The Choice

Isaiah 7:10-16.   Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19.   Romans 1:1-7.   Matthew 1:18-25

The profound promise found in Isaiah 7 that a virgin (or a young woman) would conceive and bear a Son and call Him Immanuel, meaning God with us, was not given in a vacuum. The historical setting for this prediction was fear…an emotion that often causes us to make wrong choices.

In about 734 BC, the northern Kingdom of Israel formed an alliance with Syria to help conquer the growing menace of Assyria, a kingdom located in what is known today as Iraq. Pekah, the King of Israel, and Rezin, the King of Syria, decided that it would be better if Ahaz, probably the coregent at the time with his father King Jotham of Judah, was removed from power and a puppet king installed by the coalition in his place. So, they decided to launch a preemptive strike against Judah.

At the opening of Isaiah 7 the prophet found the coregent inspecting the city’s water supply in anticipation of the impending siege. The coalition of Syria and Israel had already done quite a bit of damage in the territory of Judah and Ahaz reeked of fear. Isaiah wanted Ahaz to express trust in God by asking for a sign…but Ahaz refused. You see, he had already made the fatal mistake of trusting in the strength of another human power rather than on God. He had already sent off an appeal for help from Tiglath-Pileser, the King of Assyria. The Assyrians did respond and the coalition came to nothing…but Assyria would later turn against Judah and nearly destroy Jerusalem. Ahaz’s rejection of God’s offer cost Judah dearly. Assyrian troops swept through Judah, destroying everything in their path. The people of Judah starved as regular farming became impossible under the conditions of war…and so when the child born to the virgin was about twelve or thirteen years of age, he would be eating whatever he could find in the wilderness…curds and honey. 

Like the bail outs being offered by China today. Nice temporary roads…temporary yes, because they don’t last more than a year in most cases…nice railroads…nice financial aid…but pay-back day will come and then the choices made today will appear to have been foolish and rash.

Trusting in human powers rather than on God or confusing human powers with God is a mistake humanity has made repeatedly throughout history…

I believe this is the reason why Matthew saw in this prophecy of Isaiah a likeness of what happened with Mary. So many years later, politically, the Jews were in another pickle at that time. Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece had all come and gone…then there was a brief period of self-rule under the Maccabees and then Rome and Rome ruled with an iron fist and some religious leaders, most notably the Sadducees, took full advantage of the subjugation and oppression of their fellow Jews. Messiah fever was at its peak and some, like the Zealots, were trying to take matters into their own hands. A few self-proclaimed Messiahs had already led their followers to their deaths. But it seemed that few looked to God for help…so God sent them a “Sign”…with a capital “S”. God sent them His Son as rightful heir of the Kingdom.

For this reason, Matthew began with the genealogy of Christ. This is not a precise historical genealogy as some would want it to be…it is simply a rough sketch of Jesus’ ancestry that would serve as a backdrop for what was to follow in the rest of the Gospel story. The intention was to demonstrate that Jesus is King through His lineage…while this might not seem important to us, it was and still is very important to the Jews.

A Jewish man, Stan Telchin, in his book “Betrayed!”, tells of his daughter’s decision to become a follower of Jesus. This decision prompted him to set out to disprove the Messiahship of Jesus in order to win her back. To do so, he had to study the New Testament for the first time in his life…but he didn’t have to read very far. He was convinced by the time he got to the end of Matthew’s genealogy. Stan, as a good Jew, knew that all Jewish ancestral records had been destroyed in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. There was no way possible for any Jew to prove that he was a descendent of David since that time…Jesus was the last one. And so he became a believer in his daughter’s Messiah…just by reading the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew…

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Jesus’ genealogy is that, unlike most genealogies of the royal and rich and famous, the weak links, so to speak, were not eliminated or hidden…instead the people of questionable character, an adulterous king, an unfaithful wife, foreigners, and a loose woman were included…I believe for good reason…in Jesus’ Kingdom, even the marginalized and despised have a significant place. Besides, who can claim to have access to heaven through a perfect, sinless life? Aren’t we all just regular oddities who have been forgiven? As someone once said, God has the power to raise heroes from zeroes through His grace.

But Matthew’s point in quoting from the prophecy of Isaiah was to show that this King born to the Virgin Mary would render our fears invalid for all time. Ahaz feared Israel and Syria and made a bad choice in turning to Assyria for help. The Jews at the time of Jesus had to make the same choice. God or Rome…or a violent Messiah figure like Judas Maccabaeus. But God gave them the Sign of signs…the one born to the Virgin…the crucified Christ Child Who rose from the dead…He defeated the greatest enemy of all time. He set us free from the greatest slavery, exile, and oppression of all time. 

The Jews that rejected Jesus and trusted rather in Rome or a violent Messiah figure, were ultimately destroyed in AD 70…Rome itself did not last either…all the kingdoms of this world, great and powerful empires, have come and gone…but this Kingdom lasts forever. 

Because unlike the human powers, Jesus was without trace of the one thing that trips us all up…He was without sin. A Chichewa proverb says, “The good taste of the chicken starts all the way from the egg.” You see it doesn’t matter how good we try to be…we are flawed from the egg, so to speak…and we tend to make bad choices in our lives that affect us and others. This is the major problem shared by all leaders. But not so with Jesus. He was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit…unlike the child born to the young woman in Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus was God incarnate. 

As the Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans, this reality of Jesus being the Son of God was only “discovered” later by His followers once God raised Him from the dead by the power of the same Spirit through Whom He had been conceived. You see, the resurrection was the ultimate sign given to the Jews and indeed to every human since then…Jesus through death defeated death. We need not fear death any longer…indeed, we need not fear the coalition of sin, death, and the devil…we can be filled with assurance that just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so He will raise us all who are in Him as well. 

This is the message of the Eucharist. Sunday after Sunday we reenact the greatest sign of them all…through these signs of His Body broken and His Blood shed we declare to all and sundry that Jesus has swallowed up death in victory and has released us who were once living in darkness and fear from the body of death. In Him we have eternal life…and these elements of bread and wine serve as our sign to this very day.

The question then, is quite simple. If this is our sign, what is our choice?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2019