Words that once spoke of ancient hope now land in a world shaped by war and grief. What does it mean to sing “Israel” in Advent in 2025?

“O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”

For most Christian congregations, this Advent hymn is a gentle invocation of hope, sung in candlelight as the year winds down. Yet in 2025, those lines no longer sit comfortably inside the warm glow of liturgy. They carry another resonance, one shaped not by ancient longing but by the daily news. When the word “Israel” is sung now, it echoes across a political landscape thick with grief, anger, and accusation.

The hymn remains the same, but the world hearing it has changed.

The tension arises because biblical “Israel” occupies a space that is both historical and symbolic, both political and theological. The plea to “ransom captive Israel” originally voiced the longing of a people oppressed under empire, yearning for liberation. It was a cry for justice before it was ever a hymn. But when those same words are sung today, they can be heard through radically different filters. Some hear the spiritual Israel of Scripture. Others hear the modern nation-state. And others, especially Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians hear a word that seems to exclude their own story or sanctify their suffering.

This is the problem: the biblical word “Israel” has become morally entangled in a world that no longer allows it to remain abstract.

It would be convenient to solve this by drawing a bright line: biblical Israel on one side, the modern state on the other. There is truth in that distinction. But it is also insufficient. For Jewish communities, the continuity between scripture, memory, trauma, and modern statehood is not an optional interpretive stance but a lived reality. To treat “Israel” as purely spiritual can sound like a theological clean-up exercise that ignores Jewish history and the insecurity that still shapes Jewish life.

Yet the opposite impulse, collapsing the two Israels into one is equally unsatisfactory. With the death of Walter Brueggemann just months ago, we have lost a voice who insistently reminded the Church that the land of the Bible is a summons to justice, not a licence for political possession. When biblical language is used to buttress political sovereignty or justify dispossession, faith becomes an accessory to power. That, too, is a betrayal of the text. The Israel of Isaiah, the psalms, and the gospel nativity is not a state with borders and armies. It is a people summoned to justice, repeatedly judged for failing it, and defined not by dominance but by vulnerability. To turn that narrative into a divine endorsement of modern state policy is to empty it of its moral force.

So the dilemma persists. Christians sing the Advent hymn not intending to make a political claim, yet the claim is often heard anyway. A phrase once rooted in ancient liberation becomes freighted with modern conflict. And silence is not an option: the moral pain surrounding Israel-Palestine in 2025 is too great to pretend that language is neutral.

This means Christians need a more careful approach, not a defensive one, not a partisan one, but a morally attentive one. It is possible to affirm the biblical story without conscripting it into modern nationalism. It is possible to recognise Jewish attachment to land without denying Palestinian suffering. It is possible to sing “O come, Emmanuel” while acknowledging that many of those who hear the word “Israel” today hear it as a wound.

The task is not to purify the hymn or to rewrite scripture. It is to take responsibility for how biblical language functions in a traumatised world. That involves naming complexity rather than rushing past it. It involves recognising that a word can mean hope to one community and harm to another and refusing to treat either reaction as disposable.

The moral challenge for Christians in 2025 is not to choose between Israel as Bible or Israel as state. It is to resist the temptation of oversimplification. Advent tells of a God who comes into the world not through power but through vulnerability. If we are to speak the word “Israel” with integrity, it must be with the same humility aware of the histories it touches, the wounds it opens, and the people who live within its shadow