting at the Glorious Right Hand of the Father. Yet, it’s not just the great events! The process of salvation moves from zygote and foetus, through the birth canal of the blessed mother; from the first gasp of a baby’s crying and dirty diapers, to teenage acne and a changing voice; from burping and flatulence to cleansing one’s self and a runny nose, from every other part of life.

See: there is nothing – except sin – that you can do now that God has not done. Since God has done it himself, every option becomes a sacrament of our salvation.

When humans were the children of Adam and Eve, the first day of death was the day of brith. No matter what we did – sin or virtue, faithful or faithless – it led directly to the grave. And yes, while God is always merciful, death was the end as far as we knew. From the time we failed in the garden to the day of Judgement all we knew was that every womb opened on a tomb, every cradle tipped into a grave, and nothing could stop that.

Now, God has done this with us: and the grave opens to Life. It is possible to open every part of our life – except sin- to the mediated action of God living with us, as one of us.

This Christmas, as we look into yet another year of Covid, as we peer into a future we do not know, we have two choices: fear or God with us.

We are commanded to “take up our cross and follow Jesus”. What can that mean? None of us are facing capital punishment, none of us are facing death at the hands of civil or religious authorities. But we know our crosses and, as mundane as can be, they are our. When you wake up in the morning do you pray like Jesus about work? “Father, let this cup pass from me…” or school bullies, “Father, let this cup pass from me…” Do you pray about someone smelly on the bus, “Father let this cup pass from me.” Do you find yourself dreading yet another Zoom meeting or going home to an empty apartment? “Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me. Yet, not my will, but they will be done.”

All of life – except sin – is our salvation playing out if we will but let it be as God gives it to us. Gond is with us in this! God, at Christmas, gives us our lives to live as one of us. Our imaginations, our loves, our fears, our times, our meals, and our griefs, our daily commutes, our morning coffees are all part of God’s dance with us. The death of our brothers, the murder of our friends, the war, the covid, the collapse of everything that we hold dear… all of it is God’s dance. It begins at Christmas, or better it includes Christmas.

God is one of us. This is the virtue of faith. This is the seventh virtue, the one at our heart. God is one of us, but more than that God is our very beingness: the fire of love that is the Holy Trinity is the fire of our being and we are no longer cut off from who we are and who we are intended to be. This is the very meaning of Christmas. God is one of us. Today Easter begins for everyone.

Life no longer leads to the grave. If you will but let it, it will lead to heaven. That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Merry Christmas.

Merry everything!

God with us! Christ is born: glorify him!

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

JMJ
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Have you ever heard of a pamphlet called The Four Spiritual Laws? I think it was written in 1965 by the folks at Campus Crusade for Christ (which is now, evidently, just called “Cru“) and it is still one of the most popular tools of “Street Evangelism”. It lists the four most-basic premises of the Christian Message:

1. God loves us
2. We’re a mess
3. God sent us Jesus
4. We’re supposed to do something in response

Although it’s boiled down so much as to be meaningless, it has brought thousands (if not millions) of folks into the discussion about Jesus. I think the steps are correct as far as they go: there’s at least a year of teaching that can go into each point. The Church’s 2,000-year history would agree with each point and could weave a tale as long as the 2,000 years and longer to tell the four stories and after you have spent all 8,000 years hearing the stories, you’d still only be walking along the periphery.

The real story of the Gospel is that deep: you dive in and it just keeps going. That’s why today’s verse is so very important. God With Us. See: God is evangelizing us.

This babe in a manger, this infant on his mother’s lap, this child needs to have his diapers changed, and feeds at his mother’s breast is the Lord and Creator of the Universe who has come to be one of us that we may go to be with him. God has become man that man might become God.

In the ancient understanding of the economy of salvation, all of humanity fell in Adam and Eve’s failure in the garden. It’s not a question of culpability: but of simple, spiritual genetics. Our parents cannot pass on to us anything that they are not. They cannot pass on to us the intimate connection with God which they had before the fall because they no longer enjoy that. We cannot “recover” it since we never had it. We wouldn’t know it if it bit us in the backside, as the saying goes.

But God has entered into human history, a slob like one of us, trying to make his way home. And it’s not that he had to do this to understand us, but rather, so we could understand him.

The titles offered to Jesus in this verse all belong to Caesar: God, King, Lawgiver, Savior, Lord. The Church sees in this baby all the things that Augustus (along with Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, etc) wanted the world to see in him. And we should rightly acclaim him as such. But God with us means so much more: for what we have is a God who is like us in every way except sin.

That does not mean that God knows what it feels like to [fill in the blank] because feeling is not important. And someone might be happy at [fill in the blank] or have any other number of emotions. What it does mean is that anything a human does (save sin), God has done. These acts become divine actions, sacraments in which we can participate. God has fed at his mother’s breast. God has cried in the night and woke up his parents. God has been alone in the dark. God has woke up from nightmares. God had favorite foods (and was probably convinced that his own mother’s hummus was better than anyone else’s). God has gone to the bathroom, and as a toddler probably did that right on the street. This God has gone swimming with friends.

This God has washed dishes for his mother. This God has helped his father at work. This God has learned a trade. This God has said his prayers. When we do these things, we are following in God’s footsteps. We can – if we wish – do each of these things and so many more in memory of him.

God did not need to do any of these things to give him sympathy for us. If that were the case, then God failed, for does he know what it’s like to work on the internet or to have indoor plumbing? No. Does he know what it’s like to be a woman? Or an ethnic minority? No. So if it were a case of simply a God who understands us he no longer does. God redrew the map: so that each of these human actions is sacramentalized in his doing of them. God has even shown us that resisting temptation leads us to holiness.

God does not need to learn about us: rather, we need to learn about him. And God-with-us has made that very easy indeed. He has drawn us into the discussion. God has evangelized us.

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster, expectatio gentium, et Salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.