Isaiah 7: 10-17 & Matthew 1: 18-25
Fourth Sunday of Advent/ 22nd
December 2013
Three
weeks ago we began the season of Advent with the words of the British Indian
novelist Salman Rushdie describing the work of the poet. Rushdie said, “A poet’s work is to name the
unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world
and stop it from falling asleep.”
Throughout Advent we’ve been comparing the work of the poet with the
work of the prophet, thus providing us new ears to hear the prophetic words of
Isaiah. This approach was inspired by
the work of Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann who encourages us to think
of prophets as poets. (It’s fitting that
this morning on Krista Tippett’s program “On Being” I heard her interview with
Brueggemann talking about the prophetic tradition as poetry.)
A poet helps us to see what we often
can’t see on our own. A poet helps us to
reframe the way we look at the world, ourselves, even God. Through the use of metaphor and symbol,
stretching the limits of language, demonstrating the power of language, a poet
pushes us deeper into reality and helps us come awake. Brueggemann says the prophet warns against “narcotization”
in our culture, that is, every “narcotic” that tries to lull us to sleep.
We can very easily substitute poet with prophet in Rushdie’s definition, for a prophet names the
unnamable, points at frauds, takes sides, starts arguments, shapes the world
and stops it from falling asleep. Not
surprisingly, we’re reluctant to hear what the prophet has to say. But we need to hear from the prophets, these
poets who help us to see, these poets who help us to image the future that God is eager to bring. These prophets offer warning, to be sure, but
overall they offer hope, hope in the new thing that God is doing and will
do—and that’s why we need to be awake.
We find it here in Isaiah 7, probably
written by the prophet himself. With an extraordinary
imaginative reach Isaiah envisions a promising future for Judah, even though he
knows that the Assyrian Empire is almost at the gates of Jerusalem. King Ahaz is in a panic, he’s unable to trust
in Yahweh. It’s almost a comical scene painted here. God speaks to Ahaz and says, “Ask a sign of
me your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven” (Is. 7:11) In other
words, God says: Ask away, Ahaz. Ask big. What kind of sign do you need to calm your
nerves? Be bold. But Ahaz replies,
“I will not ask and I will not put the LORD to the test” (Is. 7:12). Ahaz is a bit of a coward; his god is too
small, he’s afraid to risk trusting in God’s faithfulness. He will not risk being disappointed. It’s as if Ahaz can’t quite trust God. So, Isaiah steps in, and turns away from Ahaz
and speaks to the people, “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for
you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also?” (Is. 7:13). If you’re not going to ask for a sign, then
God will provide the sign, a sign that demonstrates Yahweh’s faithfulness to
the people.
“Look, the young woman is with child
and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (Is. 7:14). That’s the good news. Now here comes the not-so-good news. “He shall eat curds and honey by the time he
knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the
evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will
be deserted” (Is. 7:14). The reference to the birth of the child offers temporary
assurance for Judah (about two years). In the end Ahaz cannot trust in Yahweh.
Ahaz panics because he rules God’s people but forgets the promise; he rules minus
the “God is with us” part of the sign. Will
Judah will be invaded and taken off into captivity, like the Northern Kingdom?[1] Isaiah warns, “The LORD will bring on you and
your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the
day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria” (Is. 7:17). Tidings of great joy? I don’t think so. That day is coming, Isaiah warns.[2]
But within the “bad news” there is still
gospel to be heard here, there’s still good news, a promise. A child will be born who shall be named
Immanuel, meaning, “God is with us.”
Whatever comes, this assurance remains:
God is with us. No matter what the world will throw at you,
this fact remains: God is with us. That’s Israel’s promise.
Now fast-forward almost 700
years. We hear echoes of this text in
Matthew’s gospel. These well-known
references to a woman and a child with a special name, Immanuel, “God is with
us,” fill our pageants, carols, anthems, and oratorios.
Now, I don’t want to mess too much
with tradition here, but it’s important to lift up something here. In the long history of the Church it’s often
assumed that when Isaiah refers to this woman who will bear a child that he’s talking
about Mary; and that when Isaiah gives us the name of this child, that he’s
foretelling the birth of Jesus. We read
it that way because that’s how Matthew describes it. But that’s probably not the way Isaiah meant
it. Matthew actually gets the original reference, in Isaiah, wrong. And by
noting this we quickly come up against the “tradition,” facing a major problem
with translation, as well as an enormously complex theological quandary. And this is when Christmas pageant directors begin
to panic and start to get nervous because we’re starting to veer off-script!
Listen to the Isaiah text again,
“Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him
Immanuel.” The Hebrew there makes no
reference to the woman’s status as a virgin.
Why? Because it’s not
important. Neither is her name important,
apparently; she’s anonymous. The Hebrew
is “young woman” (‘almâ), meaning a
woman of marriageable age, meaning very young woman, a teenager. What we need to remember is that centuries
after Isaiah, after Alexander the Great’s (356-323) conquest of Jerusalem in 332
BC, which then led to the Hellenization of Jewish culture, the Hebrew
Scriptures were translated into Greek; this version of the Hebrew text was known
as the Septuagint. The Hebrew word ‘almâ, young woman, was translated in the
Septuagint as parthenos, the Greek
word for virgin. The Greek Septuagint served as the basis for the
much later Latin translation called the Vulgate (in the late 4th
century AD). Now, from reading Matthew
it’s obvious that he’s quoting from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the
Hebrew Scriptures, because he quotes the prophet as saying, “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel.” Even
the spelling of Emmanuel, with an “E” in Matthew, reflects a Greek influence. In time, the Church subsequently developed a
very complex theology around the virginity of Mary as necessary for the birth
of God’s Son. It made it’s way into the creeds and today the virgin birth
remains one of the pillars of Christian orthodoxy and at the center of our
Christmas pageants and carols. Now, I’m not saying Matthew got the virgin birth
wrong. Maybe the Church got it wrong. (Did I just say that the Church got it
wrong? Okay, maybe I am saying that—or maybe got some of it wrong or placed too
much emphasis on this part of the story.)
