Sermon: December 18, 2022

Guest Preacher: Gerry Shoberg

Scriptures: Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25

Today we have Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus—not Luke’s, that is, not the one that Linus recites after Charlie Brown gets frustrated with the Peanuts troupe trying to put together the Christmas play. Today’s Scripture is Matthew’s account, the one where Joseph gets a bit out of sorts upon learning that his fiancé, Mary, is pregnant—sorry, “found to be with child,” as Alice, the prim and proper little girl in Barbara Robinson’s classic, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, would observe, it just doesn’t seem right to use such an common word like “pregnant” with reference to Mary; much better to say something more dignified like “she was found to be with child”—and then, instead of breaking the relationship, Joseph gets set straight by an angel speaking to him in a dream. The angel tells him that Mary has conceived from the Holy Spirit, and that her son’s name will be called Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. And then Matthew tells us that all this happened to fulfil a 700-year-old prophecy of Isaiah:

            Look, the virgin shall conceive

            and they shall name him Emmanuel

Do you ever feel like you need to suspend your disbelief when you enter the Christmas season? We read about special messages coming via dreams, a virgin giving birth, shepherds being visited by angels, foreigners following a star that leads them to Bethlehem. Really?

Is it any wonder that we now have Santa Claus and elves making toys at the north pole and delivering them via a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer on Christmas Eve around the world—never thinking that a man dressed in a fur coat driving a snow sled would be highly inappropriate in December throughout all of the southern hemisphere; that really should have been a clue to us, when we were 8, that there was something fishy about the whole affair.

But it is true that there is something of a magical quality to the Christmas story.

Matthew tells us that a virgin giving birth was a fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah. This is the first of 12 times in Matthew’s Gospel that he says that something in the life of Jesus was a fulfillment of something said in the Old Testament. Now, I’m quite aware that many people understand this to mean that Old Testament writers were making predictions about the future, and New Testament writers were saying that those predictions were fulfilled in Jesus, and all these fulfillments serve to prove that Jesus must be this wonderful person—Messiah, if you will—that God was intending to bring on the scene.

Well, that is partially true, but I think there is something more profound going on in how the New Testament refers to the Old Testament when talking about Jesus. And we can see this in Matthew’s Gospel.

Admittedly, there are some places where Matthew shows that Jesus clearly fulfills predictions made in the Old Testament:

·         Matthew cites from the prophet Micah with reference to Jesus’ birthplace: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel” (Matt 2:6)

·         Matthew cites from the of the famous Isaiah passage—the passage that looks forward to a ruler from the line of King David: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us… His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness.” From the beginning of this text in Isaiah, Matthew cites: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned” (Matt 4:16), clearly applying that whole messianic text to Jesus.

So, there are places where Matthew sees specific Old Testament predictions being fulfilled by Jesus.

But there are other times when what Matthew refers to in the Old Testament is not a prediction at all. For example:

·         In the incident of Joseph and Mary fleeing to Egypt to protect Jesus from Herod, Matthew cites from Hosea 11: “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” which, if you look back in the book of Hosea, has nothing to do with making a prediction; rather the prophet is referring to the time hundreds of years previous when the people of Israel were liberated by God through Moses from slave labour in Egypt.

·         In the incident when Herod is killing all the young children around Bethlehem, trying to do away with Jesus, Matthew cites from Jeremiah 31: “A voice is heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children,” which, if you look back in the book of Jeremiah, has nothing to do with making a prediction; rather the prophet is referring to the sorrowful time when Israelites were being taken captive into exile.

·         And even today’s text—“the virgin shall conceive and bear a son”—in Isaiah 7 doesn’t so much have to do with a prediction of a miraculous birth, as it does with a prediction, to King Ahaz in the 8th century BC, that before the time it takes for a “young woman”—that’s the meaning of the word Isaiah uses—for a young woman to give birth and for her son to grow up and know the difference between right and wrong, the Assyrian army is going to be on Jerusalem’s doorstep.

So, what exactly is going on here? I suggest that what Matthew—and indeed other New Testament writers—are doing is, not just finding predictions in the prophets that relate to Jesus, but rather they are finding ways in which the story of Jesus mirrors the story of Israel.

·         Matthew sets the context with his genealogy at the very beginning of the Gospel, where he traces Jesus’ ancestry back through King David right to Abraham—the first Israelite. With the numerical value of the name of David being 14, we learn there are 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations from David to the Babylonian exile, and finally 14 generations from the Babylonian exile to the Messiah. This is the context for Jesus. Then …

·         Like Israel before him, Jesus too is God’s son who comes out of Egypt; like Israel passing through the Red Sea, Jesus too passes through water when he is baptized by John in the Jordan River; like Israel spending 40 years in the wilderness, Jesus too spends 40 days the wilderness being tempted by the devil; and like Moses going up Mt. Sinai to receive the law, Jesus too goes up a mountain with his disciples to teach them what we now call the Sermon on the Mount.

