Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
December 22, 2019
I.
About 735 years before Jesus, a 20-year-old named Ahaz was crowned as king of Judah, in Jerusalem. He was faced immediately with a national crisis. The Assyrian Empire was expanding with an unprecedented level of violence and brutality. The northern kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Aram or Syria had formed an alliance against them, and they wanted Judah to join.
The prophet Isaiah advises Ahaz to stand firm in his trust in the Lord. But Ahaz instead decided to do the smart, practical thing and make a deal with the Assyrians. That got Judah off the hook regarding Israel and Aram. But in return, the Assyrians demanded huge tribute in wealth from Judah, which became a subject, vassal State for generations. Israel, meanwhile, for fighting against the Assyrians, got completely destroyed, and the 10 northern Hebrew tribes were lost forever.
So the larger context of this passage is about the political survival of Judah. Ahaz chooses to rely on pragmatic diplomacy so that the nation is technically preserved, but deeply and permanently weakened and harmed.
But what if he had taken Isaiah’s advice and chosen to rely on God? We don’t know. We never know. Because almost no one ever does it. We always imagine that our only choices are to either fight evil with violence, or to make a deal with evil for survival. It rarely occurs to anyone to say, “Let’s resist this predatory evil empire by trusting in God and keeping God’s commandments, no matter what.”
At the time the Gospel of Matthew was written, Judah, by then called Judea, had also been destroyed because they chose to resist by force the dominant Empire of that time: Rome. Jerusalem and the Temple were in ruins. Our using violence against violence doesn’t work in God’s plan.
The other approach was to make a deal with the Romans, giving them loyalty in return for tolerance. But as Ahaz learned, the cost of this kind of arrangement is very high. Compromise with evil makes us complicit in it. Being a domesticated and loyal part of the Empire only serves to suck all the spiritual integrity from our faith. This is why the apostle Paul does not want Gentile converts to become officially Jews. The Jews of his time had compromised and sold-out to Rome.
Unfortunately, the church has historically mostly chosen Ahaz’ option: make a deal, cooperate with the forces of Empire, conquest, colonialism, oppression, and injustice. Find a political sponsor and protector. Be patriotic in whatever nation we are in, support the government’s policies, even when questionable or horrible.
The eventual result of this approach was that Judah was itself completely destroyed by the next Empire to roar down from the north: the Babylonians, 150 years or so after King Ahaz. The people were marched off on a trail of tears into exile.
In the end, fighting evil with violence doesn’t work, and neither does compromising and making a deal with evil for survival.
II.
Isaiah, however, has another idea. He presents his alternative politics to the king in terms of a kind of parable, which a chapter earlier he implied was going to be his main mode of communication. He talks about a young woman and the child she will bear. This prophecy is the how he reassures the king. Trust in God, he says, because “the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”
On the one hand he means that this particular imminent threat, from the kings of Aram and Israel, is temporary. It will be over in the time it takes for a woman to bear and wean a child, about 18 months. And he uses that imagery, rather than just saying “in about a year and a half,” to emphasize the emergence and development of new life in the form of a living person. Perhaps he even meant an actual child who would be Ahaz’ successor as king.
On the other hand he is making a still larger and deeper point that the living Presence of God, which is what the name “Immanu-el” means — God-is-with-us — is on the way to us and our job is to welcome, receive, prepare, and follow. Maybe he is saying that God’s Presence and salvation, God’s deliverance and protection, come to us precisely when and as we prepare for this.
There is a sense in which Isaiah is telling us to, “Live now in God’s future, and the past and present will take care of themselves. But caving in and making a deal with evil in order to get by today is not a good or sustainable course of action. That would be to foreclose on the future. That would be to sacrifice the future in order to get a higher return now. That would be like eating your seed-corn. That would be like poisoning your own environment, depleting resources, and wrecking the climate for a quick profit for a few now. Who would do such a thing?
