Isaiah 7- it must be Christmas!
So here comes one of those bits of Isaiah that we all know, because we hear it every year at Christmas time:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.
This is the NRSV translation- the NIV translates 'young woman' as virgin, which is of course how Matthew chooses to translate it in Matt 1:22, when he has the angel telling Joseph that Mary's immaculate conception fulfills what the Lord has spoken through the prophets.
Reading this verse embedded in the rest of Isaiah makes me look at it quite differently. Here in Isaiah the child himself is not the sign- it seems to suggest rather a time line, a hope that within the time it takes for a child to be conceived, be born, be weaned and grow to understand good and evil there will be a change in the fortunes of the people. But Matthew, and the community for whom he wrote his gospel, must have been reading the prophets like Isaiah to understand what God is like, how He acts, what are the signs that He is really at work in the troubled world. They lived at a time in history that was under at least as much threat from military and political oppression as the people in Isaiah's time, so perhaps it is not surprising that they looked to Isaiah to give them some clues about how God might, after all, be Lord of history. I suppose I was doing just the same thing when I read Isaiah 6 in the light of the recent rioting in London. Is this part of what prophecy means? Is this why we read the Old Testament- and the New, which after all is as much ancient history for us as the Old- to learn how the story works, to listen to the arc of the narrative, to see the Big Picture of God painted in the tender brushstrokes of the birth of a child?
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.
This is the NRSV translation- the NIV translates 'young woman' as virgin, which is of course how Matthew chooses to translate it in Matt 1:22, when he has the angel telling Joseph that Mary's immaculate conception fulfills what the Lord has spoken through the prophets.
Reading this verse embedded in the rest of Isaiah makes me look at it quite differently. Here in Isaiah the child himself is not the sign- it seems to suggest rather a time line, a hope that within the time it takes for a child to be conceived, be born, be weaned and grow to understand good and evil there will be a change in the fortunes of the people. But Matthew, and the community for whom he wrote his gospel, must have been reading the prophets like Isaiah to understand what God is like, how He acts, what are the signs that He is really at work in the troubled world. They lived at a time in history that was under at least as much threat from military and political oppression as the people in Isaiah's time, so perhaps it is not surprising that they looked to Isaiah to give them some clues about how God might, after all, be Lord of history. I suppose I was doing just the same thing when I read Isaiah 6 in the light of the recent rioting in London. Is this part of what prophecy means? Is this why we read the Old Testament- and the New, which after all is as much ancient history for us as the Old- to learn how the story works, to listen to the arc of the narrative, to see the Big Picture of God painted in the tender brushstrokes of the birth of a child?
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