Fourth Sunday of Advent
God is with us! Immanuel! This week – the Fourth Sunday of Advent – we focus on the prophecy of Isaiah 7:10-16.
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today!
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!
Phillips Brooks, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”
10Again The Living God spoke to Ahaz: 11“Request a sign of confirmation from The Living God, your God. Make it deep like the underworld or high like the sky.” 12And Ahaz said, “I will neither request nor test The Living God.”
13Then Isaiah said, “Hear, O House of David. Is it a little matter for you all to weary people that you weary also my God? 14Therefore, my God will give you all a sign: Look! The young woman is pregnant and about to give birth to a son. She will name him With-us-is-God. 15By the time he knows to reject evil and choose good, he will eat cream and honey. 16Before the youth knows to reject evil and choose good, the land of the two kings whom you abhor will be abandoned.” (Isaiah 7:10-16)
God Is with Us
Isaiah 7 affirms God is with the House of David during this challenging period of its history. The name Immanuel carries this promise to ancient Judah. As Christians, we also affirm God is with us in the person of Jesus, the Christ.
Reading Isaiah 7 during Advent reminds us of this profound truth: God’s promise of presence. In addition, God’s presence is a theme throughout the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel ends in Matthew 28:20 with the promise, “I will be with you until the end of the age.” Thus, “the final admonition of the gospel in 28:20 and the formula quotation in 1:23 effectively bookend Matthew’s gospel with the concept of the enduring presence of Emmanuel within the community.” (Richard Beaton, “Isaiah in Matthew’s Gospel,” in Isaiah in the New Testament, ed. Steve Moyise and Maarten J. J. Menken (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 63–78, here 65.) Matthew reminds his first readers and readers down through the centuries of this powerful promise. So the promise of presence ties together the theological imaginations of Isaiah 7 and Matthew 1 with the Advent season. The theological promise of Immanuel (Emmanuel) may look different for King Ahaz’s and Matthew’s communities. Nevertheless, the promise is still available to both communities.
To speak of God’s presence with us engenders the issue of God’s presence with others. It is tempting to focus so much on God with us (as contemporary Christians) that we forget God was with the Israelites and their leaders and God is also with others such as contemporary Jews and Muslims. This sentiment can be especially tricky to articulate given the broader context of Isaiah 7, which proclaims that two other nations are not going to succeed in the end. Questions naturally arise. Is God still with them? Is God perhaps not in favor of their war-making? For God to be with Ahaz, does God turn away from other nations? These are enormously relevant questions for the Advent season. The season of Advent can be a time to remember and affirm God’s presence to all God’s creation. As Creator of the world, God’s Immanuel presence does not pertain only to Christians.
This passage, when situated within its originating context, helps us theologically ponder such challenging issues during Advent. Whom is God with? In Isaiah 7 God promises to be with God’s people, the ancient Judahites; these people are obviously not Christians. Isaiah 7 helps us to think about God’s presence with others throughout history and in today’s world, others who need Immanuel. How might we read this prophetic passage in ways that affirm God is present to all of God’s children?
Prophecy-Fulfillment Paradigm
As contemporary Christians, we need to rethink the prophecy-fulfillment paradigm and its disadvantages. The paradigm comes to us as a Jewish interpretive strategy used by authors like Matthew. However, it has also taken on new elements in thoroughly Christian contexts, elements that often lead to a denigration of the Old Testament and a sense of supersessionism.
We need to read anew Isaiah 7 and its relationship to Matthew 1 in light of our identity as Christians, an identity established only after the times of Isaiah and Matthew. So perhaps Matthew’s promise-fulfillment paradigm is no longer helpful to us, given our changed context. We do not read Isaiah as first-century Jews in need of an explanation of Jesus’s birth story but as Gentile Christians. We do not now participate in an intra-Jewish conversation about the old and the new like those early followers of Jesus did. The conversation about these texts has shifted significantly since the first century CE. Now we have two separate, established world religions with a vastly larger Christian population than a Jewish one. Now the promise-fulfillment paradigm has the potential to harm Judaism when Christians use it. The paradigm views the Jewish portion of Scripture (shared with Christians) as only full of promise, while Christianity’s unique portion of Scripture is a promise fulfilled. In our context, it is easy for this thinking to devolve into an understanding of Jewish Scripture as promise material awaiting significance. In other words, Christians using this paradigm begin to think of the Jewish Bible as irrelevant, incomplete, or lacking in worth.
In today’s religiously pluralistic world, in our post-Holocaust Christian theologies, it is problematic for Christians to point to uniquely Christian events and connect those events to portions of Scripture we share with Jews with the phrase “in order to fulfill.” We must be careful and thoughtful about our sense of “fulfillment.” What do we mean by fulfillment? We use fulfillment to mean “to finally make sense of a previously unexplainable Old Testament passage.” Yet are we open to the fact that Jews today do not see these biblical passages as being in need of fulfillment? Are we open to the possibility that these passages are not prophecies of the foretelling kind? We have more fruitful ways to think about biblical prophecy.
A Benediction (Or Miscellaneous Thoughts)
- If you know someone who might like to read this newsletter, forward this email to them.
2. You can read an online version of this newsletter here.
Member discussion