This final week of Advent has for me a heightened depth to it. It may be a reaction to the Christmas festivities ever encroaching on Advent, almost squeezing it to the margins, that makes me want to look for something to bolster up the ramparts. It may be a concern that in the middle of all this celebrating there seems to be a hole left by the true meaning of Christmas being over looked or even ignored. It may be that I want to go deeper than nativity plays take us; to grow beyond infancy in my Christmas faith!

There is an ancient spiritual resource we can draw on to help us either keep hold of what lies at the core of the approaching festival or take us deepr into it. It belongs to this final 7 days, beginning on 17th December, and goes under the name of the Great ‘O’s. You will probably be more familiar with these through our final hymn this morning: O come, O come, Emmanuel.

This hymn is based on the Great ‘O’s and they date back to the 6th or 7th century. They are the antiphons sung or said before and after the Magnificat at the evening office in the week running up to Christmas Day. (An antiphon is a short chant which draws out a particular theme for the day or season.) They are called the Great ‘O’s because they all begin with the acclamation ‘O’. Each one of them is based on an Old Testament name for God or about God and in particular passages that have been seen to foretell or point to the coming of the Messiah, the promised Saviour. So one of them is ‘O Root of Jesse’, taken from Isaiah (11:10), another begins ‘O Dayspring’ taken from the book of Malachi (4:2), and another ‘O Adonai’ or ‘O Lord of Might’ comes from Exodus (3:15). They end with ‘O Emmanuel’ again from the book of Isaiah (7:14) and Emmanuel of course means ‘God is with us’.

These antiphons were first turned into a hymn in the 12th century, which began “O come, O come, Emmanuel” and included the now familiar refrain “Rejoice, Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel”. This Latin hymn was translated by J M Neale in 1854. J M Neale also produced Good King Wenceslas and 23 of the hymns in our hymn book come from his pen.

The use of the ‘O’ at the beginning of each verse is a way of emphasising the sense of longing for the salvation which Jesus brings. Each title draws out something that lies behind the God who comes among us. The first one in the original antiphons is ‘O Wisdom’, for some reason not included in our hymn book, and some of you may remember that in the Book of Common Prayer the 17th December bore its Latin tag ‘O Sapientia’ which translates as ‘O Wisdom’. This is an echo from the monastic past that just stuck and signaled a change of gear in the run up to the Christmas season.

Interestingly in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, Wisdom is always personified as ‘she’. So it is not a particularly fresh idea to start using feminine imagery to talk about God, as David Grice reminded us at Pentecost. It may be new to us because we have lost it over the centuries, but it is actually very ancient. Some have argued that the absence of the feminine in the ways we have tended to talk about God and the desire to redress the balance there was one of the factors behind the rise of the cult of Mary. It is then ironic that some of the places which give Mary a prominence can be the most hostile to women priests.

When we talk about the Wisdom of God what we are trying to do is express in our fragile and oh so inadequate human language something of the very essence of God deciding that creation and redemption was a good idea. It is what lies behind the desire to order all things; it is the ordering of all things, the dynamic that creates. It is the divine Word that becomes flesh and we behold his glory, or perhaps we should say ‘her’ glory, in the only begotten Son. And that is the theology behind the beginning of John’s gospel which we will read this evening in our Carol Service and will be the Gospel at our Midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve night (John 1:1-14). 'Word' and 'Wisdom' are different words for the same or at least similar notions

There is a rather tongue in cheek cartoon that has a jubilant man running out of the stable shouting ‘it’s a girl, it’s a girl’. Now that Jesus was male has never been in doubt, but like many of these kinds of jokes before we reach for the blasphemy clause there is a strand of truth behind it. The Wisdom incarnate does have this female imagery behind it and we are reminded that it is humanity in its fullness that is embraced and assumed in the child in the crib.

So the antiphons, captured in the hymn ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel’, celebrate the divine Wisdom, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us - Emmanuel.

The other ancient titles expand on this theme of God among us. The Messiah was to be descended from King David. The titles ‘Root of Jesse’ and ‘Key of David’ take his ancestry further. The child is father of the man. Jesse was David’s father, so for Jesus to be at his root means human lineage only gets us so far in his credentials! We are taken back to the essence of God that decides creating is a good idea, the divine plan that lies at the root of all things and this is very much in the background to that familiar phrase ‘And the Word became flesh’ (John 1:14).

The point of these antiphons is to highlight what we celebrate at Christmas. The one who comes is so much more than just a cute baby. In the excitement and partying, in the glow of the tree-lights and competing flashing houses around us, this is precisely the time to be reminded of the depth behind and within our festival. We prepare to celebrate the heart of the universe among us. Rejoice, Emmanuel, God is with us!

For me, from 17th December Advent takes on a greater intensity and the Great ‘O’s capture this well. We will sing 5 of them in our final hymn, so I will end with the two not included in our hymn book:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
and reaching mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
ordering all things well:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save us, whom you formed from the dust.

© Ian Black 2002

Home