Isaiah’s point is this: pay attention to the child’s name. That’s
what matters.
Matthew’s birth narrative leads us
to the same conclusion: pay attention to the child’s name. That’s what matters.
For the gospel is there in the
meaning of his name, a name that tells us who
this child is. But, more significant
still, this child’s name, tells us something about God: God is with us. That’s the
point!
Stanley Hauerwas, one of the leading
theologians of our age, a Methodist who teaches at Duke Divinity School, says,
“Too often those who worry about whether we are required to believe in the
virgin birth do so assuming they are being asked to believe something for which
there is no evidence. But Matthew is
telling the story of the God who refuses to abandon us—and even becomes one of
us that we might be redeemed. Virgin births
are not surprising given that this is the God who has created us without us, …who
will not save us without us. What the
Father does through the Spirit to conceive Mary’s child is not something
different than what God does through creation.
God does not need to intervene in creation, because God has never been
absent from creation. Creation is not
‘back there,’ [in Genesis], but is God’s ongoing love of all he has willed and
continues to will to exist.”[3]
Hauerwas is spot-on when he then makes this claim: “What should startle us, what should stun is, is not that Mary is a
virgin but that God refuses to abandon us.”[4]
God refuses to abandon us. Whether God
sends us off into exile in Babylon, the good news is that God does not abandon
us; or, when we send ourselves to “Babylon” in self-imposed exile from God, the
good news is that God does not abandon us. God
is with us. And cannot but be present.
The central claim of Advent and
Christmas is this: God is with us. God wants to be with us. This has always been the case, long before
Jesus came along. But with his birth there’s
no avoiding the truth, there’s no running from this claim, there’s no missing
this memo. God wants to be with you and
me. In the face of Jesus we see God’s gracious
intent, which was there all along, an awareness that took humanity several
hundred years to fathom before Jesus arrived—and in 2,000 years we’ve yet to
fully fathom the message of Christ’s nativity: that God wants to be near
us. In love, God wants to come down and
come in, right into flesh, right into our hearts, down deep into our psyches, into
the darkest reaches of our souls, to live there
with us and for us. In love, God wants
to enter into our sin, enter into our pain and our grief. In love, God wants to dwell fully in our
anxieties and our fears, wants to carry our burdens and the weight of our
sorrow. In love, God wants to take up
residence in us, with us, so that we might share in God’s glory, God’s grace,
God’s joy.
The contemporary poet Maya Angelou
said it beautifully, “Love knows no barrier.
It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its
destination, full of hope.”
Arrives…in
us – not just some of us, but in humanity.
Not just a portion of humanity, but all of it. Whether we think we deserve it or not, God is
with us. For Love knows no barrier. It jumps hurdles and leaps fences and
penetrates the defensive walls of our egos in order to arrive at its
destination, full of hope. This is the message that needs to penetrate
the walls of our hearts. For there are
far too many people within the church and beyond its walls who can’t quite
accept the fact that the birth we celebrate is for them, for us, that it’s
really our birth too. There are so many
people who think they are beyond hope, that they can’t escape their past. They might find it easier to accept others,
but they can’t accept themselves, people who can’t extend the same mercy to
themselves that they extend to their pets.
If that’s you, sometimes or all the time, perhaps this Christmas will be
the year you receive the gift designed for you long before you were born: that
you might believe—more than believe, know,
feel, through and through, that right
now, God is with you.
Or maybe there’s someone you know,
someone in your family, someone you’re going to see this week who needs to know
this, really know it. Perhaps God is calling you to be God’s prophet, to be God’s poet, to help him, help her see what he or she can’t see: that he
or she is worthy of God’s love, that God is with her, with him.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we
find these words: “For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for
good works, which God prepared before hand to be our way of way of life”
(Ephesians 2:10). “For we are what he
has made us….” The Greek here for
“made,” “to make” is poema (poivhma). For we are God’s poema…poem, created in Christ Jesus for good works. That’s what his
birth means and yields for us—the knowledge that we are God’s poems. We all need help remembering this, really
knowing this. Perhaps you know someone
who needs to know it too.
God doesn’t want to be aloof, apart, separate. God wants to come close, to share our breath,
our hopes and dreams, to give us life, to awaken us and call us to life—why?—so
that our lives can properly be given for the world, for our neighbor. For, like the child we celebrate this season,
none of us were born for ourselves, to do whatever we want to, to pursue of own
pursuits; like this child, we were created to reveal the glory of God and reflect
that glory, reflect that light with our lives. We were created to be poems, poems, poems that transfigure the
way we see ourselves, the world, and God, and then as poets help others to see
themselves, the world, and even God in a new light, with new eyes. That’s the
gift we continue to give to the world
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 1-39 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 70-72.
[3] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew.(Grand Rapids: Brazos Press,
2006), 34.
[4]Hauerwas, 34. Emphasis
mine.
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