“Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son
and shall call his name Emmanuel”
(Isaiah 7.14)
“When the fullness of the time was come,” as Paul puts it, “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” A powerful statement about the meaning of the Incarnation, the meaning of Christmas, it highlights at once the extravagant and wonderful idea of the intimacy of God’s engagement with our humanity and its meaning for us. God sent forth his son born of Mary that we might become the sons of God. His phrase captures the vocation of our humanity. God calls us into communion with himself through the Incarnation.
Matthew in the Gospel which accompanies the Epistle reading from Galatians tells us about the birth of Christ. Christmastide is all about the richness of the stories of the Incarnation and its purpose and meaning. The Nativity accounts are in Luke and Matthew but as direct and straightforward as they are or at least seem to be they are far from simple linear accounts. They are themselves profoundly poetic and philosophical.
It is easy to raise skeptical questions about the details of the Nativity. The stories are ones which have come down to us long after the events they relate. But it belongs to almost all forms of writing, including journalism, to create a narrative, a story with a meaning, to take the events or the so-called facts and put them into an order without which there is no story. At the heart of the Christmas story is that ordering of ideas by the Evangelists and others that open us out to a new reality, the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity. There is, inescapably, the awareness of the something new and different, something which changes our entire outlook. With Paul it is the concept of the fullness of time; with Matthew, the sense of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
I know of no passage of Scripture about which so much ink has been spilled and to so little purpose than the passage from Isaiah that Matthew quotes. We have Isaiah’s proclamation in the first of the Christmas Day anthems. “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.” Matthew deliberately draws upon this passage from Isaiah. “Behold, a Virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a Son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel” and then he goes on, intriguingly and importantly, to explain the meaning of the Hebrew term, Emmanuel, “which being interpreted is, God with us.” That he provides an interpretation suggests a certain distance from the Aramaic or Hebrew communities. The word in question is virgin. The Hebrew word can be rendered as ‘young woman’, ‘girl’, ‘maiden’ or perhaps even ‘virgin’ and derives from the feminine form of the Hebrew word for young man, ´almah from ´elem. The Greek translation, however, uses parthenos, meaning virgin.
Matthew clearly draws upon the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as The Septuagint composed several centuries prior to the time of Christ. It is based, apparently, on an earlier Hebrew text of many of the books of the Jewish Scriptures than what has come down to us latterly, but The Septuagint had a kind of authority and regard especially in the New Testament world. In the meeting of Hebrew religion, Greek philosophy and culture, and Roman Law, The Septuagint was the basic text for the emerging Christian communities and, of course, part of the growing polemic between Jews and Christians. Christianity, after all, emerges out of Judaism and there is a constant tension about the ways of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures.
One of those areas of tension is about the virgin birth and many historians and atheists – I am not suggesting that they are always one and the same – have focused on the divergence of translation between ‘young woman’ and ‘virgin’. For some it is an argument against the idea of the virgin birth which, in turn, is an argument against the uniqueness of Christ and, thus, the whole Christian story. Such viewpoints seem to me quite narrow and linear in their perspective. Isaiah looks for a sign to convince the anxious Ahaz, king of Judah, about the security of his kingdom, for something extraordinary that would indicate God’s providential care for his people. There is, dare I say, hardly anything extraordinary about a young woman giving birth. It happens all the time.
But why the virgin birth from the Christian perspective which takes up this prophecy and reads it with an altogether different significance? It troubles our rather linear and prosaic age and is sometimes taken as being anti-body or anti-sex. Mary is celebrated in the Christian understanding of things as both virgin and mother, combining in her own person all of the aspects of our humanity, but entirely in the context of God being with us uniquely in Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
The virgin birth opens us out to a rich theme of theological reflection; for instance, the ideas of creation, procreation and, then, redemption. God creates man, adam, without the aid of a woman; but in procreation, seen in the biblical story as post-fall, the sexual union of man and woman results in children all of whom are born of woman; but now, in the story of redemption, the new adam, Christ, is man born of woman without the aid of man. There is a kind of pleasing symmetry to this way of thinking. It challenges us about the understanding of our humanity. The virgin birth suggests something profound about our humanity. We are more though not less than sexual beings just as we are more though not less than merely physical creatures.
The Christmas mystery points us to a truer form of spiritual understanding. It is not gnostic; it is not about a flight from the physical world and from the things of the body but about the redemption of our humanity in all of its aspects. We become the sons of God through the Son of God conceived and born of the Virgin Mary. No longer servants “but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.” Something has changed because a virgin has conceived.
“Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son
and shall call his name Emmanuel”
Fr. David Curry
Second Sunday after Christmas
4 January 2015