The agony of Advent
One of my favorite Christmas hymns isn’t technically a Christmas hymn at all; it is, rather, an Advent hymn.
“O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” first composed in Latin but translated into English in 1851, stands out from other standards of the season, both in its haunting minor-key melody and its lyrics, which express the aching ardency of a suffering soul longing for relief from near-perpetual torment.
Unlike Christmas hymns, which exist in a realm of ecstatic bliss, the speaker in this song is not observing the moment when the being titled “God with us” (the actual meaning of Emmanuel, as explained in Matthew 1:23) has arrived. In those hymns, the world is engulfed in “joy,” the “herald angels sing,” and “all is calm and bright.” It is an occasion for merriment and celebration, a time for feasting and reveling.
By contrast, “O come, O come Emmanuel” emerges from a realm of mourning, of habitual donning of sackcloth and ashes, an era spent in captivity and “lonely exile,” in which “Satan’s tyranny” reigns, and people feel themselves to be dwelling in the very “depths of hell.” The “gloomy clouds of night” gather, and “death’s dark shadows” loom.
In the midst of such conditions, the speaker begs for the “God-with-us” being to arrive, in order that the captives may be “ransomed,” and thus set free from Satan’s tyranny, in order the “victory o’er the grave” may be achieved, that the “path of misery” be forever “closed,” and the gates to “our heavenly home” be “open(ed) wide”:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan's tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o'er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heav'nly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Adonai, Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai's height,
In ancient times didst give the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
In spite of the prevalent gloom and heartbreak of present surroundings, the speaker repeatedly insists that his hearers should in fact “rejoice” because “Emmanuel shall come” (soon, one gathers, though this is never directly stated); that is to say, the one called “God-with-us” will literally be with us.
It is a little discussed fact that Advent, like Lent, is a penitential season in the Church’s calendar. Just like in Lent, the “Gloria” goes unsung during Mass, and the liturgical color of purple is worn; likewise, throughout the Advent season, fasts are observed on Fridays.
As Lent leads into the commemoration of the sacred agony of Christ’s suffering and death during Holy Week, before the occasion of his glorious Resurrection on Easter, so Advent’s painful interval of fervent “wishing, hoping, and praying” draws us finally into the presence of God’s incarnation in human flesh (God thus being quite literally with us, sharing our image and likeness, just as we were said initially to have been created in His image and likeness).
Perhaps what makes this hymn so emotionally resonant is the fact that it captures both the anguish of Advent, in which “all of creation groans together,” while at the same time almost defiantly proclaiming, with the fervor and fanaticism of one crying out in the wilderness, the coming jubilation of Christmastide, even in the midst of a dry, parched season of spiritual torpor: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!”
Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist and Muze, as well as the soon-to-be published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.