The Young Woman
salms 31 (morning) 35 (evening)
Isaiah 7:10-25
2 Thessalonians 2:13 - 3:5
Luke 22:14-30
I have only a few minutes today because of an early meeting, but there is so much in our readings.
You can feel Isaiah's frustration. The king Ahaz of Judah will not accept Isaiah's counsel. Threatened by an armed coup engineered by the kings of neighboring Aram and Israel, Ahaz proposes an alliance with powerful Assyria. Isaiah says to the king, "Trust God, not Assyria (or Egypt)." This crisis will pass.
The prophet gives the king a sign about how temporary this crisis is. "Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel." Before this child can take solid food and know "how to refuse the evil and choose the good," these two kings will have departed, their threat over.
The name "Immanuel" means "God is with us." The name reinforces Isaiah's message -- trust God, not Assyria. It is most likely that the prophet is speaking of his own wife and son. Earlier in the chapter (7:3) Isaiah uses his other son's name to make a similar point. It is the prophet's right to name his son. Some scholars think that Isaiah may be referencing not his own son but the royal heir Hezekiah who succeeded Ahaz as king of Judah.
The word used to speak of the child's mother in Isaiah 7:14 is translated "young woman" in the NRSV. The Hebrew word refers to a woman of marriageable age. Hebrew translations into English render the word "young woman." But the Greek translation of the Septuagint (around 200 BCE) used the word "virgin," Since the Christian gospels were written in Greek and early Greek-speaking Christians used the Greek Septuagint as their scriptures, Matthew picked up the passage from Isaiah 7:14 and used it as a prophecy to proclaim the unique origins of Jesus as having being born of a virgin. (Mt. 1:18-25) Some scholars believe that the source of the story of the virgin birth of Jesus is as a prophecy that the early church adopted and added to its expression of faith about Jesus. The story or metaphor of the virgin birth, some scholars say, is not history remembered but rather prophecy historicized.
One of the measuring rods I use when I choose a Bible translation is to look at how it translates Isaiah 7:14. If the translator chooses the translation "young woman," then I know the translators are trying to use the word most faithful to the original text. If the translator chooses the word "virgin," then I suspect the translators have a theological agenda, probably to defend the historicity of the virgin birth. I prefer translations without the theological agenda.
I'd love to write a bit about the crucial passage in Luke's gospel where Jesus takes the cup and the bread and announces "the new covenant in my blood." This moment is central in the story of Jesus and the focus of Christian worship and practice since the resurrection.
Let me close with a few lyrical words of blessing from 2 Thessalonians: "Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word. ...May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ."
Lowell
posted by Lowell @ 7:38 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Hallelujah! You've cleared up in a few sentences the confusion about God working through natural laws instead of by, in this case, a miraculous conception. Thank you, thank you.
Peace and Hope
Just found some words about (and by) Thomas Merton who was on the calendar today--
He passed over to the true geography of his heart not by crossing seas and seeking out new cities but by sinking roots in one Kentucky place with a community of fellow travelers. Rooting his mind at Gethsemani, he paradoxically experienced the wider horizons of his times. Merton's stability at Gethsemani, through the thick and the thin of his passionate struggle for a better way to be a human being, is a major key to his appeal to a generation that risked, as he himself had risked, traveling down a road of rootless dissipation. Thomas Merton remained a monk for twenty-seven years because he could never stop loving becoming a monk. In spite of decades of monastic routine (or indeed precisely because of it), he could muster a poet's concentrated joy for the smallest turns of difference in time or temperature that marked a day as singular and new. Merton's joy--often muffled below the voicing of his public cares and concerns--situated him among those rare human beings who love the life they are leading and who have found their own true place. He reflects his typical joy as a monk in this journal entry dated May 21,1963:
Marvelous vision of the hills at 7:45 A.M. The same hills as always, as in the afternoon, but now catching the light in a totally new way, at once very earthly and very ethereal, with delicate cups of shadow and dark ripples and crinkles where I had never seen them before, the whole slightly veiled in mist so that it seemed to be a tropical shore, a newly discovered continent. A voice in me seemed to be crying, "Look! Look!" For these are the discoveries, and it is for this that I am high on the mast of my ship (have always been) and I know that we are on the right course, for all around is the sea of paradise.
Monastic life inculcated in Merton this heightened awareness, an alertness to the possibilities of the hour, what he called "the grip of the present." Alert expectancy was a habit he cultivated for a fruitful, examined life. His monastic stability and its enclosed horizons ironically made all the keener his innate tendency to be more ready to depart than to settle down in fixed ideas or perspectives. Merton was never afraid to walk away from himself when, through experience, prayer, and study, he found himself still too narrow and noninclusive to be a thoroughly catholic human being.
Peace, Janet
Janet,
Thank you for catching that it was also Thomas Merton's feast day Dec. 10. (It's too easy to miss a commemoration when we have two on the same day.) For me, having him included in the proposed calendar was one of the highlights of its proposal.
One of his commentators says, "In the several decades of his monastic life, Thomas Merton became a dervish of praise spinning around a still point of presence manifesting on the surface and in the depths of everything, especially the human heart. He labored to name this mysterious center of being, 'a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will' He called it 'le point vierge' -- the 'virgin point' of the spirit where one meets God, and which is the glory of God in us. It is like 'a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven,' seen at once in the landscape of a numinous dawn, and the inscape of the heart's secret beauty. It is in everyone and everything..." (from "Thomas Merton A Book of Hours," edited by Kathleen Deignan)
Lowell
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