Sermon Year A, Advent 4
"Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel, which means 'God is with us.'"
Our scripture readings today, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, are all entwined with this prophecy, this promise, of a birth that means God is with us, a birth that signifies the very presence of God in the midst of human life. We hear the prophecy in its original context in Isaiah, and we hear it again in an interpreted context in Matthew. The whole story today, the whole gearing-things-up-for-the-Feast-of-the-Nativity, hinges on this thread of prophetic promise.
And we all know what the prophecy means, right? Approximately seven hundred years before it happened, Isaiah foresaw, Isaiah predicted, the birth of Jesus, so that when it happened, Joseph and Mary and Matthew and everybody else could understand what was going on.
Or maybe not. We today like to think that prophecy in the Bible is a simple matter of predicting an event and then the event happening--that prophecy works kind of like peeking ahead in the storybook so that you know what's going to happen next. But as with so many things in scripture, prophecy is not quite so simple as that--the relationship between prophecy and event turns out to be deeper, stranger, more interesting, and more full of God's surprising grace than we had thought.
Isaiah's prophecy of a woman bearing a child named Immanuel was originally given to King Ahaz of Jerusalem to calm his fears about a possible invasion. Two kingdoms to the north of Judah--Syria and Israel--were making an alliance, they were ganging up to threaten Jerusalem, and Ahaz was afraid they'd invade and he would not be able to stop them. So God sent Isaiah to promise Ahaz that God would not abandon them, that God would be with them. And the sign of that promise would be that a young woman would bear a child, and would give him the symbolic name "God is with us," and by the time the child was old enough to go from milk to baby food--"curds and honey"--Syria and Israel would no longer be a threat to Jerusalem. Originally that's all the prophecy meant. There was no hint of anything royal or miraculous about this birth. The Hebrew word for "young woman," almah, does not necessarily mean "virgin" in the technical way we use the word, so the birth wouldn't have been considered a miracle. And the "young woman" is never identified, so there's nothing to indicate the baby would be of the royal house or the heir to David's throne. At first, all the prophecy meant was a promise that by the time a woman could bear and wean a child, the two kingdoms threatening Jerusalem would cease to be a threat.
And that promise was fulfilled. In just a few years, the armies of the Assyrian Empire came and changed the whole balance of power in the region, and Syria and Israel were no longer a threat. So the prophecy and the event matched up, sort of, and that was the end of the story.
Except that it wasn't quite the end. You see, once something has become meaningful, it's hard to stop seeing meaning in it. The promise "God is with us" seemed to later generations too significant to have been exhausted with Ahaz's relief at not being invaded. People after Ahaz's time kept reading the Book of Isaiah, and they kept seeing the prophecy of Immanuel, and they kept thinking there had to be more to the story yet to come. Gradually, over time, more and more meaning got added to the Immanuel prophecy.
When the People were taken into Exile in Babylon almost 600 years before Jesus, they discovered "God is with us" meant to them that God would not abandon them even when they were not living in God's land, with God's Temple, under God's anointed king.
When the People returned from Exile and started rebuilding Jerusalem nearly 500 years before Jesus, "God is with us" meant to them a promise that God would restore the Davidic line to the throne in a new kingdom.
When Judah never did regain its own royal line, but got absorbed by one empire after another, the promise "God is with us" was given a new meaning: it was taken up into the emerging hope for a Messiah--that is, the hope for an heir to David's throne who would be more than just a human king, but would be a divine king as well, someone who would bring the peaceable kingdom and the sharing of God's Torah, God's Way, with the entire world, which the People believed was God's ultimate will for them. The prophecy of Immanuel got connected to the hope for the Messiah, so people began to think of the birth of this child as something that would be royal, something that would be miraculous. About 150 years before Jesus the Book of Isaiah was translated into Greek, and when the translators got to the verse about a young woman conceiving and bearing the child Immanuel, the word they used for "young woman" was parthenos, which does mean "virgin" in our modern sense of the word. Those Greek translators of Isaiah clearly thought the birth of Immanuel was to be miraculous, that the child would be, not just symbolically but literally, "God with us," a "divine man." That's the meaning the prophecy had for the Jewish people at the time Mary and Joseph were engaged to be married.
At each successive stage of its history, people saw new layers of meaning in the prophecy, new ways to connect the promise that God would be with them to the situations and needs they had in their immediate lives. The prophecy was "fulfilled" anew each time someone saw a connection between God's promise and their need.
And Matthew does the same thing when he sees yet a new layer of meaning in the connection between "God is with us" and the birth of Jesus. What Matthew and other disciples experienced in the adult ministry of Jesus was the living God present in a human life, God being with us by becoming one of us, an intimacy between humanity and divinity that went far beyond anything they'd ever prophesied or predicted before. So when Matthew (or the later disciple using the name "Matthew"), writing the gospel, sat down to think about where this intimacy between divine and human came from, he made the connection between the presence of God and the verse from Isaiah--and the promise "God is with us" was seen to be "fulfilled" in a whole new way. So, writing about the birth of Jesus, Matthew says "All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel."
And the thing is: the prophecy didn't stop being fulfilled with Jesus, either. The meaning of "God is with us" revealed in Jesus, the intimacy of human and divine given in Jesus, was shared by Jesus with his disciples--so that the community of disciples, the Church, to this very day continues to share that divine presence that first came to us in Jesus' life and ministry. The promise "God is with us" is being fulfilled in new and ever-expanding ways in us, through sacrament and worship, through baptism and eucharist, through service and mission, through striving for justice and through living in love. We are "God with us" by the grace of Christ, for the renewing of the world.
So what does that mean to you? If the promise "God is with us" keeps being fulfilled among us in ever-unfolding ways, how does that unfold in your life? What mission in Christ does God have for you? What passion for praying or serving or growing closer to God or loving your neighbor--what passion for Christ fills your heart? Think about it: if the Angel of the Lord came to you right now in a dream or an imagination or a thought and said to you "Do not be afraid: Jesus will live in you, to fulfill the promise 'God is with us' in you"--what would that look like?
Tomorrow we will celebrate Christmas Eve, the beginning of the Feast of the Nativity, the festival of the remembrance of the birth of Jesus. But today, in order to prepare for tomorrow, we ponder the promise "God is with us," and how that promise is fulfilled in Jesus, and how it keeps on being fulfilled in Jesus in us. How will you fulfill that promise as you celebrate the birth of Jesus the Messiah this year?