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December 23, 2007 |
See also: [2001][2004] John Cobb on incarnation |
Isaiah 7:10-16
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25
Isaiah 7:10-16
Once again, the choice of First Testament reading for this day is governed by the Gospel selection: this text is the source of the “Immanuel” prophecy which Matthew will interpret in terms of the birth of Jesus. But the Isaiah text has its own interpretive history prior to Matthew’s use. In its original context, the prophecy is meant to reassure King Ahaz of God’s intention to spare Jerusalem from conquest. According to the first verses of chapter 7, Ahaz of Jerusalem has received intelligence that the kings of Aram and Israel are forming an alliance against Judah and Jerusalem. Ahaz is fearful, but God sends Isaiah to calm his fear. Isaiah delivers a first oracle, saying “Do not fear”; then God delivers a second oracle, which is why verse 10 begins “Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz.” The second oracle begins with an invitation to Ahaz to ask for a sign, “deep as Sheol or high as heaven,” that will reassure him of God’s protection. Ahaz refuses to ask, citing the prohibition against “putting the Lord to the test”; it is unclear whether Ahaz is sincere, or whether this is a false piety meant to cover his own lack of faith; Isaiah’s response about the “House of David” “wearying” God would seem to indicate the latter. Because Ahaz will not request a sign, God chooses the sign: a promise that a young woman will bear a son, giving him the symbolic name “God is with us,” and that before the child is old enough to choose what is good (perhaps the meaning of the enigmatic “curds and honey”) and reject what is noxious—i.e., in only a short time—Aram and Israel will no longer be a threat to Jerusalem. In this original context, there is no suggestion of a miraculous birth, nor any indication that the child is a royal or special child. The Hebrew for “young woman” does not indicate virginity, and the symbolic name “Immanuel” does not in itself indicate divinity—indeed, Isaiah himself gave his children symbolic names, and there was no claim that his children were supernatural or divine. It would seem that, originally, the entire function of the prophecy was to assure Ahaz that Aram and Israel would not be threats to him for very long. In that sense, the prophecy was confirmed in a relatively few years. But later interpreters continued to see significance in the prophecy, above and beyond its original meaning. We may surmise that this promise, like the promise of the Davidic Heir in Isaiah 11, was taken up into the emerging Messianic hope in the post-exilic period. The child “Immanuel” came to be understood not only as symbolically named, but as an actual bearer of God’s presence, like the one who would bring the peaceable kin-dom and present reign of God. This expansion of meaning must have taken place at least before Isaiah was translated into Greek for the Septuagint, inasmuch as the word chosen for “young woman” in verse 14 is parthenos, which literally means “virgin,” and so is clearly intended to signify the miraculous and divine origin of the child. With Isaiah 7:14 thus drawn firmly into the Messianic orbit, it is only natural that Matthew would then use it in his account of the birth of Jesus, as we will see below. The “Immanuel” prophecy thus functions like a Whiteheadian proposition, which is not simply a statement of fact, but is “a notion about actualities, a suggestion, a theory, a supposition about things” (Adventures of Ideas, 243).The statement that one will be born to be “God with us” is a suggestion about what might be, which is not exhausted with the birth of a single child in Ahaz’s reign, but which continues to point ahead to a union of divine ideals with human actualities. Indeed, we could say that the promise of the prophecy is not even exhausted in the birth of Jesus: while Christians recognize Jesus as the Messiah, we also recognize that the fullness of the Messianic promise has not yet come, hence the Advent expectancy of the “second” coming of Jesus in an ideal reign of peace. We are still unpacking Isaiah’s prophecy today, even more than Matthew did in his day, as we strive both to embody “God with us” now and look forward to a fuller presence of “God with us” in the future.
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
The psalm asks God for a time of restoration for the people, a time when God will “stir up your might” and “let your face shine” so that the people might no longer “eat the bread of tears” or be given “bowls of tears to drink,” so that they will no longer be scorned by neighbors or laughed at by enemies. The strength to restore the people the people will come from God, and it will be divine strength, “enthroned upon the cherubim”; but this divine strength will be focused through a human leader, “the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.” This psalm also takes its place in the Messianic orbit, articulating hope for a future divine/human savior. This psalm passage lends itself, perhaps more than the Isaiah passages we’ve seen this Advent season, to the militaristic side of the Messianic hope, in which the savior was seen as a war leader who would conquer God’s enemies in order to establish the reign of peace. This militaristic Messianic hope reached a kind of apex in the Qumran community’s expectation of a war between the children of darkness and the children of light, and may also have influenced John the Baptist’s expectation of a Messiah who would bring ax, fire, and winnowing fork. Process-relational interpreters, sensitive to the difference between coercive and persuasive power, must acknowledge this dimension of the Messianic complex, but will prefer to “dwell upon the tender elements” of transformative hope in the Isaian and Matthean treatments of the “Immanuel” prophecy.
