Hilton Head Island, SC – November 29, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 7:10-17; Matthew 1:18-25
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. – Isaiah 7:14 (RSV); All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (which means God with us). – Matthew 1:22-23 (RSV)
What is coming?
It is impossible to ignore the power of individual recollection and imagination. It also is impossible to ignore the power of collective recollection and imagination.
For example, think of where you were when you first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Or think of where you were when you first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Then ponder how your personal memory of those events was affected by the things you saw on television and your conversations with many other people immediately afterward, and how together all of us formed a national understanding of how those events occurred and how we interpreted their meaning.
Now let me ask a couple of questions. If you were a Soviet citizen in 1963, or Chinese or North Korean or Albanian, how would you and your fellow countrymen perceive the assassination? In September of 2001, if you were an Iranian government official or soldier or an Afghan Taliban or an Iraqi general, how would you and your fellow countrymen understand what happened when four airplanes were hijacked on a crystal-clear September morning?
Frequently context determines meaning. Different people see the same events differently. What really happened last year when the Chicago policeman shot the teenager sixteen times? If you saw the televised video of the incident a few days ago, what do you think happened, or what do you choose to believe happened? What prompts sorrow or grief or bitterness in some may evoke satisfaction or even feelings of smug triumph in others.
In a similar way, different parts of the Bible are interpreted differently by different people. There are parts of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, which are understood very differently by Jews and Christians. And among Jews there are major variations of thinking about the Hebrew scriptures, just as there are many different ways for Christians to interpret the Greek Bible, the New Testament.
We see an example of this phenomenon in our two readings for today, the one from Isaiah and the other from Matthew. In order fully to appreciate the opposing nuances, we need to focus on the Hebrew word almah. Almah means either “young woman” or “virgin.” The context in which the word is used determines its particular meaning. It should be obvious to everyone, without saying anything else, that all virgin females are virgins, but not all young women are virgins. It would have been much better if the ancient Hebrews had thought up two different words for these two quite distinct concepts, but they didn’t.
Now please note in your bulletin the two texts for today’s sermon. The first is from Isaiah 7:14, and the other from Matthew 1:23, and both are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. The original quote from Isaiah says, “Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” But listen to how Matthew chose to quote Isaiah: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” In Isaiah, says the RSV, a young woman (who obviously was not a virgin) was going to bear a son, but Matthew wants very specifically to state that a virgin was going to bear a son, which is a totally different and utterly unique concept. The fact that in Isaiah the name of the son was spelled Immanuel and in Matthew Emmanuel is not so significant, except that for Christians we now sing, as we shall at the end of the sermon, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” not “Immanuel.”
Anyway, to return to the word almah, Old Testament scholars, both Jewish and Christian, say that in the middle of the 8th century BCE the prophet Isaiah was suggesting to Ahaz, then the king of Judah, that a baby would soon be born who would grow up to be the king of Judah. Isaiah had no idea who specifically this child might be, but the coming king would, in effect, represent “God With Us,” which is what the word, or name, “Immanuel,” means. Under this king God would be with His people as He did not seem to have been under the previous few Israelite monarchs before Ahaz. In other words, Isaiah was trying to encourage Ahaz that things would improve.
Eight centuries later, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew had absolutely none of those thoughts in mind when he quoted Isaiah 7:14. Matthew presumably wrote his Gospel about 70 CE or so, which was forty years after Jesus had been crucified. By that time Matthew, along with many other of the earliest Christians, believed that Jesus was the long-promised Messiah of God. Furthermore Matthew, along with Luke, the man who wrote the Third Gospel, also believed that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was a virgin when she gave birth to her first-born child.
Early on in Handel’s oratorio Messiah there is a recitative which uses the words of this text. The recitative is taken directly from Isaiah 7:14, as it is translated in the King James Version: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel: God With Us.” It is normally sung by an alto, unless there is a counter-tenor, a man with either a very high voice or a very clear falsetto voice, if one is available, which is almost never the case.
Why would Matthew and Luke (and George Frederick Handel) focus on the idea of a virgin? And why did the Church from its very beginning unambiguously proclaim that Jesus was born of a virgin? It was because they truly believed that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. And they believed that because they believed God was Jesus’ Father, not Joseph. And they believed that because they believed Jesus was the Incarnation of God, literally “God-in-the-Flesh.” And because the Early Church came to believe and to proclaim that, they came to believe that Jesus himself was divine.
Another question might be this: Why would the KJV translators in the early 17th century say “virgin” in Isaiah 7, while the RSV translators in the mid-20th century said “young woman”? Probably it was because most of the 17th century scholars believed in the virgin birth of Jesus, and they thought Isaiah 7 was a prophecy of that. But probably most of the mid-20th century American scholars who translated the RSV from the original Hebrew and Greek no longer believed in the virgin birth of Jesus and did not see Isaiah 7 as referring to Jesus at all.
