Isaiah 7:10 - 14
Later, the Lord sent this message to King Ahaz: “Ask the Lord your God for a sign of confirmation, Ahaz. Make it as difficult as you want—as high as heaven or as deep as the place of the dead.”
But the king refused. “No,” he said, “I will not test the Lord like that.”
Then Isaiah said, “Listen well, you royal family of David! Isn’t it enough to exhaust human patience? Must you exhaust the patience of my God as well? All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).
The Old Testament lesson for the day comes from the prophet Isaiah. At a tenuous time in Israel's history, King Ahaz tried to make alliances with the king of Assyria, a neighboring nation. Politically, the alliance may have made sense. It may have provided military protection for Israel. By selling themselves to Assyria, Israel would ransom themselves in order not to be overrun. Historically, the deal seemed wise.
But to create such an alliance meant that Israel was trusting in a foreign king for life and well-being rather than trusting in Yahweh. So Isaiah would not support the deal. Isaiah adamantly insisted that Ahaz not trust in other humans, the kings of nations, but Ahaz was bent toward the protection he could arrange from human powers.
It was a prototypical bind in which the person squeezed trusts in the evil he/she sees and knows more than the life and deliverance that cannot yet be seen. The seen and known seems more reliable, even when it exacts a tremendous price, than the unknown.
So Isaiah told Ahaz that God's intervention and presence would be manifested through a sign that would come outside the natural order of things. He told the king that a virgin would conceive and give birth to a child, and that the child would be a sign and an embodiment of God's presence with the people . . . "Immanuel, God-with-us."
In Matthew 1:22 - 23, Matthew connected the birth of Jesus to this Isaiah passage. The birth of Jesus, announced by angelic message through dreams to Joseph, came outside the natural order. For Matthew, Jesus embodied Immanuel. Jesus was God-with-us. The rest of the Gospel account witnesses to that embodiment.
Years ago I heard Thomas Keating use a phrase for our contemporary lives that struck me as true. He said that as we live open to God, lives that are increasingly growing in depth and meaning, we ourselves becoming a living experience of Jesus. I've held onto that phrase for many, many years now. I think it's a wonderful way of thinking about our contemporary lives.
Let me put it another way. As Jesus embodied God's character and nature, taking Divinity into his own flesh, so you and I are invited to embody the Spirit of Jesus in our time. We are not so much invited to mimic his life -- as many want to suggest -- as we are invited to live fully the lives we've been given by God, and thereby to live the essence of Jesus' life in our contemporary existence. In effect, we are energized to live our full humanity as a sign of God's presence in us and in our world.
To have a lived experience of Jesus means that my life embodies the Christ who was born among us and who was resurrected to new life. Jesus now lives through you and me. Our real experience is an experience of Christ.
How do we live this experience of Jesus? Contemplative prayer and practice train us in the art of letting go of that which is counter to our humanity, counter to our ongoing connection with God. Prayer and spiritual practice are the places I suggest we begin for this lived experience of Jesus.
Prayer and spiritual practice help us live life from the inside-out. The essence of who we are flavors our living more and more. Our being shapes our doing. We live with meaning, a depth of purpose. We receive what life gives us, and find God somewhere in all of it. We find that we don't have to manage and control other people or our circumstances. We are held steady inwardly, free from compulsions. We find life in that which draws us, not in what drives us.
In these ways and others, Christ continues to be born into our world, and specifically, into the real lives you and I live.
In this way, Immanuel, God-with-us, comes to this very day.
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