Scripture Text: Isaiah 7: 10-17

¹⁰Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ¹¹Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. ¹²But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test. ¹³Then Isaiah said: “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? ¹⁴Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. ¹⁵He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. ¹⁶For 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.

¹⁷The Lord will bring on you and on 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.”

During this season of Advent this year, we have read texts that get louder and louder with prophetic messages of what is to come.  This is the thing of which Christmas’s are made.  This one is no different.  I will tell you, though, that this is not usually considered the easiest scripture passage to talk about.  So, it should be noted that this is not even in this year’s lectionary assignments and I STILL chose it!

So, in this passage, we read of the signs and wonders that were shown to the House of David.  “Here, listen people, there is a young woman with child.  She shall bear a son and the world will change.”  That’s essentially what it says.  As Christians, we often read this as a prophetic sign of what will come, a prophet’s vision of the coming of Christ, Immanuel.  But, read it again.  This is in the present tense.  The young woman IS with child.  (as in already) So, which is it?  Is it a child born immediately after this writing or are we talking about the birth of Jesus?  After all, the writer known as Matthew depicted it differently.  Is it then or is it later? 

The sign is a child.  The child’s name, Immanuel (or “God with us”) reinforces the divine promise to deliver the people from sure demise.  The child is born of a young woman, the Hebrew “almah”, which means a young woman of marriageable age.  Many scholars think that the young woman may have been Ahaz’s wife and her son the future king Hezekiah. If the author had wanted to depict the woman as a virgin, the word “betulah” would have been used.  But in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word was translated as “parthenos” or “virgin”.  So, here’s the deal.  At the risk of blowing your whole view of prophecies about the coming Christ out of the water, so to speak, this passage in its purest form is not about Jesus.  It’s an account of a promise made to a people in 8^th century BCE that find themselves in the dangerous position of being situated between two warring factions.  Caught between Judah and Assyria, they were afraid.  So, the prophet Isaiah delivers these words.  Essentially, the prophet is telling the people that God is with them, that God will save them, that their enemies will be thwarted, that a child will be born who will become the ruler they need.

Fast forward to the first century after the birth of Christ.  The writer we know as Matthew, who most think was a very devout (and probably educated) Jew, reiterates these well-known words in the first chapter:

²²All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:  ²³ ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ 

For the writer of Matthew’s Gospel, the birth of Jesus was the coming of God into the world, Emmanuel, God with us.  I’m not convinced that he actually understood the original verse as a prophecy of Jesus’ birth.  I think it was more that he finally understood the meaning of Immanuel.  He finally grasped the meaning of what he had always been taught, what he had always knew.  He finally understood what it meant for God to be with us.  And then all those translators that came after that capitalized on that notion, perhaps in an effort to explain the unexplainable, to rid the text of the ambiguities that were probably meant to be there in the first place.

So, which is it?  Is it a virgin or a young woman?  Is it talking about Hezekiah or Jesus?  Is it what the writer known as Isaiah probably wrote or what the writer known as Matthew assumed or what the later redactors translated?  Yes.  All of the above.  The text and, indeed, the whole Bible is ambiguous at best.  Who are we kidding?  Faith is ambiguous.  It encompasses surety and doubt, light and darkness, life and death.  I don’t really get wrapped up in what “really” happened.  It doesn’t bother me if this is actually talking about Hezekiah.  But it was part of the Matthean writer’s tradition.  It meant something to him.  Somewhere in the words, in the text of his faith, he saw God.  He felt God.  To him, it meant Immanuel.  And so, what better way to depict the first century nativity story that we love?  The coming of God WAS foretold–over and over and over again–through sacred stories told and shared by a waiting people.  It continues to be told, the story of God who breathed Creation into being, who entered the very Creation that held the God-breath, and who comes into each of our lives toward the glorious fulfillment of all that was meant to be.

I don’t think that God ever intended to lay it all out for us like some sort of lesson for us to memorize.  God doesn’t call us to have it all figured out but rather to live it, to open our eyes to all the signs and wonders of the world, to all the ways that God walks with us, to all the ways that God calls us to follow, to become.  All of the above, the obvious and the ambiguous, are part of the Truth that God reveals (whether or not our human minds can fathom it as “true”).  The Scriptures are not an historic account of the world.  Oh, they have those echoes because the context in which they were set and written was indeed the world.  But the Scriptures are the story of God, a God who has always been with us, a God who is with us even now, a God who will come in final and promised glory when the world is finally swept in to that peaceable kingdom.

We are about to begin our journey to Bethlehem.  It is a road that is filled with ambiguities–loss and finding, sorrow and joy, fear and assurance, doubts and fears, a manger and a cross.  But along the way are signs of the God who is always with us, Immanuel, who carries us from moment to moment and from eon to eon with the promise of new life.  The Season of Advent is one that takes time and sort of muddles it.  We are swept into the past, the present, and the future, all at once. Then it happens again–over and over and over again. Time becomes merely a marker that we might sort of know where we are.  But wherever we stand, God has always been with us, God is with us now, and God will be with us forever.  That is Immanuel, God with us.  Let us go and see this thing that the Lord has made known.

If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into [God’s] superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely close-hugged truths…we have misunderstood the words of Christianity. (Karl Rahner)

On prisoners of darkness the sun begins to rise, the dawning of forgiveness upon the sinner’s eyes, to guide the feet of pilgrims along the paths of peace, O bless our God and Savior with songs that never cease. (Michael Perry)

Lyrics: “The Handing Over Time”, by Carrie Newcomer

The creek beds dries and then it fills
The shadows lengthen as shadows will
The last wild roses go to seed
The summer birds they take their leave
As the light goes golden golden

Here we are here I am
Here we stand in the handing over time
All that shines all that rusts
In the light and borrowed dust
It all comes round and round again

Curtains of leaves drift away
The fields are filled with wheels of hay
The yellow finches fade to gray
At least the ones who choose to stay
As the light goes golden, golden

Here we are here I am
Here we stand in the handing over time
All that shines all that rusts
In the light and borrowed dust
It all comes round and round again

Something fine and true and deep
Happened when I was asleep
Something there right in my palm
It was here and then it’s gone

The creek bed dries and then it fills
The shadows lengthen as shadows will
As the light goes golden golden

Here we are here I am
Here we stand in the handing over time
All that shines all that rusts
In the light and borrowed dust
It all comes round and round again

Grace and Peace,

Shelli