Therefore, another question: Does it matter to you whether Jesus was born of a virgin, or not? Knowing most of you as I do fairly well, and that you are a nest of rather radical and lasciviously liberal outside-the-box sort-of-free-thinkers, I suspect that not only does it not matter to most of you whether Jesus was born of a virgin but that you have long since concluded he was not born of a virgin. I may be wrong in that supposition, but nonetheless it is what I suppose.
Let us, however, return to Isaiah, and then to Matthew. The prophet Isaiah wrote several passages upon which the Church has always expressed particular interest as foretelling the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. Our responsive reading from Isaiah 9 is one of those. Handel agreed with that conclusion, because Isaiah 9 is used for more of his recitatives and arias and choruses. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light….For to us a child is born, to us a son is given,” and so on. Isaiah 40: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God…. The voice of one that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” Isaiah 53: “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief….Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”
Those passages trumpet Jesus of Nazareth - - - don’t they? Do they? Do they really? Are they talking about Jesus, or are they talking about the Messiah, whoever he might be and whenever he might come?
Would there be any point in Isaiah telling his listeners or his readers in the middle of the 8th century BC that early in the second quarter of the 1st century AD one was coming whose name would be Yeshua, a latter-day form of Joshua, or in Greek “Yea-zous” or in English Jesus? Even if Isaiah had actually known that it was Jesus who was coming (which he didn’t and couldn’t), what good would it have been to say it?
Let me give you an analogy. Suppose someone today would predict beyond doubt that in the year 2785 AD someone will be born who will revolutionize the world. He (or she) will reverse climate change (if there is any climate left to reverse). She (or he) will unite all religions into one, meaning all current religions plus any others which may evolve between now and 2820 AD or so. He (or she) will bring peace to all nations, of which then there will either be many more than there are now or far fewer. She/he will make God so real and plausible and magnetic that no sensible person will ever again deny the existence, power, or authority of God.
Would you find it helpful to know that almost eight centuries from now those things will happen? Are you not more interested in finding out how the millions of refugees in the world can be resettled somewhere, or who can stop ISIS, or who can thwart Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley in the next election, or who can cut off at the electoral pass Donald Trump or Ben Carson or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or whoever else, but particularly The Great Horn Tooter? Of greater concern, is there someone who right now can eliminate the animosity among nations or peoples or religions --- not seven and a half centuries from now, but NOW?
I cannot imagine that Isaiah or anyone else writing in the Old Testament foresaw the coming of a particular person named Jesus. No one could envision a very specific who who was coming; all they could imagine was a what. Messiah was coming; of that they had no doubt. Who it would be or when it would occur they could not even hazard a nebulous guess.
The world desperately needs a Messiah. You and I need a Messiah. We need someone who can inspire us to seek peace rather than to wage war between individuals and nations. We need someone to teach us to love one another rather than to be suspicious or resentful of one another. We need someone who can convince us that God is with us, not against us, that He loves us instead of being reviled by us, that He will not forsake us, even if we deserve to be forsaken.
The Jewish people prior to Jesus also knew they needed a Messiah who would transform the world like that. Because of the coalescence of certain historical circumstances, most Jews never perceived Jesus to be the promised Messiah. But over time millions and then billions of Gentiles did. And for us, praise be to God, the “what” of the Messiah became the “who” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Matthew believed the Hebrew Bible was a set of books which served as proof texts for validating his own particular theological predilections regarding Jesus of Nazareth, whom Matthew believed was, at a minimum, the promised Messiah of God. Time and time again Matthew says, “This was to fulfill what was written” by so-and-so about such-and-such. The writer of Matthew’s Gospel was so familiar with the contents of the Old Testament and he was so convinced of the claims he made in his Gospel about Jesus that he was certain the Old Testament was frequently pointing to Jesus. Perhaps he was correct, but it is only faith, and not facts, which can authenticate that. There is no proof that Jesus was and is the Messiah or the Son of God or God Incarnate; faith alone can lead us to that conclusion.
Prior to what Christians call the First Century A.D., Annum Domine, the Years of Our Lord, the Jews were waiting for a What, not a Who. They were expecting that God would send His Messiah, but they didn’t know ahead of time who he would be or specifically how he could be identified. The prophets gave some hints, but the hints were deliberately nebulous and diffuse, because the prophets could not know many specifics. Generally they had ideas about Mesheach, Messiah, but not specifically. And even if they had known specifically about Messiah, of what benefit would it be to those to whom they spoke and wrote, since Messiah would be coming at some indefinite point in the future? And who could define that point other than God Himself?
It was easy for Christians in the first Christian century or in any subsequent century to project Jesus of Nazareth back into the Jewish Bible. But Jesus lived for only 30-plus years at a particular point along the timeline of human history. Prior to the first century of what Christians self-describe as the “Christian Era,” no Jews knew beyond doubt either What was coming or Who was coming. And after the first Christian century no Christians knew beyond doubt Who had come; they only were capable of believing that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth the Promised One of God made his appearance.