Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus

Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus

“A savior is born for us,” Martin Luther preached on Christmas Day in 1534. “That really climaxes all. . . . That is the chief point and greatest reason why we ought to be joyful. . . . Those people are lost who neither know nor have heard this. . . . For these words melt heaven and earth together, make death into sugar, and turn all ills, of which there are plenty, into delectable wine.”^a

The incarnation changes everything.

One evening deep into Advent, I found myself in a room so filled with longing I thought the walls might burst. So full, with only eight souls’ collected hopes and dreams and fears. There has never been a time that the world has not ached for a Redeemer, and never a time when I myself have not needed one. That God, in love, sent just what was needed is beyond my wildest imagination. And because he has come, has lived, has suffered, died, and risen again, we may keep on bringing to our long-expected Jesus “the hopes and fears of all the years.” He expects them. He was made for this.

Slipping on humanity like a coat

You left the rarest air that is

and settled here.

Never mind the glory once laid by—

You plunged into a world bereft of majesty

and stayed to woo us into life again.

Heaven’s purest hope contained

in flesh put on to die:

Your dwelling changes nothing more than me.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. You have multiplied the nation; you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil. For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.

Isaiah 9:2-4, ESV

^a Eugene F. A. Klug, ed., Sermons of Martin Luther: The House Postils (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996), 1:116.