Oh, Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, hope of the nations and savior of the peoples, come save us, Lord our God!
Christ is the Emmanuel, the God with us, the God who became man to always be next to men. For Saint Augustine the incarnation is the greatest act of mercy of Christ. His love is reflected in the fact that he wanted assume human nature to save men:
“Nevertheless, God inclines his ear toward us, placing his mercy on us. Is there any greater mercy than giving us his only Son not only for that he would live with us, but that he would die for us? (Commentary on the psalm 30, 2, 1, 7)
He is, then, the Emmanuel for love, and becomes the companion of humanity for all the eternity. At Christmas we celebrate mainly this, that Christ has become man, that he has assumed a human nature similar to ours in everything, except sin.
However, as Saint Augustine reminds us, the incarnation of Christ, by which becomes Emmanuel, it is the first step of redemption. Christ becomes man to redeem men, because in the same line as Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the Bishop of Hippo maintains that what Christ did not assume has not been redeemed:
“[Christ] showed himself among men with the nature of a true man, since it was convenient for him to take the nature that was to be liberated” (True Religion 16,30).
In the Confessions he reminds us how the incarnation of Christ made him realize the arrogance of the Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophers, who spoke about many things similar to the gospel message, but they could not bear the idea of incarnation of the Word. Therefore, the fact that Christ had become man to be the Emmanuel is not only an act of love, but also an example of humility and abasement, which should lead all men to lay down their own pride and imitate the humility of Christ:
“Because he had already begun to want to appear wise, full of my punishment, and he did not cry, before I was inflated with science. But where was that charity that he builds on the foundation of humility, which is Christ Jesus?” (Confessions 7, 26).
For Saint Augustine, the fact that Christ is the Emmanuel means that the Lord himself, pitying human beings and the misery of their sins, he descended from heaven to redeem men. That is why for Saint Augustine the incarnation can be understood with a spiritual reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10, 25-37).
The Good Samaritan is Christ, since, just as the Good Samaritan came down from Jerusalem to Jericho, Christ has descended from heaven to earth. Furthermore, Saint Augustine interprets exegetically the name of Samaritan as the “custodian.” Christ is really the Custodian of our souls.
On the other hand, just as the man in the parable lay wounded on the road, in the same way, the human being lay prostrate for his own sins and in need of divine help. The horse on which the Good Samaritan places the wounded man to taking it to the inn is nothing other than the flesh of Christ. The Redeemer himself placed the sins of men on their own bodies to purify them in the oblation of his own body on the cross.
The inn to which the Good Samaritan took the wounded man is the Church, where this must heal. The host is the apostle Paul, as a synecdoche of the Scriptures, that contain medicines to heal our illnesses and our sins.
