O Emmanuel - Bernadette Farrell

 

St. Martin's Voices

Commissioned by the Church of England for Advent 2025

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour, come and save us O Lord our God.  

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Commentary on the above in the form of a rant

I've written here before about how, as an egalitarian democrat I always felt a little queasy about praying "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," because "no kings."   That was until I realized what was wrong with human monarchs was that they were all too human.  If nothing the revelations about how good queen Elizabeth II had an absurd blind spot for her criminally horrible favorite child,  Andrew, and his crimes and corruption as well as his rotten character from the time he was a little brat - not to mention the likes of that predecessor of the clients of Jeffrey Epstein,  Lord Mountbatten* and so many others she certainly knew about.  

The Kingdom of God won't be one of inequality.  That is it will not be one of greed, cruelty, evil and corruption.  All systems that tolerate, never mind being based in inequality as ours is, will ever be anything but those.  American history even before the Roberts Court's legalistic corruption  shows perfectly well those can be as characteristic of a deputed and even real republic as it can be of a hereditary monarchy.   The problem with the absurd and corrupted from the start scheme of John Adams for a balance of powers was that it depended on the fallibility of men, in the case of the early Republic many of them rotten from the start and bent on corrupting even that scheme to their own gain.**

The Hebrew Scripture from the time of Moses and, later, Jesus aspired to more than that for humanity and the world, they aspire to equality beyond the rule of the corrupt, they aspire to nothing short of our salvation.   It was in large part the consequences of human governance under man made laws that this antiphon prays we will be saved.   In the United States, right now, it is to the consequences of an American election, one governed by the lies of the mass media and a party catering to the worst things about us, greed, racism, misogyny, a desire to be freed of social restraints against being the worst we figure we can get away with, the love of cruelty encouraged by American macho culture and Hollywood - we are living with the media campaign of popularizing cruelty that started in the 1970s with the rise of such things as shock jock radio and cruel, often racist "comedy."   I've mentioned here before that a carpenter I knew then told me he thought that the promotion of cruelty in things like Garbage Pail Kids was a promotion of just that, he mentioned Nazism in his discussion and he predicted that things in the United States would get disastrously worse as a consequence of that trend in pop culture.   Well, that pop cultural trend continued and things have gotten worse.    Secularism will never aspire to more than what leads there.   But so much of American "christianity," "christian-nationalism" the kind of "americanism" espoused by conservative Protestants and Catholics like Timothy Cardinal Dolan and Robert Barron is as thoroughly if not even more secular than much of non-religion these days. 

American "christianity" was also taken down a similar path with the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the media campaign to turn the meaning of "Christian" into an anti-Christian deformity that can be spouted by the neo-Nazi shock jocks of now and the white supremacist, Republican-fascists in Congress in the presidency and on the Supreme Court.   I'll have a lot more to say about that in the coming year.   I think either those who try to follow Jesus will have to really fight against the Mammonist parody of Christianity or Christianity will be discredited for the rest of the lives of everyone alive right now.   The law as exposited by Jesus is what this prayer asks for, its real implementation - which here, on Earth will depend on all too fallible human beings and which won't just naturally come about under a libertarian regime of "liberal democracy."   It is the law to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, treat the ill, humane treatment for the prisoner.   It will include the humane provisions of the Mosaic Law and the prophesy of the Prophets.   It won't be the pipedream of "enlightenment" (I'll have more to say about that after Christmas, too) that has been what has gotten us here, too, the framers of the American Constitution were far better proponents of the ideas of the heroes of the "enlightenment" than they're credited with - that is what those false gods really advocated, not what a lefty prof or their all too close allies in "classical political economics" at the best universities trim those into being. 

So, as can be seen in this last of the O Antiphons of Advent, Christmas is inescapably political and economic, to ignore that is to ignore why the birth of Jesus is something worthy of celebrating.   We ask nothing less of him than our salvation from our economic and political bungling and corruption.  

* It being so near to Christmas and he being safely dead,  I'll forego more about him for now.  

** Everything that has happened for the worse which the laws and Constitutional system invented by John Adams has permitted the most horrible of crimes from the start and even official, legal emancipation of slaves, what should have been the revolutionary and egalitarian consequences of the Civil War amendments and the hard struggled for progress won by civil rights and Womens' rights movements, the labor movement, has proven to be vulnerable to the very Constitutional system set up by the slave-holder-corrupt-financier founders.   John Adams may have been the least corrupt of them but he was one of them.  I wish his cousin Samuel Adams hadn't so diligently burned his papers because I'd like to know a lot more about his anti-federalism than can be known.  I have found reading the best of the anti-federalists entirely relevant to our situation and showing how we can't depend on any of it, especially the Supreme Court to save us because those are fundamentally corrupt.  Especially under the legal theories concocted in elite law schools by the members of that most fundamentally lying of professions, lawyers.   If honest lawyers don't like that, it's not my fault.   They know full well that their colleagues not only are dominated by liars, lying on behalf of even the most corrupt of their clients is held to be a professional obligation.  Almost as sacred a professional practice as billing by the hour.   The secular law will always prove to be corrupt.