Emmanuel

Remember how I love Christmas music? Well more specifically, I love Christmas hymns and carols. No, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town do not make me smile (unless they’re sung by my adorable four year old neighbor), but things like O Holy Night and O Come, O Come Emmanuel do.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel is my favorite Christmas hymn. It’s a beautiful song – it’s lyrics are amazing, it comes from a beautiful vespers* used the last seven days of advent, and the names of Jesus it describes are all in Isaiah, my favorite prophet in the Bible.

But last night, as I was reading the vesper for December 23rd (O Emmanuel, God with us), and sang the first verse of O Come, O Come Emmanuel to myself I was struck by something, something I knew about the hymn, but had forgotten:

O come, o come Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
Who mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appears

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee
O Israel

Israel was mourning in lonely exile. They were captives, they were in the middle of really crappy times. But they were waiting for the Son, and rejoicing that he was coming, that he had promised to come. They weren’t denying the fact that times were shitty (hence the mourning) but they realized that God was mourning with them, and that he still had promised that his son, God with Us, would come to them.

I’m mourning now. Maybe not in lonely exile, but I’m mourning. And yet Christmas reminds me that the Son of God appears, he has appeared, and that is something to rejoice in, or at least have hope in. Jesus is with me, he’s with my family, and that promise is renewed at Christmas.

*My favorite thing about the Antiphons? When you take the seven names of Jesus that make up the Antiphons, and line them up backwards and in Latin (the language the Antiphons were written in), the first letter of each name makes an acrostic that spells “ero cras,” which translates to “tomorrow, I will be there.” How cool is that!