O Come, O Come, Emmanuel Verse 2

O Come, Thou Wisdom from on high

Who ord'rest all things mightily

To us the path of knowledge show

And teach us in her ways to go.

Rejoice!  Rejoice!  Emmanuel is come to thee, O Israel.

 This verse is particularly strange to read after spending far too much of Thanksgiving break re-watching The Tudors (thank you, otherwise excellent The Creation of Anne Boleyn book, for making me newly curious about that television show).

The fictional (and to all appearances the real) King Henry VIII is forever telling everyone that the natural order is, essentially, that he will be a tyrant and they will like it.  Rebellion, he tells the subjects who protest his shutting of the abbeys, is a sin against God and nature.  To question the king, he tells his court, or God-forbid (literally) insult him!  That is against the natural order and to defy the Word of God.

Oh the things we've done in the name of "preserving God's order".  The things we are still doing.

But when Jesus really did show up and "to us the path of knowledge show and teach us in your ways to go", His message was very different than the natural order set up by any government.  No, Jesus was undoubtedly a radical who recommended an indifference to power, a generosity of wealth, and a sharing of human spirit that look very foreign to the politics currently done in his name.

In fact, these two parts of the verse seem in deeply ironic conflict with one another.  Jesus came down to show us the true way, the path of knowledge and true goodness, and that way was in direct contrast to the established order.  I imagine, especially from the perspective of eternity, Jesus is far more likely to agree with Mosca Mye than any current politician:

The heart of being a radical isn't about knowing all the right books; it's not about kings over the sea or the Parliament in the capital.  It's...looking at the things around you and seeing the things that make you sick to your stomach with anger.  The things there's no point fussing about because that's just the way the world is and always was and always will be.  And then it means getting good and angry about it anyway, and kickin' up a hurricane.  Because nothing is writ across the sky to say the world must be this way.  A tree can grow two hundred years, and look like it'll last a thousand more -- but when lightning strikes at last, it burns, Mr. Appleton.

Nothing is writ across the sky to say that current order is sacred.  That's us doing that.  Those of us with too much of a stake (even if we haven't the ultimate stake) in the status quo making our own insecurities sacred.

Perhaps the hardest lesson Jesus gave us was that the status quo is not our god.  Not the things that it is unthinkable to truly question.  And not always in revolutionary ways.  Sometimes in dismissing them.  After all, it was accepted Jewish belief that God would send a prophet to deliver them from Rome, but instead Jesus said to deliver unto Caesar what is Caesar's.  Nothing is writ across the skies to say that Jerusalem needed to be a political entity.

The Pharisees are condemned, because nothing is writ across the skies to say that they only can lead the people to greater faith.

Rich men are told to sell all they own, because nothing is writ across the skies to say that we must pursue wealth and power or that they are a determinant of good.

The order of the world isn't writ across the skies by heaven's almighty hand.  We did that.  We forget...because we so seldom have the courage to renegotiate the terms we laid out.  The path of knowledge often runs contrary to the "natural order" -- especially when it exposes that there is no such thing.  And that we must combat the world's ways.

If something about the way the world has always been stands in the way of doing good -- burn down the tree.  The order is ours, not God's, that makes his laws more precious than ours.