23rd December: O Emmanuel
O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.
Based on the famous prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, the title Emmanuel is the key to the mystery of incarnation. The presence of God with the people was the greatest of the promises that they could experience. Be it with Abraham or with Moses or with Joshua or with the people who were walking in the desert, one of the prominent promises that God gave was to be with them! Christ comes as the fulfilment and the most complete expression as that promise: as God among us.
The symbol is the virgin with the child in the manger. It is not just any child, but the promised salvation of the God of the universe, the king who has come to meet his subjects to make them co-heirs to his throne. The manger is a lovely symbol that unites the heaven and the earth, the Divine and the human!
The presence of the Lord is salvific; one who has experienced it cannot remain silent - he or she has to go out and share it, make every one else experience that presence! This is the crux of evangelisation: it is not proselytisation, not sheep stealing and increasing the numbers within a fold. It is sharing that salvific presence that one has experienced, from the Lord. The first call is to experience the God-with-us, the presence of the Lord with us, and the call that follows is to share that presence with those around - that is salvation.
The prayer is to the Lord our God to save us by God's saving PRESENCE... in simple words it is a beseeching to stay with us, to live with us, to sanctify us, to make us worthy of God and of God's great big family.
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