Sermon Advent 4, 21 December
Readings: Isaiah 7.10-16; Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25.
Theme: Whose Baby?
This Sunday marks the final part of the season of Advent. We now enter a transition period between the time of waiting and the time of arrival. It is a little like when we are called for boarding in the airport waiting lounge, but are still having to wait in the queue while the staff get things ready to board for take-off. The signal that this end of the waiting period is beginning is provided by the message of an angel to the husband of Mary, Joseph, that the child born of her is from God. Angels often provide this message in the scriptures that something is about to change, a new situation or a new phase is beginning.
Together with marking this transition period, the readings of the Fourth Sunday of Advent highlight a key theme of this new church year; namely, that Jesus is the long-awaited-Jewish-Messiah. But the Gospel for this Sunday puts a twist into this story. Not only is Jesus the Jewish Messiah, he is also God. The appearance of the angel to Joseph communicates this message. It tells us that heaven and earth are about to come together in a special and unique way in the birth of Christ (Messiah). If previously, these two dimensions of reality connected, for the Jewish people through the Temple in Jerusalem and the weekly celebration of the Sabbath, now these dimensions will come together in the flesh of the Christ-child, Jesus.
Neither dimension of reality will be cancelled out by the other in this adoption of flesh by God; but, in the advent of the Christ-child, there will be a transformation of flesh, of the nature of the cosmos. The flesh with its mortal frame and decaying nature will, through grace, come to share in the resurrected spiritual-body of Jesus. The cosmic arrow of time, pointing towards the entropic cycle of heat death and growing disorder, will be redirected towards the eternity of the New Creation.
Some of the Jews had imagined that this coming together of heaven and earth in the Messiah would come about through a member of the royalty, a son of David, bringing to fulfillment the Davidic monarchy, and so restoring unity and honour to the people of Israel. Echoes of this vision are present in the first reading in which Ahaz, a king of Judah in the line of David, against the wishes of Isaiah, submits to the Assyrian King, Tiglath-Pileser III, who eventually attacks and conquers Syria (Aram) and Israel (Ephraim) (2 Kings 16.7-9).
The context for this incident, alluded to in the reading from Isaiah, is the Syro-Ephraimite war, in which Syria and Israel had tried to persuade Judah to agree to an anti-Assyrian coalition with them, but to no avail. Isaiah speaks of the sign, which he offers Ahaz against his will, of a future son, Immanuel (‘God is with us’). However, this sign will not come to fruition, as long before this son will grow up the Assyrians will have conquered Israel and Syria, and Judah will have become a vassal state. So, the prophetic promise of Isaiah goes unfulfilled at that time. Yet, this prophecy leaves an indelible mark on the history of Israel that one day, an Immanuel will arise from the house of David and that he will bring a final unity to the divided and conquered kingdoms.
This bringing together of the divided kingdoms by the Messiah should also be read as an intimation that just as the chosen one, the Christ, will unite these kingdoms, so too this Immanuel will bring heaven and earth together. He will be the ‘God is with us’ (Immanuel) sacrament, and this new presence will unite these two dimensions of reality just as he will unite the divided kingdoms of Israel.
The promise of the one to come is also a promise of the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. The promise of this Kingdom is announced and embodied in word and sacrament each time that the church gathers to celebrate, proclaim, and enact the Eucharistic good news that the Messiah has come.
The second reading and the Gospel pick up this theme of redeeming a long-foretold promise, but they step it up a gear. Now the ‘Immanuel’, or rather ‘Emmanuel’, as we shift languages to Greek from Hebrew, will not only be of the house of David, that is according to royal flesh, he will also be of the Holy Spirit. Paul speaks of this dual identity of the child using the opposing binary terms of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. He will be born of the ‘flesh’, but declared Son of God according to the ‘spirit’.
The Gospel repeats this sacramental dual-identity theme by incorporating it into the account of the angelic visitation to Joseph. This episode convinces Joseph to take Mary as his wife, even though she is already with child, since the child born of Mary is “from the Holy Spirit”. This ‘Emmanuel’ will finally be the long-promised ‘God is with us’.
So, whose baby is it? The Scriptures are clear. The baby is both ours and God’s. Jesus is both ‘son of man’ and ‘Son of God’. This sacramental dual identity expresses the heart of what we will be celebrating when Christmas eventually comes: God has become one of us, a ‘son of man’, so that we may be adopted into the divine family as ‘sons and daughters of God’.
Heaven and earth will no longer be united through the Temple in Jerusalem and the celebration of the Sabbath, but through the ‘God is with us’ Christ-child who is to be born. In this child all flesh, all nature, both personal and cosmic, will be grafted onto the divine life. No longer will the entropic forces of degradation have the final word on matter, because matter has been assumed by the divine Life itself. In so assuming matter all of nature is sacramentally transformed by the grace of God.
It is as if the cosmos was once an orphan child, lost to its primal forces of death and decay. But now that Life itself has enfolded the cosmos in its arms, these two kingdoms of flesh and spirit are no longer divided. In the flesh of the Messiah, the whole of the cosmos has been sacramentally united with the Spirit of God. This is why, as Paul says in the Letter to the Romans, the baby born will be ‘declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead’.
So, let us rejoice on this Fourth Sunday of Advent that the Christ-child is ours and we are his.