O Come O Come Emmanuel

Rev. Tom Harris

December 20, 2009

          Some people say if you play certain songs backwards there are hidden messages. According to the website reversespeech.com if you play the song “Help” by the Beatles backward you can hear the message, “Now he uses marijuana”. If you play “How do you sleep” by John Lennon backward it says, “Hey poor Lindy, so mean, gets him nowhere”. George Harrison: “While my guitar gently weeps” backwards says, “Pass the gun now. It kills the love, the love is cold”. And my favorite The Spice Girls, in the song “I’m Not That Easy As a Matter of Fact” if you play it backwards it says, “I was easy, have fun.” And yes, I played the mp3 of that Spice Girls song and its true. Well, it turns out this is not a modern phenomena.

It turns out “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” has a backward hidden message, but getting to it requires some explanation. In the 9^th century or perhaps earlier in the medieval Catholic Church a series antiphons were sung during the Advent season. An antiphon is a responsive chant. The word comes from the greek, anti meaning opposite and phon meaning voice. These were called the O Antiphons because each one begins with the evocative O followed by a name for the messiah. O Wisdom, O Adonai, O Root of Jesse, etc. The O Antiphons are offered in our Presbyterian Book of Common Worship and we will say them today during the Offertory prayer.  The hymn “O Come, Come Emmanuel” is based on these O Antiphons and I will get to that in a minute. To get to the hidden backward message you need to go to the Latin word for each of the Messianic titles in the O Antiphons. The Latin for the first title, Wisdom is Sapentia. The next messianic phrase is taken from Hebrew directly into Latin. It is Adonai which is the one the terms Jews use in place of the personal name of God. It means Lord, but in Latin it is Adonai. Root of Jesse is Radix in Latin. Key of David is Clavis. Radiant Dawn is a translation of Oriens. Ruler of the nation comes from the Latin Rex. And finally Emmanuel was taken directly from Hebrew and used in Latin. Now here is where the backward hidden message comes in. If you take the first letter of each Latin title and put them in reverse order you get a phrase that is very appropriate for Advent and especially for Christmas Eve especially if we consider the message coming from Jesus. The Latin phrase is Ero cras. Which means, “Tomorrow I will be here.” John Lennon, eat your heart out.

So then to get us from the O Antiphons to our current hymn an unknown person in the 12^th or 13^th century selected 5 of the 7 antiphons and rearranged the order, added a refrain and produced the hymn we have today. Our hymnal only has 3 of those 5 verses but the modern song still has all 5. I started to wonder if there were any secret messages in the rearranged version from the 12^th century. That hymn put the messianic titles in the following order Emmanuel, Radix, Orien, Clavis and Adonai. If you take the acrostic of those words you get EROCA and if you google Latin EROCA and you get websites about a Latin swimsuit model named Erica. But if you reverse the letters to be ACORE and google that you find it’s the acronym of the American Council for Renewable Energy, which means the hidden message of our hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is God wants us to use solar power. 

OK, that’s just silly But, let’s go back to the actual Latin backward acrostic message that was probably very intentionally put in the original Antiphons “Tomorrow I will be here.”  It is indeed meaningful that there is a message that Christ will come in a hymn that repeatedly invites his coming, because, the expectation of Christ’s coming, not his actual coming is the goal of Advent. The expectation of Christ’s coming  the belief that he will be here imminently is what  leads us to put our lives in order today, the expectation not the arrival leads us to embrace this moment for all it is worth, the expectation not the arrival leads us to seize the day, to make amends, to love more fully and live more deeply, the expectation of Christ’s coming not the arrival is the point. Traditionally Advent is not just about looking forward to the birth of the baby Jesus but also looking forward to the second coming. Unfortunately, some people take that literally and believe that when Jesus comes back all things will be set right. But, in fact, it is our preparation for the coming Christ that puts our life right. It is our belief that the world might not exist tomorrow that makes today so much more awesome. It is the uncertainity of the future that makes the present such a prize. It is our prayer O Come, O Come Emmanuel that opens our hearts to love today.  

As paradoxical as it may sound, we experience the presence of Christ through our expectation of his coming tomorrow. So then the medium of a hidden backward acrostic word of Jesus is the message. Because he will be here tomorrow he is here today.