O Emmanuel (God-with-us)

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!

For my final blog post on the "O Antiphons" I prayed with two passages: Isaiah 7: 10-15 & Romans 8: 20-24.  The Isaiah reading was Ahaz's prophesy of the virgin giving birth to Emmanuel (God-with-us).  But why a virgin?  Just so God can show how powerful he is?  No.  Because if God was becoming man then he wold need to be born from a perfect & spotless womb.  God is perfect and sinless so he would have to be born from a sinless womb.  This is what led the Church, specifically through the scholarship of Duns Scotus, to the revelation of the Immaculate Conception.  Mary is our races solitary boast!  If not for Mary, Emmanuel would not have come.  This is why Mary is held to such a high esteem and many seek her prayers & intercession.  Mary knew from the moment of her conception that to be one with God is the only way to live.  May we all be as open and willing to do the will of the Father as Mary is.

In Romans 8: 20-24 St. Paul reminds us that we, all creation, needed a savior since thebeginning of   creation.  This leads into a major theological debate many Dominican's and Franciscan's have been having for years.  Was the incarnation a result of original sin?  I tend to lean more on the Franciscan side of the debate that the incarnation was pre-ordained by God before man was even created.  Look back at Genesis where everything was created "good;" however, not perfect.  There was always room for growth, even among humans since Adam and Eve were created "good" as well.  This led Franciscans, like Duns Scotus, to believe that Christ's human birth would have come even without falling because we needed a model of perfection to attain since we were only created "good" and not perfect.

Since the beginning of time we needed God to be with us (Emmanuel) and that is what happened  God gave us his only Son, born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and he [Jesus] in turn gave us his own life for our redemption.  Jesus is the model for whom our lives should reflect.  We are Jesus in the world today!  May this feast of the incarnation of Christ, God made man, remind us that we are called to share in Christ's life by imitating him and hopefully, if we lived lives of faith, hope, and love, share in his divinity one day in the Heavenly Jerusalem.

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all nations and their Savior: come and save us, O Lord our God!  Amen.