Advent 4, Year A
Psalm 80
OT Reading: Isaiah 7.10-16
Gospel : Matthew 1.18-25
Immanuel, God With Us.
With this morning’s readings the season of Advent turns towards Christmas. In Isaiah we read: Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall call him Immanuel. In his gospel, Matthew cites this verse, adding an explanation of Immanuel – God with Us – for he shall save his people from their sins. It’s all very neat and tidy. Matthew reflects the Early Church’s understanding of Isaiah’s prophecy, and it has become for us a familiar part of the foreshadowing of the Christmas story.
But what did Isaiah really have in mind? That is much harder to determine. Jerusalem and the small city-state of Judah, under threat from Ephraim, the northern kingdom of Israel, had considered an alliance with the rulers of Damascus, but King Ahaz – against Isaiah’s advice – had chosen to seek help and protection from the more powerful Assyrians to the east. As a result Israel had become a vassal of Assyria. In our reading Ahaz is looking for a way out of the trap into which he has fallen, but he is unwilling to ask for a sign from the Lord, and Isaiah comes close to losing patience with him. Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you will weary my God also? The prophet’s words sound like a threat, so it is really rather surprising that when the Lord gives Ahaz the sign that he has been reluctant to ask for, it turns out to be a promise:
Sometimes, when we have made a complete mess of our world, testing God’s patience to the limit, God in his mercy responds not with the angry judgment we deserve but with a potent sign of his love.
Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.
But who is this young woman? Construing the text in Isaiah’s historical context, she might have been King Ahaz’ queen, or perhaps the prophet’s own wife? The text which has come down to us is irretrievably corrupt. But just as we are in danger of sinking into this quagmire of uncertainty, we are suddenly lifted clear by a totally unexpected shaft of inspiration. In the comfortingly familiar words of the King James Bible, which Handel used as the script for Messiah, we read: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name: Immanuel GOD WITH US.’
Our gospel reading takes us into a different world where people of faith, shepherds and wise men, the village carpenter and his pregnant youg fiancee stand ready to play their part in the great drama of our salvation. When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, she was puzzled enough to ask ‘How can this be?’, but Gabriel confirmed her destiny, and she responded: ‘Be it
unto me according to thy word.’ Now it’s Joseph’s turn to believe the story which Mary must have had deep wells of love and trust to share with him, when it is confirmed by the angel in his own dream that Mary’s child is from the Holy Spirit. Loving and trusting God and one another, Mary and Joseph have the quiet courage to go ahead with their marriage, embracing the mystery of their improbable destiny.
We don’t very often think about the nature of the love which surrounded Jesus at his birth. But the mystery of the incarnation bears witness not only to the love and trust which Mary and Joseph must have had for one another, for God, and for the child entrusted to their care, but also to the love which God must have experienced in Himself in determining to come to earth in human form, and to do so not as a, mighty warrior or a powerful king, but as a baby, totally dependent on the loving care of a human family. How could the God whose Almighty Word created all things, be content to reduce Himself to the form of a tiny, helpless, new-born baby, unable to speak a single word? No doubt Mary and Joseph were chosen to be his human parents because they were good, loving people with a profound faith in the loving purposes of God, but it was still a huge step for the God of all creation to take.
We have just celebrated the feast of Christ the King. We believe in God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. In the stained glass window above our altar, where we see Jesus as a young man with a gentle smile, he holds in his hand an orb, the symbol of all earthly and heavenly power and authority. Yet God is Love, as we read in the wonderful epistles attributed to St John (I John 4.16). God doesn’t just DO Love, God IS Love. And we know, even from our own limited and imperfect experience of what it means to love and to be loved, we know that love makes us vulnerable to the needs and desires of the other. That same vulnerability lies at the heart of the Love which God has for each one of us; and the baby in the manger is a sign of that utter vulnerability, which God embraced in coming to earth in human form. Jesus would grow up to give full and complete expression to the profound vulnerability of God’s love by accepting an excruciating death at the hands of cruel men and women. Cross and crucifixion are central to our understanding of God’s love. But at this season the helpless baby, whom Mary and Joseph would gently lay to rest in a makeshift manger, because there was no room for them at the inn, that helpless baby is an icon, a true picture, of the profound vulnerability of that love which is at the very heart of God.
Immanuel, God With Us. As we prepare to kneel with shepherds and wise men in the stable at Bethlehem, we too should be ready to embrace – as God has done in Jesus – the vulnerability that goes with the territory of love.