We greeted the confirmation that we truly were expecting our first child with joy. After postponing children for 7 years so I could finish graduate school and seminary first, we were more than ready for that baby to come along. Likewise for our second after an interval of another 6 years, that time not by design. Both of our daughters were long awaited and gladly anticipated.
So it’s hard for me to understand the situation when a pregnancy is not greeted so gladly. But I can use my imagination to grasp and even empathize with how circumstances might make one feel the arrival of a child will be challenging or even overwhelming. Honestly, being new parents is hard enough even when that little one is loved and wanted.
This fourth Sunday of Advent, the Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 7:10-16, and Gospel lesson, Matthew 1:18-25, give us snapshots of two men who received the promise of a baby. Though they are separated by hundreds of years, the promised infant turns out to be the same holy Child.
The promise was first heard around 730 B.C. by the man who was then king of Judah, Ahaz. It was God’s response through the prophet Isaiah to Ahaz’s unwillingness to ask a sign of God after one was offered. Fairly clearly, the sign was originally intended to be assurance for the young king that God would protect him from his enemies to the north. But it’s likely that Ahaz had already connived his own political solution, a questionable alliance with another more powerful and more dangerous enemy.
So when Ahaz refused to receive a sign he would have understood, God gave him a sign much less plain to him, but much more pregnant, if you will, with potential, the prophecy that a young woman, a maiden, a virgin, would conceive and bear a son who would be named Immanuel, “God with us.” It is unclear if there was any birth in Ahaz’s time which might have fulfilled the prophecy, although both Isaiah and Ahaz had sons who might have been the eighth century child meant in the prophecy.
What is clear is that more than seven hundred years later an angel came to the carpenter named Joseph and spoke that same prophecy to him in a dream, this time clearly using the word “virgin” and assuring him that his betrothed’s pregnancy was in fact this promise fulfilled. In this case, the words found a willing welcome as Joseph arose and “did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.” And that difference between two men’s responses to the promise of a baby has made all the difference in the world.