O Come Emmanuel | Matthew 1:18-25
How many of you like to wait? Human beings categorically do not like to wait. We want instant gratification and our problems to be solved, responses to be given and traffic to move in a short amount of time. If you’re from the South, you have probably heard the saying, “It’s as slow as Christmas.” The idea behind it is that Christmas only comes once a year; so, you have to wait for it to come and it seems to come very slowly. The tradition of Christmas is waiting. As a child, I remember waiting anxiously for Christmas because that’s when we got to open presents. For believers, our life is a life of waiting and anticipation: not for Jesus to come, but to return. In our waiting, we start to wonder if what God has promised us will actually come to pass because as Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.”
O Come, O Come Immanuel is the oldest Christmas song we sing. It was a chant written in the 800s AD by an anonymous monk in Latin. The 800 ADs were known as the Dark Ages. A time in history when civilization had broken down and mankind was sliding backwards into chaos, ignorance and evil. The Bible was inaccessible for most people, yet the monk who wrote it was well versed in scripture and OT prophecies speaking of the coming of the Messiah. The song was lost for nearly a thousand years until an Anglican Priest John Neale in the early 19th century was reading through an ancient book of Latin hymns and translated it into English and in 1851 it was set to music by Thomas Helmore. The tune captures the mood of longing, aching, yearning, and hoping. It doesn’t sound like “Joy to the World,” it’s a more serious song that speaks of the tension that Christians feel today as we live in the Already and Not yet. We know that Jesus has already come, but yet, He has not fully come. Piper said, “The Christian life oscillates between two poles: the overflowing joy of the “already” redeemed and the tearful yearning of the “not yet” redeemed.” Most Christmas hymns were written with that tension of real-world sorrowful joy. The song teaches us the meaning and the ministry of Immanuel so that we can rejoice as we long for Him to return.