Our 7th
and final ‘O Antiphon’ tonight reads:
O Emmanuel, you are our king
and judge,
the one
whom the peoples await and their Saviour.
O come
and save us, Lord our God.
The meaning of ‘Emmanuel’ is “God with us”. In a way
it anticipates the nativity, the birth of our Lord, the second person of the
Blessed Trinity, which we will celebrate, tomorrow night.
Knowing that God is with us gives us inner security,
peace, joy, delight, hope – as St Paul
“With God on
our side, who can be against us” ( Rm 8 :31) and “ It is in him that we live
and move and have our being” ( Acts 17:28).
Having been made in the image and likeness of God we
have a natural capacity for God and the things of God. We experience a profound
yearning for him, just as the prophets and people of the Old testament yearned,
longed for and awaited the coming of the Messiah, for the search for God and the desire to be in
relationship with him is rooted in our human nature and the psalms testify to
this so beautifully:
“O God you are my God, for you
I long
For you my soul is thirsting” (Psalm
62)
and
“I say to the Lord, you are my
God,
my happiness lies in you
alone.”
and
“What else have I in Heaven
but you,
apart from you I want nothing
on earth”
It seems to me that this antiphon is prayed with great
humility, teaching us about this great and difficult virtue. Humility is truth.
In this antiphon the people recognise and acknowledge their inability to save
themselves for they cry out for a Saviour. We, too, continue this cry for we
also, are in constant need of the Lord’s grace to live the Christian life, -“cut
off from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5)– the words of Jesus in St. John’s
This
is portrayed by Pope Francis, in a recent address: he says:
“At Christmas God gives us all
of Himself by giving his one and only Son, who is all his joy – Jesus – the
gift of gifts – the undeserved gift that brings us salvation”
That final plea, “O come and save us, Lord our God”,
sums up all the preceding petitions of the other O antiphons. It is a cry from
the heart of the Church, and since the Church prays not only for herself but
for the whole world, it is also a cry from the heart of all humanity. As we
pray this antiphon in a few minutes we are called to pray it from the depths of
our own hearts, in humility of spirit, in the name of all humanity and for all
humanity- conscious as we are of the suffering in the world- in Syria, Iraq,
Africa, the Holy Land, India, Pakistan and for the renewal of faith in our own country
and in the home countries of all our sisters: England; Scotland; Malta; France;
Belarus and Korea.
O come and save us, Lord our
God.
.JPG)
No comments:
Post a Comment