But it’s no reason for not implementing as much of the agenda as we can here and now. The New Testament writers believed that Isaiah 35 was in principle fulfilled in Jesus, who brought the ransomed of the Lord back from the Babylon of death itself, opening up the new day whose watchword is ‘Be strong! Don’t be afraid!’ His healings, and his call to a new and joyful holiness, have set up the highway to the true Zion, and he invites all and sundry to follow him along it. Don’t follow the Herods of this world; they are just reeds shaking in the wind (Herod Antipas had chosen a Galilean reed as the symbol on some of his coins). Follow the prophetic pointings of Isaiah and John, and come to the kingdom that transcends them both.
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 7.10–16
Romans 1.1–7
Matthew 1.18–25
We were taught in college, and many repeat in the pulpit, that the word ’almah in Isaiah 7.14 doesn’t mean ‘virgin’, but ‘young woman’. It’s not that easy, actually: the word is rare, and the other uses, all compatible with virginity, don’t finally settle the issue. Nor does the more common word bethulah necessarily mean ‘virgin’. In Genesis 24.16 Rebekah is described as ‘a bethulah, neither had any man known her’. The Greek translation of Isaiah 7.14, which makes it unambiguously ‘virgin’, is not necessarily changing the original meaning, simply making things more explicit.
Why does all this matter (as it clearly does, considering how frequently the question is raised – indeed, one sometimes gets the impression that ’almah is the only Hebrew word some people know, and even that they get wrong)? Is it to suggest that Matthew (or his source) has invented the story of Mary’s virginal conception in order to cook up pseudo-‘events’ that just happen to ‘fit’ or ‘fulfil’ prophecy? Matthew is of course very concerned, not least in these early chapters, with all sorts of prophetic fulfilments; but if that were the origin of the story, how might we explain Luke’s account, where Isaiah 7 is not mentioned? Or the sneer about Jesus’ illegitimacy in John 8.41? It looks, rather, as though things worked the other way round: Matthew, faced with a deeply puzzling story about Jesus, found a biblical text that might shed some light upon it. Like Joseph, Matthew knew well enough what people would say. He was right: they still do.
In Isaiah, the fact of the ’almah being with child was given as a sign to the unbelieving king Ahaz, that un-David-like Davidic descendant, that God would rescue Judah from the northern threat, and would do so very soon, before the child reached an awareness of good and evil (when this moral maturing was supposed to take place is not clear). Eight centuries later Paul would write of another son of David through whom God’s rescue was assured, and the issue of good and evil settled: the one whose birth and resurrection now formed the summary of ‘the good news’, itself an Isaianic term.
Paul gives us the earliest written evidence that the phrase ‘son of God’ was acquiring, within developing Christianity, the meaning of ‘one who was from the beginning with the father’, without losing, as clearly in Romans 1 it has not lost, the meaning ‘Messiah’ which was one of its connotations in the Hebrew Scriptures. The ‘good news’ for which Paul has been ‘set apart’ is that God’s son has come to be of David’s seed, and has been publicly marked out as God’s son through the resurrection. Birth matters; resurrection matters more. Without Easter, nobody would ever have told the Christmas story. Ponder that when battling with seasonal mammon-worship, in which, as Marx wryly noted, purchasable commodities become the incarnation of the rival god. Mammon doesn’t raise the dead.
The First Sunday of Christmas
Isaiah 63.7–9
Hebrews 2.10–18
Matthew 2.13–23
More Isaianic translation problems. Fortunately here the meaning is not in doubt. ‘In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them’? – or is it ‘He became their saviour in all their distress; it was no messenger or angel, but his presence that saved them’? Either way, the underlying point is that YHWH, Israel’s God, did not send someone else to rescue his people when they were in their deepest need. He came and did it himself. He could (the second version implies, echoing the debate between God and Moses in Exodus 32—34) have sent a lesser being, but was eventually persuaded to accompany Israel in person, consistent with his action when he heard their cry in Egypt and came to save them. The prophet looks back to the Exodus to invoke this same compassionate, grieving, personally present God for his own day.
Egypt forms the link with today’s gospel (our nicely nonsensical calendar means that we get the Flight into Egypt before the Epiphany). Again, this is hardly likely to have been invented simply on the basis of Hosea 11.1, quoted in v. 15; nor is Matthew unaware that God’s ‘son’, for Hosea, was of course Israel itself (compare Exodus 4.22). Jesus specifically takes on the role of Israel, doing as an unwitting baby what Isaiah said YHWH had done, coming to where the people were in distress, recapitulating the story.
The house of Herod, who hover balefully in the background throughout Matthew’s Gospel, are introduced in this chapter for the first time (does Matthew’s genealogy, sweeping down the royal line from Abraham to David to Jesus, owe its existence to Jews who kept the true Davidic hope alive during the Hasmonean and Herodian years?). First the old man, bitter, ill and paranoid, lashing out, as we know from Josephus he regularly lashed out, at anything that might conceivably be a threat. Then his son Archelaus, the new ‘king of the Jews’, who lasted ten years until popular dislike ousted him, to be replaced by direct Roman rule. Antipas, another son, will appear soon enough. Matthew’s story reminds us vividly that the good news of God’s personal redeeming activity had from the first to make its way in the disorderly and dangerous real world of violence and conspiracy.
This is exactly the point made by Hebrews. These readings nullify any Christmas sentimentality, and insist that, from the first, Jesus embodied the living, saving God, personally present with his people. Like us in every respect, suffering and being tempted, he is able to help. That’s another contrast between the true God and the idols; they are able to thrill, but they can’t help. They can excite, but they can’t rescue. There is only one God who can. To believe in the incarnation is not to perform a mental conjuring trick, but to swear allegiance to the God who had always acted like that, whose love would be satisfied with nothing less.
The Second Sunday of Christmas
Jeremiah 31.7–14
Ephesians 1.3–14
John 1.1–18
C. S. Lewis said that it sometimes seemed an anticlimax to move from the broad poetic sweep of the Old Testament to the narrow focus and seemingly mundane concern of the New. No chance of that this week; but the readings show well enough why the problem occurs.
Early Christian writers were faced with a towering challenge. They believed that the events concerning Jesus were the fulfilment, the filling-full-ment, of the long and winding story of Israel. The hopes and fears,