Immanuel

Jesus’ final promise to His disciples consummates the covenantal promise of Immanuel: I will be with you, says the one who is “God With Us.”

What is not so obvious in English is the way the Greek depicts this reality in the word order.  The statement begins with the unnecessary and emphatic first-person pronoun, ego , continues with the prepositional phrase “with you” ( meth humon ), and ends with the verb, eimi , which can stand alone as “I am.”  Rendering this in English, we’d get: “I with you (I) am.”

Several things.  First, Jesus is clearly playing with the I am of Sinai, the name of Israel’s God.  Second, Jesus’ presence “encloses” the disciples; they are confident in their mission because Jesus is “with them,” but by the arrangement of the Greek sentence, Jesus is also promising to “surround them.”  The disciples (“you”) are nestled within the I . . . am.  Finally, this is a grammatical depiction of perichoresis.  Having been baptized in the Name, the disciples are incorporated into the I am.

Or, to give this a Barthian twist: By the resurrection, God declares that He will not be “I am” unless He is “I . . . am” with us, with us enclosed within the divine life.  He refuses to be God-without-us, but overcomes death in order to be God-with-us.