Emmanuel shall come to thee
Dr Mel Eyeons, LLM
The 4th Sunday of Advent
21 December 2025
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
Matthew 1.18-end
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
We’ve sung these words throughout Advent, a weekly reminder that underneath all the busyness and pressures and expectations of this time of year we are waiting for something deeper, more solid, more lasting and more wonderful than we can imagine.
And now the waiting of Advent is almost over.
Of all the gospel writers, Matthew is the most set on linking Jesus to his Jewish roots and his place in the story of God and Israel, in what’s perhaps a timely message now, given recent anti-Semitic events.
The lectionary has spared us the list of names that comes at the start of Matthew’s Gospel, but they are there for a reason.
The names are a reminder that, through his adoptive father, Joseph, Jesus stands in the line of Abraham and David. He stands with all those generations of faithful people trying and failing, hoping and despairing, working and playing, loving and being loved by God.
God has been with Israel through slavery, exile and war, triumphs and disasters, and everything in between. He has laughed and cried over his people, rebuked and encouraged them, and never given up on them. And woven throughout the story of Israel is the hope for a Messiah, someone to save the people and establish God’s reign over all the earth. The People of Israel have waited for a long time.
And now, says Matthew, the time has come! Rejoice! Here he is, as foretold by the prophets! So, to further establish Jesus’s place in the history of God’s dealings with his people, he quotes Isaiah 7.14, rendered in our translation,
Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel”, which means, “God is with us.
We have many titles for Jesus, and a lot of them appear in the hymn O Come Emmanuel: Wisdom, Lord, Branch of Jesse’s stem, Key of David, Bright Morning Star, King of Nations and King of Peace.
Yet it’s Emmanuel, God with us, that keeps appearing, because the Advent message that God is coming to be with us is the one that transcends all the others.
The message that God is with us runs the danger of appearing sentimental, something to make us feel cosy and warm like a mug of hot chocolate, protecting us from the cold outside.
But it’s not such a simple or easy thing as all that.
There was danger in God appearing on earth, for both Jesus and his earthly family.
The Messiah came to an occupied country, to a scandalous family situation, to danger of death at the hands of a tyrant, to all the problems and dangers that human beings face, and to the possibility of rejection even by his earthly father, Joseph.
We hear about Joseph’s doubts, and about an angel appearing and reassuring him, and it sounds quite straightforward.
But imagine for a moment the turmoil Joseph faced. His fiancée was pregnant, and not by him. As far as he knew he’d been betrayed and taken for a fool. He faced social and religious disapproval as well. People whispering about him, giving him funny looks at the Temple, pitying him or laughing at him.
What was he to do? The Law was clear: Mary should be sent away, even stoned for adultery. But he was a good man who understood that justice should be tempered with mercy, so he made up his mind to end things quietly, for her sake.
This was a dangerous moment. Alone and unmarried, Mary would be considered a fallen woman and subjected to moral condemnation no matter how kindly Joseph sent her away. She and her baby would lose Joseph’s strength, kindness, financial provision, and protection. And Joseph would miss out on his chance to be directly a part of God’s new work. So strong measures were needed in the form of angelic intervention.
Even before Jesus’s birth, then, being God with us in this new way, of taking flesh and living among us, was risky and uncomfortable. For Mary and Joseph, also, it took faith and determination in the face of social, religious, political and personal obstacles.
God with us doesn’t necessarily mean life is cosy. God being with us can be challenging. It can shake our assumptions about how things should work, as it did for Joseph in his relationship with Mary. It can mean our lives being upended, as it did for Joseph when he and his small family fled for their lives to another country. It can sometimes be unsettling when God comes alongside us and says,
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Yet, God with us is also the source of our greatest hope just because it changes everything.
In loneliness and rejection. In tiredness and sadness. In sickness and pain. In fear and frustration.
When the world is in turmoil and we worry about what’s coming next.
In life and in death. In all these things, God is with us.
We know all too well what the problems of the world are, and the difficulties we face in our own lives.
But we also know that hope isn’t the absence of struggle but the presence of Christ within it.
And we know that even as we prepare to celebrate the first coming of Our Lord we are still waiting for his second coming.
We are still in a time of waiting, a time when we walk and love and work with God as we await his coming to put all things right.
Yet, in this in-between place, we have this to hold on to: whatever happens, either around us or to us, we don’t go through it alone because God has come to us in a new way and will never leave us comfortless.
We go through everything with Emmanuel, God with us, who has been there ahead of us and has promised never to leave us.
So, as we turn towards Christmas, may we have the strength and willingness to listen of Joseph, the faithful obedience of Mary, and the joy of the angels in heaven – for Emmanuel will come to us.