O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

This post continues the Obsculta Preaching Series, sponsored by the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary. In these posts, our authors engage a variety of ways in which scripture, preaching, and liturgical worship interact with the life of the faithful.

I remember when I first heard the song, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”  I was in 2^nd grade at Saint Ambrose School in Rochester, NY.  As a youngster coming to terms with the fascinating yet confusing way the adult world was organized, I did not know what to think of it.  “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” did not have the frolicking levity of “Jingle Bells” or the sweet piety of “Silent Night,” which were the only other songs I associated with Christmas back then.  Nonetheless, it certainly fell into the “religious” category, because we were told “Emmanuel” is another name for Jesus, and both the singer and we were waiting for Christmas to come.  Good enough.

I never gave the piece much thought after that until I was a freshman in college, when I heard Joan Baez’s recording of it, which led to a conversation with a liturgist who explained that the Advent carol rested on the whole tradition of the O Antiphons.  I needed to know more, and pursuing this line brought me to the Magnificat in Luke’s Gospel.  Since I had just completed my first course in Sacred Scripture, an experience that opened to me a whole new world, I was immediately drawn to this Advent hymn.

As one might expect, O Come O Come Emmanuel has its roots in Latin.  Scholars have traced it to a sixth-century prayer book entitled, appropriately enough, O Antiphons, in which the vocative particle “O” is followed by an attribute of Jesus.  It seems that a schola of monks, nuns, or other religious, sang a particular antiphon to introduce the Magnificat at Vespers the week before Christmas.  To do so, they drew on various biblical passages from the biblical prophets and Wisdom literature, and they addressed them as:

• O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
• O Adonai (O Lord)
• O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
• O Clavis David (O Key of David)
• O Oriens (O Dayspring)
• O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations)
• O Emmanuel (O God-with-us)

The O Antiphons give us a peek into the way the early Church, and by extension, Catholics especially before the twentieth century, learned and applied the Bible to their daily lives.  The academic approach we use today is a late arrival on the scene.  In the ancient and Medieval world, learning the biblical text was an organic affair that relied on wordplay, images, generic symbolism, and imagination.  What seemed to be a stream of consciousness ran through all the texts and human experience.  For example, the O Antiphons are ordered so that in taking the first initial of each Messianic title, SARC ORE, and reading it backward, one spells the Latin words ERO CRAS, that is, “Tomorrow, I will come”.

While the verses to O Come, O Come Emmanuel are based on the O Antiphons, the two sets are not identical.  The most obvious difference is that the hymn verses are in meter while the antiphons are chant.  The hymn verses also have a rhyme scheme in Latin whereas the Antiphons do not.  And for the record, the clever ERO CRAS found in the Antiphons does not work for the hymn.  Over the centuries, the verses for the hymn we know have seen so many versions that sorting any phrase from the first line forms an impossible word scramble.  Nonetheless, the references are the same for both collections thus allowing us to use the hymn verses to reference the Antiphons and to interpret the biblical texts.  

Perhaps more than anything else, the most notable feature of the Antiphons is the mood they create.  Each opens with a vocative, “O,” and a description of Christ follows.  When chanted, the “O” sound sets a pleading tone to the rest of the verse that leads directly into Mary’s Magnificat, and the Magnificat outlines the shape of the salvation that Christ’s redemption has wrought, qualities we associate with Luke’s Gospel: food for the hungry, relief for the weary, and justice for the oppressed.  Because the Antiphons draw on OT references, they connect Mary’s song to the major themes of OT salvation history as they attach those same themes to the person of Jesus Christ. 

Luke’s Gospel forefronts prayer more than the other three gospels. We build our relationship with God through prayer, and Mary’s Magnificat is a prayer of praise.  We praise someone when that person has done something grand that needed to be done.  The pathos inherent in the antiphons raises the volume of the Canticle. Mary is singing, because the Lord God has heard the existential longing of his people.  As disciples, we must respond in like manner to those crying out in their need today.

The Antiphons are the voice of ancient Israel, and indeed, all humanity, pleading to God for rescue, specifically, to teach us the path of knowledge, to rescue us with divine mighty power, to save us without delay, to free the prisoners of darkness, to shine on those who dwell in the shadow of death, and to save humankind from reverting to dust. The seasonal context places that longing within the promise of the Incarnation. The hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, popularized the O Antiphons, thereby making this tune one of the most biblically rich in the Christian, Christmas repertoire.  During this Advent season, there is no better refrain to underscore that promise to the world than “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!”

Fr. Michael Patella, OSB, is Benedictine monk of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota and professor of New Testament at Saint John’s School of Theology at Saint John’s University. He has published in the areas of Luke, Mark, Paul, angels, and demons, art and theology, and also has written for The Bible Today and Give Us This Day.