O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
I have a confession to make. Though I have always loved the song “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” I never paid it the attention it deserved. I liked the melody, of course, and the feel of the song, but until I started taking Advent seriously as a season of the Christian year, or more specifically as the beginning of the Christian year, I didn’t understand how poignantly that song gathered together the seeming contradictions of the season of Advent.
Advent is a season of hopeful expectation, but also a season of penance and preparation, a season when that madman John the Baptist bursts on the scene to level mountains and raise up valleys, crying out for the world to repent so that paths might be made straight for the One who is our hope to come. Advent means coming; it does not mean arriving. It is a season that does not fully possess what it longs for. It is a season that pairs hope with melancholy, expectation with mournful longing.
If Advent has a sound, it is not the blaring brass of Christmas or Easter, but the strain of a cello, the pull of a bow against strings. If Advent has a song, we can do a lot worse than, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and its refrain of “Rejoice,” a hopeful word, yes, but sung in a way that pulls the word from our lips like the bow pulls the note from the cello. It may feel like a sung contradiction, but that potent pairing of hope and melancholy feels like contradiction in the way that life so often feels like a contradiction.
Even so, I recognize that hope and melancholy might seem like complete opposites. Indeed, Graham Greene, in The End of the Affair, spoke of melancholy as the “logical belief in a hopeless future.” And Andrew Delbanco in his wonderful book, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, juxtaposes melancholy with hope. But I have come to experience the ways in which Advent hope makes space within itself for melancholy. Just as the prayer of lament makes space within prayer for doubt, questioning, and rage, so too does Advent make space within hope for melancholy, for a sadness at our own shortcomings, certainly, but most especially a sadness for the brokenness of the world.
And so, Advent hope sings in “lonely exile.” Advent hope sings “Rejoice!” against the mournful strain of a minor key. Such longing seems to only come in the midst of exile, when all other options have been exhausted, when every strategy has failed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood these dynamics as well as anyone. In Love Letters from Cell 92, Bonhoeffer wrote on the cusp of Advent that, “A prison cell like this, in which one watches and hopes and performs this or that ultimately insignificant task, and in which one is wholly dependent on the doors being opened from the outside, is far from an inappropriate metaphor for Advent.”
Though the door may only open from the outside, Advent hope trusts that it will indeed be opened again because it has been opened before. Advent hope remembers that the One who did not shun the Virgin’s womb is also the One who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. It is for this reason that this season teaches us the two sides of longing, both the bitter and the sweet, by placing us between the two great longings: Israel’s longing for the coming of the Messiah, and the Church’s longing for the coming of the Bridegroom.
To whom, then, should we sing “Rejoice?” We sing it to ourselves. It is sung as a kind of self-exhortation, in the way the psalmist sang, “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” And that self-exhortation set against those notes reminds us that much of life is scored in the minor key. If even “Rejoice” emerges in such a mournful way, then hope has much more to say to us than just “look on the bright side.” It says that the light that shines in darkness has known darkness. It has known darkness not as an abstraction, not as a philosophical counterpart to some ephemeral notion, but darkness, real and absolute darkness of place, of mind, of soul. To sing “Rejoice” in this way is, if I can steal this phrase, to sing a kind of “broken hallelujah.”
So when I speak of melancholy and mournful longing, I am not speaking of despair. Melancholy is not itself despair, because despair, along with presumption, is a sin against hope, as Thomas Aquinas understood. Advent hope acknowledges darkness but does not want to dwell there forever. The melancholy of Advent hope asks for the light to come, for the dark to be dispersed, for “death’s dark shadows to be put to flight.” In this way Advent hope is akin to the hope Christians express at the funeral of someone who has died in Christ.
Which brings us to the origin of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” The lyrics come from the original Latin O Antiphons, which date back to at least the eighth century. While the provenance of the text was well known, for years no one knew the origin of the haunting tune, though there was much speculation about its origin. In the 1960s Sister Thomas More discovered the melody in an archive in France. It was part of a funeral dirge. Imagine that. This song that anchors the celebration of Advent is tuned by a melody used in funerals. If this is surprising, I think it says something about us and the kind of sanitized and saccharine faith we have settled for. Christian hope is hope in the face of death, hope that there is something on the other side of that inevitability.
None of this should be surprising then. After all, our hope is in the resurrected One who was first the godforsaken One, the crucified One. Ours is an Easter hope, no question, but that Easter hope rests in this fundamental but frequently forgotten truth, that in his death Christ went fully into darkness. Christ went to the outermost limits of godforsakenness to secure our hope that there is no place a human being can go, even into the darkness of death itself, that God in Christ has not gone himself. Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar understood this as well as anyone, and spoke of Christ’s movement into darkness as the basis for our hope and as the centerpiece of the great theo-drama of history.
And this, of course, is why hopelessness for a Christian is more than melancholy; it is distrust of God, a refusal to accept that his promised future, his promised presence with us and for us, will come despite whatever current circumstances reveal. More than for a particular event, more than for a preferred outcome, Christian hope is hope in the character of God and in the work of Christ. Hope therefore originates with God, and for this reason the Church understands that hope is a theological virtue, a spiritual gift given and fostered by the Spirit.
Most think of hope as an openness toward the future, and, in the Christian sense, it certainly is. But only in a derivative sense. Hope is first and foremost, and finally as well, an openness to God. The tendency is to think of Christian hope in terms of a hoped-for event or determined outcome, but Advent hope reminds us that God fulfills his promises with himself.
Emmanuel, we must never forget, means God with us. When we cry for Emmanuel to come, we are crying out for God to come. In the first Advent, all of Israel’s hopes and longings are fulfilled in the coming of a person. For all we do not know of the when and the how of God’s promised future, we certainly know the who—the Lord Jesus Christ who first came to us in humility and who will come again in glory.
Why then do the Spirit and the Bride cry, “Come, Lord Jesus?” Because he is our hope. Because there are broken things that cannot be unbroken until he comes. So if Advent, as Fleming Rutledge channeling Karl Barth said, is the season that most encapsulates the experience of the Christian life[1], then “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is in some sense a song for all seasons.”
[1] Of all the seasons of the church year, Advent most closely mirrors the daily lives of Christians and the church, asks the most important ethical questions, presents the most accurate picture of the human condition, and above all, orients us to the future of the God who will come again.” (Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 1.
Christopher Myers is the associate rector of St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church in Dallas and a doctoral student in theology at Durham University. He blogs at The Road Between Here and There.