Emmanuel: An Advent Reflection

Madonna and Child: Our Lady of Coventry

They shall name him Emmanuel, which means, ‘God is with us’.

Forgive me for a sermon, but it is Advent! These words are quoted from Matthew 1.23, included in one of the most well-known Christmas readings.

There are many references in the Hebrew Scriptures (Christian Old Testament) to God being in the ‘midst’ of Israel. What did ancient people in Israel and elsewhere in the Mediterranean mean by this? There are three main ways in which they understood it.

1. God was understood to be present among the people during cultic rituals and festivals, and in sacred spaces. In the Jerusalem Temple, the ‘Holy of Holies’ was the inner chamber, the focal point of God's presence. The High Priest alone could enter, and only on one day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

2. God was especially present in the person of the king. The king was a Messiah, meaning a ruler anointed with holy oil. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the king was described as God’s Son or as being filled with the Holy Spirit. The idea of a ‘sacred ruler’ was widespread in ancient cultures, and still exists today in some parts of the world.

3. God visited the people in remarkable times. These may have been positive, in terms of great victories leading to a golden age, or negative, in terms of a divine punishment causing defeat and disgrace. The prophets proclaimed these great events: if the people followed the Law, God’s visitations would be beneficial to everyone, if not, then catastrophic.

In the Christian New Testament, Jesus is proclaimed to be ‘God with us’, or God in the midst of the people. This draws upon the older traditions in the same three-fold pattern:

1. Jesus is referred to as the High Priest and the Temple in himself, and so Christians believe that he superseded the Jewish Temple cult which was destined to be destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Christ’s presence, in Christianity, became the centre of the cult, especially in the bread and wine, and also in the water of baptism.

2. Jesus is the 'Messiah', translated into Greek as 'Christ', the anointed king of Israel and subsequently all people on Earth. He rules over the universe in heaven ‘at the right hand of God’ as the Son of God and partaking in the essence of God.

3. Jesus is the prophet who represents God’s visitation in his own person; he does not simply point forward to it. In his first coming, he showed people how to recognise and follow God. His second coming will be the Day of Judgement. The early Christians expected this to come soon, but two thousand years later it is still anticipated in the Christian faith, especially during this time of Advent.

The Stalingrad Madonna (Coventry Cathedral)

That is all reasonably elementary in understanding the Christian faith. But what is fundamentally important is that Jesus was not, in any normal sense of these terms, a priest or a king, and nothing remarkable happened in social or political history during his lifetime.

Therefore, as representing ‘God with us’ or ‘God in our midst’, Jesus is quite unlike the expectations that people had of this phrase before his lifetime. His priesthood, his royal status, and his prophetic proclamation were all to do with the everyday rather than extraordinary life, and with ordinary people, especially those who struggle and seek something better for themselves and the others around them, those who love ‘God and neighbour’.

The problem in Christianity is that the old ways of understanding God’s presence have kept coming back.

1. We all know the tendency for ‘Sunday Christianity’, the idea that the sacraments, worship, and priests or ministers somehow reflect the sacred more than everyday life and ordinary people.

2. It took centuries for Christian societies between the Roman Empire and the American and French Revolutions to shake off the idea that royal persons had some kind of divine privilege. Our own queen was anointed in the same way as the kings of Israel, even if her privileges these days are somewhat curtailed by the democratic process.

3. Christians continue to be obsessed with prophecies concerning the date of the end times, or with miraculous happenings, signs and wonders. In some churches, this seems to be the main focus. Then you start to see belief that prophecies are being fulfilled in all kinds of very unspiritual ways, like the exaltation of fraudulent healers, or the coming to power of a nationalist leader. The divine judgement is conceived as being exercised against everyone who disagrees with you.

It is human nature to be stimulated by worship and ritual, to be in awe of rulers, and to become excited by the idea that we are living in extraordinary times. However, in Christianity these things have to be measured by the example of Jesus himself, who attended Jewish worship regularly but did not agree that religion should ever be focussed on its ministers or override the needs of people. He never assumed the mantle of leadership in any formal capacity, only amongst the people in an informal way. He talked about remarkable times, it is true, but in a way that emphasised the building up of people in the 'kingdom of God', and the bringing of ‘good news to the poor’.

Seat of Wisdom (Leuven, Belgium)

Therefore, as Christians, we need to judge worship, systems of leadership, and belief in wonderful happenings by the strict yardstick of how far these things are grounded in concern for the common good, which means the good of absolutely everyone, and which also means a preference for those least privileged. This is an everyday business, and very often lacking in the sensational, although some social and individual miracles may well emerge in the long term when we look back on them.

Where worship, rulership, and prophecies are primary in their own right, and not considered secondary to the nitty gritty of the 'kingdom of God', they are empty, like the ‘clanging cymbal’ describing things without love in Paul’s famous passage in Corinthians 13. The Christian religion should gravitate around justice and the common good: celebrate them (worship), facilitate them (rulership), and seek them (prophecy).

While this may seem to be obvious, there is too much in Christianity, both today and yesterday, which seems to completely forget and overlook the work of Jesus in the building up of the whole community. It is this which alienates people from Christianity, quite rightly, as it is not the real thing.

Christmas is an opportunity to savour the peace and justice that Jesus brought to the common people of ancient Israel, so that we can try and put it into practice in our own time and all year round. It is a celebration of ‘God with us’ that remembers God in our midst each and every day. There are ways of responding to this, and very many ways of ignoring it.

(And yes - and you would expect this of me - Mary was integral to the work of Jesus too. You could say that she got involved in it before he was born! That is why I have just written a book called 'Mary, Founder of Christianity', published by Oneworld Publications and out on April 7th 2022.)