Romans 1:1-7
On this final Sunday of Advent, on the threshold, as it were, of the Feast of the Nativity, the most significant element in this Romans passage is Paul’s assertion of the “dual inheritance” of Jesus: that Jesus is “descended from David according to the flesh” and is also “declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness.” It is interesting that Paul further explains that the “declaration” of Jesus as Son of God is made by his “resurrection from the dead”; does this mean that Paul considers Jesus to be divine only after the resurrection, and not from his conception and birth? Commentators are not united in their interpretation of this passage; nor is Paul entirely consistent in the apparent meanings of his Christological comments—for instance, this suggestion that Jesus becomes divine in the resurrection is balanced by the Christological hymn in Philippians where Paul clearly thinks of Christ as preexistent and “emptying himself” in order to be born as Jesus. In this context, it may be better to set aside the historical analysis of Paul’s Christology, and to concentrate instead on how Paul’s assertion of the “dual inheritance” complements the nativity story in Matthew and the “Immanuel” prophecy from Isaiah. From a process-relational point of view, it is important that Paul does not speak about the meeting of human and divine in Jesus in terms of substance or nature, but in terms of “descent” and “declaration.” Jesus, as a society of life-occasions, inherits human characteristics, as any human occasion inherits from its immediate and personal and species past. But the occasions of Jesus’ life were also given divine aims to fulfill divine purposes, and these aims “declare” Jesus as participating in divine reality; in process thought “a thing is what it does,” and if Jesus does divine things then Jesus is divine. Where Paul often opposes “flesh” and “spirit,” here “descent from David according to the flesh” and “declaration as Son of God according to the spirit of holiness” work together to name Jesus as the meeting-place of human and divine. Those who are “called to belong to Jesus Christ,” who are “called to be saints,” share in this meeting of human and divine, as their own life-occasions inherit from Jesus the characteristics of human-actualization-of-divine-ideals. In this time between the two Advents, as we remember the beginning of God’s reign in Jesus and look forward to the culmination of God’s reign in the future, we can know “grace and peace” in striving to embody Christly, divine-and-human aims in our own actuality.
Matthew 1:18-25
The central theme in Matthew’s Nativity story is faithfulness: God’s faithfulness in fulfilling the promise of a savior, and Joseph’s faithfulness in accepting the role of the savior’s foster-father. We have already noted above the complex interpretive history of the “Immanuel” prophecy; Matthew of course quotes the Isaiah passage from the Septuagint, with its emphasis on a virgin conceiving and giving birth. Matthew further intensifies the miraculous nature of the conception by mentioning twice—once in Joseph’s angelic dream and once in direct narration, so that the reader is, in effect, “in on” the miracle from the beginning—that the child is “from the Holy Spirit.” Matthew takes the symbolic name “Immanuel” literally, as a description of the actual presence of the divine in the human child; “Immanuel” must function here as an epithet or description rather than a name because the name decreed by the angel for the child is “Jesus.” Matthew also reflects on the symbolic weight of the name “Jesus” when the angel explains that the child must bear this name “for he will save his people from their sins”: Yeshua is an Aramaic derivation of Hebrew Yehoshua (English Joshua), from a root meaning “to save.” Matthew assimilates the historical name Jesus to the prophetic name Immanuel by showing that their meanings are equivalent in the person of the son of Mary: Jesus saves because he is God with us, the meeting point of human and divine, the one in whom the existential rupture between God and humanity, caused by sin, is overcome in reconciliation. The remarkable—indeed, to Joseph, unsettling—conditions of Jesus’ conception are taken here as evidence of his divine origin, and hence of God’s faithfulness in bringing to human birth the long-promised savior. But divine faithfulness must be responded to with human faithfulness in order to be enacted in the human world, and therefore Matthew also is attentive to Joseph’s role in Jesus’ birth. Many of us are more familiar with Luke’s version of the Nativity on this point, and we resonate more, perhaps, with Mary’s counter-cultural, anti-patriarchal acceptance of the role of Christ-bearer. Matthew reflects more the patriarchalism of the time, and focuses more on how challenging it is for Joseph to accept Mary as his wife in spite of all the outward signs of infidelity. When Joseph learns that Mary is pregnant he assumes that she has been unfaithful. The Torah-prescribed penalty for adultery is stoning (as related, for instance, in John 8:5), but Joseph is “a righteous man” and does not want “to expose her to public disgrace.” Joseph’s righteousness is clearly as much a matter of compassion as it is of strict obedience to the law, since instead of stoning he resolves to “dismiss her quietly.” After the angelic messenger in the dream explains the divine origin of the child and commissions Joseph to name the child and raise him, Joseph further demonstrates his faithfulness by doing “as the angel of the Lord commanded him,” marrying Mary, and respecting her child as his own both up to and after the delivery. Thus for Matthew it is in the cooperation, the synergy, the working-together of divine and human faithfulness that the Messiah is born, just as it will be the working-together of divine and human actuality in Jesus himself that will open the way to salvation. This salvation is made operative in us when the same divine and human working-together is actualized in sacrament, worship, mission, and work for justice and peace, all done in the name of Jesus. This is how we continue to be influenced by, and to influence, the “field of force” that radiates from Jesus’ life and mission into and beyond our own.
Paul Nancarrow is rector of of St. George's Episcopal Church, St. Louis Park, MN, and canon theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota. He is a regular contributor to Creative Transformation and co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World.
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