His Name Immanuel
In our readings just before and on Christmas Day we have been presented with texts which are familiar yet still astonishing owing to the significance which, through the course of millennia, they have been understood to possess.
In the case of the seventh chapter of Isaiah, the fourteenth verse has to comprise one of the most theologically laden in all of Scripture.
14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign;
Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,
and shall call his name Immanuel.
We have only to think next of the way these words are seen as fulfilled in the Gospels, to see the extraordinary span over which the meaning unfolded – as it continues to do for us today:
Then Joseph her husband, … while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. 21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.
22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 23 Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. (Matthew 1:19-23)
Taken together, these texts frame nothing less than the Christian understanding of the incarnation and birth of Christ which we celebrate at Christmas. Moreover, in doing so, they convey a sense of purpose and direction to history that was in fact revolutionary.
For many in the Greco-Roman world, as indeed in many Eastern worldviews today, time was seen as cyclical (as caught up in nature’s eternal return) or degenerative (as a decline from a Golden Age). In sharp contrast, the Hebrew Scriptures introduced a strongly linear conception of time where history has a definite beginning in the creation, followed by a trajectory guided by divine providence leading towards a definitive end in the eschaton at the end of time.
Western secular culture as well a Christian theology has, since the renaissance, had a complex relationship to this profound world view – seeming to alternate by turns between rejection, reduction or identification and even critical synthesis.
But the fundamental truth to which the old Testament prophecies lead and the coming of Christ at Bethlehem made manifest, is the startlingly powerful one of both our need for, and the actual availability of, salvation.
The great arc of the Biblical narrative presents our need for salvation as rooted in the time of humanity’s first sin in the Garden of Eden with the Fall – when it was Adam and Eve’s misguided act of hubris that led not to progress but rather to regression and the loss of their original blessed state. The problem of alienation from God, in consequence of sin, defined the problem which only the coming of God incarnate as the Messiah could solve.
The immediate context of the great passage before us in Isaiah was one of acute national peril when a new young King, Ahaz, aged only twenty, faced a military coalition formed by the Kings of Syria and Northern Israel (Ephraim). At this moment of crisis Isaiah counsels Ahaz to trust in God rather than foreign allies, yet instead, Ahaz throws in his lot with the Assyrians and becomes their mere vassal in consequence.
God’s response to this rejection of trust in him by King Ahaz becomes the moment that transforms the entire episode from one about merely that time and place into something so wide as to embrace each and every one of us.
Far from pulling back from the covenant made with the forebear of Ahaz King David, recorded in 2 Samuel 7:12-17 it is now renewed and transformed in what will become an altogether transcendent way. God had promised that David’s lineage would be established forever upon the throne in Jerusalem, and Isaiah promises now a new sign that will presage a fulfilment of that Covenant on a scale of magnitude that reached far beyond merely the people of Israel at that moment. Rather it would ultimately come to extend to all people who would believe in the coming Messiah, for “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.”
The name Immanuel is central here for it extends throughout Isaiah’s prophecy and into the New Testament – embodying the overarching assurance that “God is with us.” It thus carried an eschatological significance affirming that in the end, from that time forth and despite the present and unfolding crises of later history, God will remain present with His people. Moreover, that people could trust in the salvation brought with the birth of the Christ who was the Messiah to come, at times and through ages long after Ahaz – all in ultimate fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant first made many centuries before.
The oracle of Isaiah finds its ultimate fulfillment in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary: God with us in human form.
The convergence of Old Testament promise and New Testament fulfilment in the figure of Emmanuel reveals the coherence of Scripture and the consistency of God’s redemptive purposes across the millennia.
The child Emmanuel of Bethlehem becomes the corner-stone upon which the entire edifice of Christian faith and hope rests: the living assurance that God remains eternally present with His people, accomplishing through the incarnate Son what no earthly power could possibly contrive.
Hence the cosmic resonance of the words of Isaiah 9, 6:
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:
and the government shall be upon his shoulder:
and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
The mighty God,
The everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace.
The timeless transcendental significance of these words has always been hard for us to handle without reducing them to something far less significant. This is well illustrated by the recurring temptations to propose a mere earthly utopia instead.
This has been a recurring dream turned nightmare despite the early exchanges of Erasmus and Thomas More, right down to the absurdities of bio-cosmism. This last was a bizarre combination of vulgar godless materialism and Gnostic spirituality which formed the secret teaching of Soviet Marxism – wherein the goals of religion (collective paradise, overcoming of all suffering, full individual immortality, resurrection of the dead, victory over time and death, conquest of space far beyond the solar system) were imagined to be achievable here and now through the development of modern science and technology in an all powerful state. (An intellectual folly neatly summarised by the iconoclastic Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek in his little book, Against Progress.)
Even Christian thinkers were not immune to this contagion as was evident in Protestantism and the Social Gospel movement along with such thinkers as Albrecht Ritschl and Walter Rauschenbusch who again began to equate (and therefore reduce) the coming of the Kingdom of God to such aspects as could be achieved through the ethical and social reconstruction of society.
The catastrophe of two World Wars shattered this overly optimistic identification of human progress with divine will and led to the rise of Neo-Orthodoxy or the “Dialectical Theology” of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Who in The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–43), argued that history does not solve the problem of sin; it merely enlarges the scale of human power for both good and evil.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer arguably delineated the contours of the emerging late-capitalist ‘administered world’ (verwaltete Welt), of which we are very much in the grip now, as “the point at which civilization itself returns to barbarism.” A kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the Nietzschean kingdom of the “Last Men,” where in the words of Žižek, the ‘administered world’ is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment and is “unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse” (or a rock and a hard place). All this leaves Žižek to observe that, “After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together, the only indubitable ‘progressive’ goal that humanity can pursue today, …. is to simply survive.”
Such a purely human vision stands in all its poverty in stark contrast with that of Scripture. The early Church Fathers unanimously understood the words of Isaiah, and those of 7:14 in particular, as a messianic prophecy directly applicable to Christ – and as such as part of a cosmic narrative of salvation of such unique grandeur as alone could be adequate the problem of the fallen human condition.
Justin Martyr, Augustine, Cyril of Jerusalem, Jerome, Chrysostom, and many others devoted their vast theological energy to defending the messianic character of the text of Isaiah and its fulfilment in the virginal conception of Jesus.
Their consensus was grounded in careful exegesis and theological reflection, and thus represents a weighty interpretive tradition that cannot be dismissed.
Thus emerges the profound significance in turn of the name Emmanuel as it reaches its apex within Matthew’s Gospel in Chapter 28:20, where the risen Jesus promises His disciples:
“Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Here is the assurance renewed and fulfilled wherein God is truly and fully present with His people, not merely symbolically through a divinely appointed child, but hypostatically in the person of God’s own Son incarnate.
The child born to the virgin becomes Emmanuel precisely because in Him, God’s very self enters into human existence and establishes an eternal presence among His people.
And while that presence takes concrete form in the birth of a child who bears God’s name, and with the coming of Christ, there is too the presence which we know to continue in the post Resurrection experience of the Church ever since and also our experience of the Eucharist here, now, and always.
Thus can we begin to understand the plenitude of St Matthew’s claim that, “all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet” and his conviction that, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the entire trajectory of God’s purposes announced through the Law and the Prophets finds its historical realization and eschatological completion.
The Messiah has come. God is with us. Immanuel.