Fourth Sunday of Advent; 18 December 2022; Advent 4A (RCL); Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25.
So much hinges on a dubious (ancient) translation, and some verb tenses. In the reading from Isaiah, the prophet is giving Ahaz a sign that Israel and Syria will be desolate before they can carry out their plot to overthrow Judah (Judah refused to enter their alliance against Assyria). Isaiah notices a young, pregnant woman (his wife? Ahaz’s wife?) and says that by the time the child is old enough to know right from wrong (3yrs? 5 yrs?), Assyria will have conquered Israel and Syria.
When Isaiah was translated into Greek, the translators chose the word παρθένος (parthenos), “virgin” for the Hebrew word that means young woman and has no connection to marital status or sexual experience. And they chose a future tense, where the Hebrew has a present tense: “the virgin will conceive and bear a son,” rather than “the young woman is pregnant and will bear a son.” In the face of an impending war, Isaiah gives Ahaz a sign of hope by pointing to a pregnant woman and saying that her son will grow up safely, and be named, “God is with us.” The mistranslation by the Septuagint (The Greek version Matthew used) allows Matthew to place an entirely different meaning on the sign.
In Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus teaches at his hometown synagogue (6:1-6), the people respond, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” One never but never called a person the son of his mother, unless the father was unknown. I think we have here evidence of an embarrassing tradition of Jesus’ illegitimacy. The Talmud has a tradition of Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier (Pantera) and apparently, the tradition goes back to at least the time of Mark’s Gospel. Both Matthew and Luke acknowledge the tradition and seek to account for it. They each come up with a different solution. Luke has the angel Gabriel announce to Mary that she will be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, while Matthew quotes this passage from Isaiah.
Matthew, in his infancy narrative, uses the device of having the events of Jesus’ birth and life “fulfill” scripture. The flight to Egypt, and the return is fulfill the word of the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” (One wonders if even Joseph’s name is part of Matthew’s device of recapitulation — Mark does not know Joseph’s name). Paul was the first to comb the scriptures for hints about what God was doing in Jesus, and turned specifically to the prophecies of the suffering servant. In Jesus, God is accomplishing everything that God could not accomplish in Israel. Paul frames the salvation in Jesus in language reminiscent of the Exodus — Jesus frees us from slavery to sin.
Regardless of what one thinks of the virgin birth, the Christian message is that God accomplishes the divine purposes in the most unexpected of ways — the crucifixion is the summit of that reversal. Even if we view Mary as the village girl who got in trouble, God can use even such events in the divine plan. And of course, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth (apart from any factual considerations) points to the stunning idea of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. Such a birth, however it came about, joins deity and humanity both on the human plane and in the heart of deity. God indeed is with us.