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December 22 2019
Fourth Sunday of Advent
The LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying:
Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God;
let it be deep as the netherworld, or high as the sky!
But Ahaz answered, "I will not ask! I will not tempt the LORD!"
Then Isaiah said: Listen, O house of David!
Is it not enough for you to weary people, must you also weary my God?
Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign:
the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.
R. (7c and 10b) Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.
The LORD's are the earth and its fullness;
the world and those who dwell in it.
For he founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.
R. Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.
Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD?
or who may stand in his holy place?
One whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean,
who desires not what is vain.
R. Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.
He shall receive a blessing from the LORD,
a reward from God his savior.
Such is the race that seeks for him,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
R. Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.
Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus,
called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God,
which he promised previously through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,
the gospel about his Son, descended from David according to the flesh,
but established as Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness
through resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Through him we have received the grace of apostleship,
to bring about the obedience of faith,
for the sake of his name, among all the Gentiles,
among whom are you also, who are called to belong to Jesus Christ;
to all the beloved of God in Rome, called to be holy.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.
When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together,
she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.
Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man yet unwilling to expose her to shame,
decided to divorce her quietly.
Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,
"Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins."
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means "God is with us."
When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him
and took his wife into his home.
Let's start with Joseph. Because he was a righteous man he was unwilling to expose Mary to shame. A righteous man? Today we'd say 'a man with a conscience'. Mary had told him she was pregnant, and assured him she'd not been unfaithful, and after days of worry and indecision he concluded he should not tell anyone even though the law demanded he report her crime. He would keep it a secret between the two of them.
This is a strange story to open the gospel with, a man breaking the law, hiding a crime, covering up what he was legally obliged to make public so the girl could be punished, perhaps stoned to death in the village square, and the community cleansed of her sin.
Joseph made that decision in the lonely recesses of his conscience without anyone to share the load. Day and night he thought it through; sometimes clarity seemed to come in sleep. It might have been some innocent dalliance with another teenager down behind the stables. Was it the result of his own urgent closeness on occasion? And then another thought. What if it is of God?
This is a stunning thought: that this may not be an accidental pregnancy from a very common human mistake, but something out of the ordinary. Joseph didn't know anything about how women made babies; only that it happened in them after they lay with a man, as the expression goes. People often said that the Lord had made them fruitful, and Joseph realised it is always God's doing. Making a baby is not like making a table or building a house. When a son is born to a man it is God's greatest gift. Perhaps - it's not unthinkable - this one is a special gift like the ones they talked about in synagogue. His son could be blessed, anointed, with a mission. He could be a fixer (God knows, plenty of things need fixing). What name should they give him? Working around town repairing broken furniture, leaking roofs, farmers' equipment and old tools, Joseph felt like a fixer himself. He liked the name: Jeshuah - God fixes, YHWH saves.
He'd see what Mary thought. If she agrees we'll call him Jeshuah.
Matthew the story-teller captures all this in one short phrase: 'in a dream'. I wonder did Joseph have the comfort of an angel waking him up and saying: Now hear this! Is this the way it really works, or can we say it's like an experience we're all familiar with, an experience of growing awareness, of waking up from sleep with a problem solved? And being a man of conscience he knew the responsibility was still his, whatever decision he came to, even with an angel's voice to encourage him.
*****
Moving on, the gospel writer drops in a reference from the book of Isaiah. It was the fashion in synagogue to be finding links back to the old days, and this one about the sign of a child to be born who would be called Emmanuel was popular with some of the hot-heads: 'God with us! The Lord is on our side. If we fight them now we're bound to win.' But Isaiah had not counselled war but trust and patience, and sure enough, in time that siege was lifted and the armies marched away.
Things might be a little confusing at this point, so we need to look at the original story in the book of Isaiah. The selection in the lectionary gives only part of the picture. Here is the whole episode in the Berean Bible translation:
Then the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go out with your son Shear-jashub to meet Ahaz at the end of the aqueduct that feeds the upper pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field, and say to him: Calm down and be quiet. Do not be afraid or fainthearted over these two smouldering stubs of firewood, over the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and of the son of Remaliah. For Aram, along with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, has plotted your ruin, saying: ‘Let us invade Judah, terrorize it, and divide it among ourselves. Then we can install the son of Tabeal over it as king.’ But this is what the Lord God says:
‘It will not arise; it will not happen... [Verses 8-9 omitted]
Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, “Ask for a sign from the Lord your God, whether from the depths of Sheol or the heights of heaven.”