Jesus talks about this a lot. Grabbing whatever wealth, status, power, fame, or security we can now, only closes us off from those very things in the future. “Woe to you who are rich now, for you have received your reward,” he says. He blesses those who don’t have now, because only they are open to God’s coming blessings. It is the seed that is planted in the earth and figuratively dies that sprouts to become a plant that bears much fruit for all to share.
Isaiah uses the image of a child because children are inherently an act of faith and trust in the future. They are a colossal investment in the future. I mean, let’s face it, on a purely economic level, children are a net drain on the family resources in the short term. Their value is in the future.
Ahaz is thinking that it is up to him, the anointed king, to protect Jerusalem’s children, and the present threat is these two kings of Israel and Aram who are laying siege to Jerusalem, and that if he just makes a deal with the Assyrians to get those kings off his case he can preserve the future for these children. But in reality he is by that deal condemning those same children to an existence under the yoke of a powerful, oppressive, extractive Empire. His “cure” is worse than the disease.
III.
Isaiah’s message is, Yo, Ahaz, hello? It’s not up to you. These are God’s people and God, not any human king, will protect and sustain them. Your job, Ahaz, is not to worry about the geo-political circumstances. Your job is to be faithful and to inspire the people to be faithful. Your job is to let God be God and not get in God’s way.
I love the way that Sojourner Truth, the great African-American liberator of slaves, deals with this in the 19th century. She correctly notices that in the Virgin Birth story in the gospels, there are no men, that is no male humans, no members of the privileged, dominant gender, certainly no kings or emperors, involved in the actual conception and delivery of God into the world in Jesus Christ. The only men in the story play mere secondary, supporting or adversarial roles. But it is a matter of God — specifically God’s Holy Spirit — the Hebrew word for which is Ruach, which is feminine — cooperating with Mary, a teenaged, Jewish woman.
So when Isaiah uses a term that Matthew understands as “virgin,” he is not only saying that God’s future is coming, but that it is God’s future, that is, it is not dependent on the decisions or agency of any of the powerful people in the world, nearly all of whom were men. He is saying that God’s future comes about in spite of and in contradiction to the plans and agendas of the powerful humans who think they are in charge.
Isaiah is telling Ahaz that he has to get the normal understanding of what a king is out of his head. The king of Judah is different from the kings of other places. The king of Judah is not the big-boss but the chosen vessel, and channel, and instrument of the living God, the God who liberated the people from slavery in Egypt without the need of any assistance from a human king. Indeed, in that act God humiliates and overpowers the greatest human king of the day: Pharaoh. The king of Judah is not chosen so he can do his own will, according to his own reasoning and judgment, but so he can do God’s will, according to God’s Word.
Most of the problems in the world are a result of people trying to fix things. Most of what we are trying to fix is a result of people trying to fix things. Ahaz creates great problems for his people and future generations because he tried to fix what he conceived of as the main problem.
But what Ahab and we do not realize is that there is only one problem in the world ever, and that is that people are not following God’s Word. People are not living in obedience to Jesus Christ. People are not living in humility, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, joy, and peace. People are not letting go and letting God. Instead, they are trying to fix things. And this is where we are. In a fix.
IV.
But God’s salvation is already embedded and encoded in the very heart of creation itself. It was all spoken into being by God, and it has God’s imprint all over it. God will bring it all home. God’s redemption will happen — is happening — quite naturally. And we will be able to see and participate in that if we simply let it go, and let ourselves follow Jesus.
Ahaz is not considered a good king. He gets very bad reviews in 2 Kings 16 and 2 Chronicles 28. Yet he still shows up in the genealogy of the Lord Jesus in Matthew 1:9. Because even the bad kings get redeemed. Even they play a part in the chain of events that bring God into the world.
None of the decisions of dopey politicians are going to stop God’s salvation. They might make it more difficult; they might do a lot of harm to many people but they can’t stop God’s will.
As far as the decisions we have to make, we need to make them in obedience to Jesus Christ, reflecting and expressing in our own lives his justice and love, his acceptance and welcome, his healing and his goodness. That’s the way to be in tune with what God is doing in the world. That is the way we welcome Emmanu-El, God with us.
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