When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. ~ Galatians 4:4-5
Tomorrow (December 23) is the day that the ancient church sang the following short antiphon (response) during its evening liturgy:
O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.
O Emmanuel, our king and our law-bearer,
the expectation of the nations and their Healer:
Come to make us whole, O Lord our God.
This night is the culmination of seven nights of singing God’s praise, in preparation for the celebration of Christmas, and calling for God’s Messiah to come and “save” us, that is, “make us whole,” using a series of short hymn responses known as the “O Antiphons.” Though these responses are over 1500 years old, we know them best in their present-day English version, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which starts with the cry to the one called “God with Us” to deliver us all who live “in lonely exile here.”
What strikes me as I read the text of this antiphon is the word legifer. I have most often heard this word translated “law giver,” but what it actually says is “law bearer.” Long ago, the God of the cosmos, the Lord who had freed the Israelites from slavery, gave to Moses a set of laws that shaped how the people of Israel were to live in relation to their God and to one another. In this interaction, Moses was the intermediator of God’s law to the people.
With the coming of God’s Messiah, Jesus was born as the bearer of God’s law. There was no intermediator. Jesus himself, bore in his very being God’s eternal torah, that is, God’s law and instruction. Jesus wasn’t just a teacher of the law; he was himself the bearer of the law. As Mary was the one “bore God,” Jesus birthed God’s holy law in the world, a law that was all that God meant our restored lives to be: ordered by justice and righteousness, illumined by light eternal, sustained and nurtured by compassion and humility, and grounded in love of neighbor.
The apostle Paul doesn’t speak much of Jesus’ birth, but what he does say is this:
Consider this among you, the very thing that was in Messiah Jesus: though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God as something to be grasped, but he emptied himself, and being found in human likeness, he took the form of a slave. (Philippians 2:)
Jesus Christ emptied himself of his equality with God so that he might live among us as a servant of all. Yet what he could never empty himself of was the essential quality of God: light, truth, hope, faithfulness, justice, healing, love, and salvation.
We live in this hope and expectation during this Christmas season: Christ Jesus was born into a lawless world to take on the consequences of that very lawlessness. Our hope is that as Christ bears God’s law to us, our lives are restored and made whole through this infant servant born to be Emmanuel, God with us.
To hear this ancient antiphon, O Emmanuel, click on the link below.
