A Virgin Shall Conceive

4th Sunday in Advent - Isaiah 7:10-14

The LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying:

Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God;

let it be deep as the netherworld, or high as the sky!

But Ahaz answered,

"I will not ask!  I will not tempt the LORD!"

Then Isaiah said:

Listen, O house of David!

Is it not enough for you to weary people,

must you also weary my God?

Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign:

the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,

and shall name him Emmanuel.

This week, the Church presents us with one of Isaiah’s most famous prophecies, the Emmanuel Prophecy. Isaiah delivered this message in 733 B.C. At this time, the mighty Assyrian Empire was expanding its borders into the Holy Land. The kingdom of Israel (God’s apostate people who had broken away from the Davidic king ruling over Judah) and the kingdom of Syria were threatening to invade Judah because its king, Ahaz, would not join their military alliance to resist the Assyrian advance. The Lord sent Isaiah to encourage King Ahaz to trust in him and not to trust in a military alliance. As proof that the Lord would protect Judah, Isaiah asks Ahaz to pick a sign that God can perform, and Ahaz declines in a huff of false piety. And so the Lord picks the sign: a virgin will conceive and bear a son named Emmauel. 
 
Prophecy does not function with the precision of mathematics, and this is a notoriously tricky prophecy. There is no scholarly consensus as to what Isaiah was originally referring to. Is “Emmanuel” Ahaz’s son Hezekiah? Is he one of Isaiah’s sons? Is he a figure of God’s people as a whole? Or does he point ahead to the Messiah? A further complication is that Isaiah’s Hebrew points to a young woman (almah) bearing a child, not necessarily to a virgin bearing a child. The ambiguity of the reference coupled with the original language has led hordes of modern scholars to scoff at the Gospel of Matthew for claiming it as a prophecy of Jesus’ virgin birth. Yet, for centuries before Jesus was born, God’s people had been reading Isaiah’s words as referring to “Emmanuel’s” birth from a virgin mother. Already by the third century B.C., Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, who were translating the scriptures into Greek rendered almah as parthenos, a young woman presumed to be a virgin who miraculously gives birth to a son. This is the interpretation maintained by the rabbis in the decades before Jesus was born. And of course, it is the Christian reading of this same prophecy. 
 
Did Isaiah understand the fuller meaning that God intended by this prophecy? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Did Isaiah’s original audience think that “Emmanuel’s” mother would be a virgin only until she conceived in the usual way? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Did God say something to humanity more than 700 years before he brought about an event that shed new light on what he said in the first place? It seems so. And therein is the Spirit’s message to us as Christmas draws nearer by the day. 
 
Whether you are new to Mass or have been coming your whole life, you probably know the biblical Christmas story pretty well. You probably already know what it “means.” You might even be tempted to zone out a bit as the familiar stories are read yet again. Don’t do it! The Word of God is living and active (see Hebrews 4:12), and God has a track record of saying something new with the same old words. Don’t hide behind Ahaz’s false piety claiming that God would not speak to you in a new and clearly relevant way through the Christmas Scriptures. Isaiah spoke of Emmanuel, which means “God is with us,” and that means you too. If God is with you, he probably has something to say to you too. Let him who has ears hear.