Why does Isaiah in our 1st Reading today (Isaiah 7:10-14) insist on giving King Ahaz a sign, even though he says he doesn’t want one? You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGDYvhgv8Ts
The answer is that Ahaz, threatened by local kings, had allied himself with the military might of Assyria; and then to demonstrate his loyalty this young king had sacrificed his son to the pagan gods of the Assyrians, ransacked the Jerusalem Temple of its treasure for a gift, and replaced the Jewish altar with one dedicated to pagan worship. Isaiah however insists that the true God is at work, even if Ahaz has rejected him, and that the sign of this is not some powerful army, but a defenceless young woman having a baby; so different from the fearsome armies of Assyria who would be more likely to rape and kill such a woman rather than show her respect.
Our problem is that we are so used to the idea that a young woman having a baby is a sign from God - Mary giving birth to Jesus - that we do not realise what a shocking idea this is. We proclaim in our Psalm today “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples… Let the Lord enter! He is the king of glory.” ; and then without realising how strange this is, we apply it to the birth of the helpless baby Jesus. In our 2nd Reading St Paul lays this paradox out very starkly. Jesus is both a human “descendant of David” and also “the Son of God in all his power.” Most people nowadays, whether they choose to believe or not to believe in God, tend to think of God as the supreme universal power, and ascribe to this power all sorts of semi-magical properties. It is very difficult to think of such a power as most of all present in a tiny human baby, that this baby is “Emmanuel” : God with us.
I think we are all much more like Ahaz than we care to admit. One of the problems is that the earlier views of God in the Bible are precisely ones of God as a god of war helping his people to defeat their enemies by giving them greater military might. It was only gradually, not least because Israel realised that there were many empires much more powerful than they were, that the prophets began to teach a different idea of what God’s power was like. So we get that great phrase from Psalm 20, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” Isaiah echoes this, not just as we see him in conflict with Ahaz today, but also very explicitly in Chapter 31 where he says “Woe to those .. who rely on horses, who trust in the multitude of their chariots .. but do not look to the Holy One of Israel, or seek help from the Lord.”
This idea that God saves through military might was still around in the time of Jesus. Many people acclaimed Jesus as the Messiah and shouted Hosanna because they expected him to somehow raise up a power that would drive the Romans, and indeed any other oppressive foreigners, out of their land. His rejection of this idea of what the Messiah, the Christ, would be like was precisely why so many of the crowd turned against him and began to shout “Crucify him.” Jesus is not prepared to do anything that might deliberately seek to make him popular. We are sometimes bewildered when he asks those he has healed not to tell others. We fail to realise that he asked this of them because he knew false popularity was fake. Indeed, it was something he had rejected way back, when he was tempted in the desert.
The most extraordinary example of his total rejection of popularity occurs in the Gospel of St John. Jesus has been teaching that his followers must be so close to him that they must, in a way, eat his body and drink his blood. (6:53-56) This leads to many of his followers turning away from him; and you might think that Jesus would have said to his closest disciples “Please stay.” But instead, he challenges them, saying “Do you also wish to go away?” (6:67) We are thus shown that the truths of God do not rely on the number of people who accept them. Sadly it is a mistake we Christians today still make, thinking that if numbers are large, if there are a lot of people in church, or at a place of pilgrimage, then that is a sign that God is there. We get the same mistake made by nations engaged in war. Too often they claim that God is with them rather than with the enemy, whereas God is actually with those who suffer rather than those who triumph.
The claim that God is not basically a faraway power but a power close to us and with us, a power more likely to be met in a mother with her new baby, or just in general with the poor and the lowly, than in large gatherings of successful people is why celebrating Christmas each year is so important. We see Joseph in our Gospel today (Matt 1:18-24) agonising over the woman he planned to marry being found to be pregnant. It is already in his mind not to punish her publicly, as was the normal thing to do, but then he goes one step further. His remarkable decision is described as being based on a dream in which God has spoken to him. In effect, he meets God in his mind. I am afraid I get more than a little irritated with people who want to suggest that if an idea comes into my mind, then it is “just in the mind,” and cannot possible be a message from God. I get irritated because I want to ask them where they get the idea that unless God is a voice booming at us from the sky it cannot be God. Surely God being God, being the power that has created us, is most likely to speak to us is in our minds. Deep down it seems to me, the reason some people want God to be a voice booming from on high, is that they do not want to think that God can be within them. They want to think of themselves as entirely self-sufficient. But even in scientific terms we humans are never self-sufficient, we are a product of the creative force whether we believe that force is God or not. It is better I think not to be like Ahaz and rely simply on external forces, rather we need to look within ourselves, and find there the kind of guidance that led Joseph to do the gentle loving thing, resisting worldly pressure to take revenge on a woman he thought had wronged him, and instead taking her “To his home.”
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