The 'O Antiphons' are sung
according to tradition, during the evening liturgy on the last days of
Advent. Each one is a named attribute of The Christ, to whose coming the
church looks forward with eager and in these latter days, heightened
expectation
"On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples;
the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious."
Isaiah Ch.11 vs 10
As I mentioned in the previous post in the series, Roots have been a constant source of reflection these past months, in many regards though for longer than that, perhaps since the many hours I spent with my Grandmother, my last direct ancestor, listening to her life story in the final months of her long life.
Our Ancestry is a source of endless fascination to many as testified to by the popularity of such television programmes as the BBC's excellent 'Who do you think you are?'. And it is well titled for not only is our ancestry of interest, our forebears form us in many ways. Some we become aware of, such as the many moments I have caught my breath after a word or action brought an uncanny sense of one of my parents to mind, or those facets of our character shaped for better or worse by our interactions with mothers and fathers in the early years of our life, often before we began to have any Self consciousness to speak of. But of course our ancestry affects us far more deeply - I always wonder at my Grandfather's invaliding out of the Great War in its final weeks. A German snipers aim was slightly off and he lost part of his ear . . . an inch, a second, a life but not just his, my father's, and mine . . . And before him many many others and on my mother's side - an unrepeatable mix of life experience and genetics.
Today, the third of the last seven of Advent our antiphon is 'O Radix Jesse' - The Root of Jesse, the next of the titles of Christ, made better known to most of us through the great hymn of Advent, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. We are reminded of the human ancestry of Christ, but interesting the biblical Root appealed to is not the son of Jesse, David, but Jesse himself.
This points to what I have come to call 'displaced sonship'. We think of our own ancestry in direct line - we trace it relentlessly - yet important as biblical genealogies are we find throughout them and the wider scriptural account something else at work. Put bluntly we are reminded over and again of sons who in some sense are not sons and those who are not sons finding themselves to be sons. David himself is called 'my son' by Saul, although his son is Jonathan, and his successor, Solomon is the most ambiguous of sons. There are at the beginning the convolutions of the sons of Adam, Cain and Abel and of course Seth (who ever remembers him, yet he is the surviving son of the Man and the Woman). There is Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob - the 'right order' continually disrupted, a sign that things are not as they seem.
And so the LORD sends Samuel to 'the Bethlehemite', Jesse - and seven sons come for inspection, before the forgotten son, the eighth is dragged in from the fields to be anointed. Not one of the seven will do, it is almost as if a son must be sought from out of the created order [Interestingly the Chronicler, for his own reason numbers David as the perfect Seventh son of Jesse] For all David is a Son of Jesse it is showed that in a sense he is something other. And so finally in that lineage comes one 'the son so it was thought of Joseph'
In our own lineage and culture we seldom think of ourselves as of the root of many generations - old faded photographs from merely three or four generations ago are voiceless reminders of those from whom we have come, yet they are strangers to us. We know little of their lives and there is little or no trace of their words.
Three or four generations, yet it is fourteen generations from Adam to David, fourteen from David to the exile and fourteen from the exile to the Christ. Even in his humanity He is deeply rooted, deeply rooted in a story we are privy to from generation to generation - out of the stump of Jesse comes the Saviour - known and yet unknown - the Root of Jesse. Here apart from the most powerful reminder of the significance of ancestry, those of us who are not of this earthly line are once more reminded, if we have ears to hear, that we are grafted into the most well attested lineage known to humanity -
He is The Root of Jesse.
He is The Ancient of Days.
O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.
O Come, O Come Emmanuel
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