But Ahaz replied, “I will not ask; I will not test the Lord.”
Then Isaiah said, “Hear now, O house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of men? Will you try the patience of my God as well? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and she will call him Immanuel. By the time he knows enough to reject evil and choose good, he will be eating curds and honey. For before the boy knows enough to reject evil and choose good, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. (https://biblehub.com/bsb/isaiah/7.htm)
Matthew seems to be only interested in the name Immanuel, and leaves out mention of the sign itself, which was this: by the time the boy was two or three years old the armies would have been called away to fight invaders attacking their own countries.
US scripture scholar Bart Erhman explains https://ehrmanblog.org/why-was-jesus-born-of-a-virgin-in-matthew-and-luke/:
The king of Judah is upset because Jerusalem is being laid under siege by two foreign armies. Isaiah tells him not to be upset, because God is going to save the people. Here’s the evidence: “A young woman has conceived and will bear a son.” The reason the boy will be called “God is with us” is because he will be a sign of God’s presence among his people. Before the child is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong (i.e., in a couple of years), the two antagonistic kings will withdraw their troops and Jerusalem will be saved. (Notice: the prediction is not that the woman will conceive as a virgin; in the verse it indicates that she has already conceived. The sign is that her son will not be very old before the political/military disaster is averted).
A few things to explain here. We often imagine a sign given by a prophet is about something happening in the future that would prove something about divine intervention at some point or other. Certainly a sign always points ahead: the road sign tells me where to find the city; the sign outside a shop tells me what I'll find inside; the sign above the theatre tell me what entertainment they're providing. The proof of the sign comes only after I've read it and trusted myself to its promise.
So Isaiah's promise to the king: this new-born baby is your sign and also the measure of how soon the siege will be lifted. It will happen within a couple of years, that is God's promise contained in the boy's name, Immanuel: God is with us.
*****
The lesson for Ahaz, the fundamental lesson for everyone, is that our role is to accept in all humility that God is in charge, that our so-called problems great and small will be fixed and made good by God in God's good time and in God's own way. We've got to learn that by ourselves we can't do it and that doesn't matter, because God is at work since the beginning doing all that needs to be done. There's a terrible irony in this, that it's only in an AA meeting that you see this in action. 'I cannot do this by myself! I rely on a power greater than myself.'
The meaning of virginity too is not about sex but about having a sense of dependency on God where common sense says you must rely only on yourself, and never trust anyone if you can't look them in the eye. Perhaps the scholars who made the Septuagint translation two or three centuries BC had precisely this in mind when they used the Greek parthenos for the Hebrew almah (with perhaps a passing shot at the great pagan shrines to virgin gods who gave birth to men they called 'divine'). At least that's the way Matthew has taken it in drawing attention to the prophet's promise, hinged as it is on the name Immanuel: God on our side.
The key is always this: It is all God's doing. The Lord has taken the initiative - as he always does from the very beginning, and our role is to recognise this, and give up our pig-headed determination to do it by ourselves. Being dependent on God is the foundation of a healthy personal life. To recognise this is our salvation; the same goes for the world at large. Weapons of war have already brought us to the edge of extinction and as our climate changes human relationships are heating up at every level. Where is God in this exploding crisis? Watching and waiting patiently: we've got all we need, and now's the time to use our brains and do right things.
*****
And so at Christmas our world explodes in joy: fundamentally, before and beyond and deep within all the commercialism, the partying, the carols and the cribs, the message is that God is on our side. And the proof that God is with us is in this child, in the man he grew up to be, in the teaching and example he gave, in the way he died and how he is raised up. We even see God with us in Jeshua as in a messenger, or even as in a message that we must absorb, and in taking it in we take in God for the message is God's love that we can trust.
To trust in God does not give us victory automatically. The trust continues right through the experience of defeat: the promise becomes reality as we are raised up again after we've hit the wall of life, or the wall of death. To give up because you phoned the Emergency Line in a crisis and no help came to save you is to miss the point of personal loving trust. It proves not that God does not care or does not exist, but that our approach to life, to death, to suffering, to success and failure is all wrong. Perhaps it takes a lifetime to get this right, but then it's up to us to try and explain it clearly to the younger generations and show them how to really trust, how to really be convinced that God is at our side and is not going anywhere.
From this we might even say we owe it to God to trust. It's what Paul called the obedience of faith.
“We are all united to God but only some of us know it. Most of us deny it and doubt it. It is –just frankly- too good to be true.” (Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance, p.109.5)