Emmanuel = God With Us

I’ve been hearing the phrase “God sent his only son” quite a bit in church lately. The more I hear it the more this phrase begins to enrage me.

Rage seems a pretty serious – maybe even unstable? – response to any sort of church talk. So as Ricky said to Lucy I have “lots of ‘splainin’ to do” if I’m going to win any hearts and minds with the argument that follows. So let me back up…

I’m at church services more than most people. Our small community church has services on both Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Because I’m privileged to help with the worship music I often find myself attending both services. I usually hear two messages, two sets of pre-message prayers, and two post-message reflections. I generally enjoy this.

Right now, however, it’s the fourth week of Advent. Christmas is fast approaching and a certain phrase of John’s comes to the surface more and more frequently. As frequently as it’s tossed out at church – and I hear it now almost as often as I hear claims of “bipartisan cooperation” aimed at the coming election year – it’s even more often misquoted. To misquote John in the way I usually hear him misquoted, the phrase would go: “For God so loved the world that he [sent] his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.”

Of course the actual word in this passage is “gave.” John tells us God gave his one and only son, not that he sent him to us.

Is it just this slip of the verb that increasingly grates on me? That does seem unstable. After 2000 years it’s a bit unrealistic to expect every person who quotes John 3:16 to land on precisely the right four-letter verb.

But it’s this particular verb I chafe at. "Sent." When used as the primary verb to accompany the subject of Jesus I can hardly imagine another choice that could so painfully distort the good news of the gospels.

Why should that be? The bible uses the word combination “God sent” many many times. In Genesis Joseph says to his brothers, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

In Judges, God “sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem…”

In the first Chronicles, God “sent an angle to destroy Jerusalem.”

In Luke, “God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee…”

In Galatians Paul writes, “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’”

With so many biblical precedents it seems like “He sent” is a perfectly acceptable biblical word combination. God seems to send spirits and angels to mankind with something like regularity. Is there any reason for me to feel anything remotely like rage? And there doesn’t seem much to support my claim that this little change of phrase so hideously distorts the good news of the gospels.

And yet…

Nearly 700 years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah ascribed a special name for the One of God who would deliver his enslaved people. He called him Emmanuel — “God is with us.”

The first temple was destroyed. Its finery had been carted away to the treasuries of Babylon. The remnants of Israel had been taken to the land of the two rivers in bondage.

In this alarming context Isaiah was making a profound statement: God would no longer be in his temple, or in the incense or priestly raiments of his attendants, or in the treasures of the ages. They day was coming when God would be with his people wherever they were.

Three-quarters of a century later the gospel writer Matthew remembered this phrase, and he very deliberately assigned this title to his lord and savior: “…She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Yeshua [or “God saves”], because he will save his people from their sins…all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel…’”

As an ever-struggling Christian these words come back to me again and again. They console me. They reassure me as they reaffirm my faith in Jesus. The words that echo again and again in my mind dangle from the end of this phrase like sweet grapes from a gnarled and ancient vine: “…and they will call him Emmanuel…God with us.”

God is with me, and he is with you.

With Jesus we would never again be separated from God. Not by too great a distance between ourselves and a far-off temple. Not by rules or strictures that make us feel unworthy of accepting his grace in our lives. Not by the distance between a pulpit and a pew. Not by anything, for the God who came to us as a baby still comes. At this time of year more than any other we need to remember that.

So here is the source of my rage in the comment “God sent his only son.” Here is why I want to cry out “Aren’t you listening?” when we so readily ape this phrase. God didn’t send another being to communicate his desires to us. He came.

Jesus was not an ambassador sent to us from a distant empire.

Jesus was not a courier, bringing us checks or winnings.

He was not an otherworldly being, sent to us from a distant unreachable realm.

He was Emmanuel.

Jeremiah, the prophet who was a contemporary of that first prophet Isaiah, told us how this would be: “No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…”

We can put ourselves in God’s all-encompassing shoes and see how brutal is the replacement of the verb “to give” with the verb “to send” by creating a simple modern parable:

A man had left behind his family to make his fortune in a far-off land when his homeland was set upon by disease and drought and famine. Half the population died from a mysterious sickness. The rains failed to come year after year. The crops failed. The man sent money home again and again, but the news never got better. Still the disease took lives, still the earth was parched, still there was no food. One day the man said “I will go myself.” He risked the failure of his new business, he risked catching the dreaded disease himself, he risked starvation, but still he went. It was better, he decided, to give himself to his people and help them from within than it was to try and help them from without.

Would God do any less?

When we say “God sent Jesus” we thoughtlessly strip the majesty and beauty from God’s great act of mercy. When we say “God sent his only son” we ignore the true message of Jesus: He came to suffer and be with us, forever and always, never to fully return to what he was.

There are two stories that bring this strange idea home to me again and again. One is an anecdotal tale that has been told many times in many versions, and the other is from the Gospel of Mark.

The anecdote goes, “There was a Jewish prisoner who was assigned to fill in and re-dig latrine ditches at Dachau. As the rains came and turned his job into an unholy mire of excrement and muck his guards jeered at him. They made fun of his neck-deep struggle in the filth, and they shouted to him ‘Hey old man, where is your God now?’ He looked up at them from his smelly hole and told them what Isaiah had always told him: ‘He’s down here with me, of course.’”

The gospel passage from the end of Mark’s tale goes: “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.”

Mark could not have made a more deliberate and profound statement to his audience: the curtain in the holy of holies that separated man from God had been shredded and would never separate them again. He believed that a vast unmeasurable part of God had flooded into our reality then, and that it has been with us ever since.

And that’s why I feel something so close to rage when I hear “God sent” again and again. He did not send some supernatural visitor from another realm.

He instead traded distant safety for intimate pain. He traded remote otherness for blood and tears and oneness. He has been with us since and he is with us still. To fail to see this, to swap the personal “give” for the impartial “send,” runs the risk of forgetting how desperate and final and salvific this act truly was.

He became Emmanuel.

God is with us.

We should not forget it. This time of year above all others.

[This post was originally published in December 2006. MT]