Oh! Adonai, Shepherd of the house of Israel, you appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and on Sinai, you gave him your commandments; come free us with the power of your arm!
The second antiphon of the “O” has a deep biblical or Hebrew flavor. The Jewish people avoided pronouncing the name of God, a sacred name (the so-called tetragrammaton). They used other expressions, such as Adonai, which means “my Lord.”
To approach the mystery of Christmas is to recognize that Christ is the Lord of our lives and must guide and govern our existence. St. Augustine understood that human beings must choose to recognize God as the Lord of our life or turn their back on Him and choose the creatures of this world. In his book “The City of God,” St. Augustine reminds us, “Two loves have given rise to two cities. The love of self to the point of rejecting God has given rise to the earthly city, and the love of God to the point of self-contempt has given rise to the city of God” (14:28).
After his conversion, St. Augustine meditated on the dimension of Christ as the Lord of his life. He did so in the footsteps of St. Paul, who uses the Greek word Kyrios, which means the owner and the one with unlimited power over all who belong to him. St. Augustine recognizes that the Christian life implies conversion of heart, recognizing Christ’s lordship, and being docile to his will, for it is this will of God that leads to eternal life.
That is why, in one of his first works, Saint Augustine expresses these ideas with a phrase that is more appropriate to Roman law than to a theological vocabulary, but which, in summary, comes to say the same thing, namely, that Saint Augustine wishes to submit his life and his destiny to the will of God. That is why he says that he desires to be under the jurisdiction of God, of Christ.
To fully understand the phrase we will offer below, it is necessary to consider that the normal status of every citizen in the Roman Empire could be of two types. To be independent, and therefore to be sui iuris, or else to depend on the authority of another person, and to be alieni iuris. In his conversion, St. Augustine recognizes that, up to that moment, he had lived independently of Christ, which led him down paths of estrangement from God, of sin and unhappiness. That is why he wants to submit to the authority of Christ, that is, to renounce his harmful freedom or rather licentiousness, to obey the law of charity in Christ, and to be subject for love to his Lord (St. Augustine says: “to belong to your jurisdiction”). This is how he expresses it beautifully in Soliloquies 1:5:
“Now I love you alone; I only follow you and seek; I only will to serve you because you alone justly rule; I want to belong to your jurisdiction. Command and command, I pray you, what you will, but heal my ears to hear your voice; heal and open my eyes to see your signs; banish all ignorance from me, that I may acknowledge you. Let me know where I should look to see you, and I hope to do all you command. Receive, I ask you, your fugitive, Lord, most gracious.”
To recognize Christ as Lord means to allow Christ to grow and for us to diminish (our tendencies, impulses, selfishness), as John the Baptist says in the Gospel according to John (3:30). St. Augustine comments this as follows:
“John is born on the day the days begin to grow shorter; the Lord is born on the day the days begin to lengthen. The former is diminished by the head when he is killed; He, on the other hand, is lifted on a cross. Therefore, as soon as the prophecy personified in John pointed the finger as already present to Him who foretold that He was to come from the beginning of humankind, the preaching of the Kingdom of God began to diminish and increase from that time. This is also why John baptized for penance: for the old life is measured until penance, and from then on the new life begins” (cf. Eighty-Three Miscellaneous Questions, 58, 1).
In these final days of Advent, may we open our hearts to Christ and recognize him as our Adonai, as our Lord, as the one who comes to save us, to set us free, and to lead us to eternal happiness.