·         And in other ways too: like with the sorrow expressed in Jeremiah’s day, so also there is sorrow expressed in connection with Jesus’ birth; as in Psalm 78 that Matthew cites, in rehearsing God’s acts of care for Israel, where the psalmist says “I will open my mouth in a parable” (Ps 78:2), so also Jesus speaks in parables (Matt 13:35); and as in Isaiah’s prophecy to King Ahaz, Jesus is in fact born of a virgin—not the meaning of the Hebrew word used by Isaiah, but interestingly within the range of meaning of the word used by the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek—parthenos.

What Matthew is doing is telling the story of Jesus as a re-embodiment of the story of Israel. And he does this precisely because for most Jews of Matthew’s time, Jesus is anything but a Messiah for Israel, anything but a saviour-figure for Jews. He had been rejected by Pharisees—who were widely respected people; he had been arrested, tried, and found guilty of crimes against the state by the Jewish leadership; and he had been executed by the Romans on a cross—the most demeaning form of execution in the ancient world. For Jews, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. So, how can you possibly think this person was the Jewish Messiah? Well, for the full answer to that question we are going to have to wait a few months until Easter.

But the challenge still is, how do you tell the story of Jesus to demonstrate that he really was Israel’s Messiah, even though he was a far cry from the kind of Messiah Israel was expecting? What Matthew does is he tells the story of Jesus with clear correspondences to the story of Israel: Jesus is depicted as the true Israelite, as the one Israel was always meant to be. And we can take it a step further: since Abraham was called by God to address the problems created by sinful humanity, this points to Israel’s vocation—to recover true humanity, and so, as God had said to Abraham, to be the place where all the nations would find blessing. And thus this is who Jesus becomes in Matthew’s Gospel—humanity restored—the one who, as it was intended for Israel to be but where Israel failed again and again, the one who would overcome the problem of humanity’s sinfulness: hence Matthew’s explanation of the name Jesus—“for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21). He is the truly human one, not just in terms of his nature, but in terms of his vocation.

But the reality goes deeper still. For Matthew carries on in his citation of Isaiah: “‘and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’” (Matt 1:23). Not only does Matthew tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, but he tells the story of Jesus as the story of God:

·         In response to John the Baptist’s disciples coming to Jesus to ask whether he truly was the Messiah, Jesus responds, as you all know from last Sunday: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised” (Matt 11:4–5), all very impressive things, but even more so when we realize that these are precisely the things that Old Testament prophets said that God would do when he restores his people. Hear Isaiah again: “Here is your God…. He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy” (Isa 35:4–6). Or again…

·         One day when Jesus and his disciples are caught in a bad storm on the Sea of Galilee, the disciples cry out to Jesus, “Lord, save us,” and Jesus rebukes the wind and the sea and there is calm (Matt 8:25–26). Pretty amazing stuff—but especially so when in a Jewish context it is only God who controls the wind. Or again…

·         Even when in connection with Jesus’ so-called triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where Matthew cites from Zechariah 9—“Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey” (Matt 21:5)—Zechariah sets this text in the context of God appearing to and saving his people—that is, the role of this “king” here seems to be wrapped up in the role of God himself.

Here then we see Jesus not only as the embodiment of Israel, but also as the embodiment of God himself. His vocation will be the vocation of Israel and the vocation of God.

Is it any wonder then that there is a magical quality to the Christmas story? Could it have been  anything else? Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth is about stretching our imagination, about realizing that the future does not need to be merely a repetition of the past but that it can have hope, about seeing in Jesus God making humanity whole again. Here is “true God from true God” who “was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.” Here is the love of God—not merely in a sentimental scene of baby with mother and animals peering on—but of God taking on ordinary human life, in the dark of night, in the cold of winter, in the humblest of circumstances, in order to fix what was broken, in order to bring light.

This Christmas season I invite you not to suspend your disbelief at all, but to embrace again the story of “God with us” with all its wonder. As expressed so eloquently by the English poet, Malcolm Guite:

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us

O long-sought With-ness for a world without,

O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.

Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name,

Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame.

O quickened little wick so tightly curled,

Be folded with us into time and place,

Unfold for us the mystery of grace

And make a womb of all this wounded world.

O heart of heaven beating in the earth,

O tiny hope within our hopelessness

Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,

To touch a dying world with new-made hands

And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.   (O Emmanuel”)