December 1998 Issue

According to Paul Tillich, theologians speak from within the circle of commitment and community. They focus on the saving impact of the concrete without making an idol of it. "Only those statements are theological which deal with their object insofar as it can become a matter of being or non-being for us."¹

The debates that mob the Immanuel passage, Isaiah 7:10-17, are silent when we ask, How does the Incarnation become for us a matter of being or non-being? Questions about the Hebrew noun `almah, the reading of the Septuagint, the identity of the child, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and so on—while remaining crucial—neither dictate our interpretation nor dominate our worship. How is Immanuel infused into the microscopic cells of life within the womb? The question is not merely unanswerable; it is irrelevant. How? does not attend the Ultimate. Medical technology can be barren of mystery. To the left brain analysis of the issues we add right brain celebration of truth of which we cannot conceive, but out of which we can live.

Ironically, the church has transmuted a text which honors the asking of questions and the seeking of signs into dogma which bludgeons the seeker into submission. Yet, failing to engage honest doubt may reduce the Incarnation, the infusing of the Infinite into the finite, to a fantasy no more substantive than Santa Claus. We gather at the manger not only with the simplicity of shepherds but also with the wonder of the wise.

The Incarnation beggars the mind and the keyboard at the same time it fills the heart. Deeper than Sheol, higher than heaven, nearer than breath, farther out of reach than the edge of the universe, it is intimate as well as infinite truth. God, of whom every verbal or visual icon is as false as true, becomes known in the cadence of a voice, the twinkle of an eye, and the touch of a hand. The Incarnation, which Christian tradition teaches occurred uniquely in human history in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, continues whenever the people of God today become human faces of grace, hands of compassion, voices of justice, and beautiful feet of peace.

The human actors of Isaiah 7 are themselves partakers of incarnation. Ahaz is a ruler who renders lip service to the liberating power of God but refuses to risk anything to actualize it for himself or his people. Whether enfleshed as the impotence of Ahaz, the cruelty of Herod, or the benevolence of Hezekiah, earthly rule is set over against the sovereignty of the Christ, in the glory of whose coming we may unlock the gates, fling open the doors, and lift up our hearts. Christians seduced by the promise of political power remain in the marble halls of Jerusalem, but Immanuel is born elsewhere. Sadly the pet preachers of the powerful keep faith from deepening in response to questions framed in community and hope, lest such faith erode the foundations of the status quo.

Isaiah is the speaker of God who invites, confronts, and points beyond himself and his words to the in breaking of the Infinite. Prophets like him, confronting the complacent platitudes and obsolete dogmas which promenade as piety, call us to midwife the new births of the Timeless. No wonder that the Spirit brooding over his person and his poetry swept across the Ancient Near East and the generations to awaken other voices that sang of a return from exile, a suffering servant and everlasting signs.

Almost hidden in the text is the mother in whose womb tiny cells of a separate life had begun to grow. No man can comprehend this sign of the pregnant woman who even in her silence and hiddenness bears light and life. The vehemence of our debates about her sexual experience prior to conception suggest the depth of the anxiety she creates in us as participants in a sexist patriarchal tradition. The woman's faith—whether she is a prophet in her own right, the wife of Isaiah or Ahaz, Mary the mother of Jesus, or a woman today—"makes possible God's entrance into history."²

As I write, I feel within myself the rising insecurity of the male. The celebration of woman takes nothing from the equal (but only equal) standing of man. So long as men maintain our privilege by the subjugation of women, so long as any human being forces other persons or other parts of creation into literal, economic, psychological, racial, national, or spiritual slavery, we will not fully experience the abundant life flowing from the authentic being of all. In a poem entitled Advent, Kathleen Norris sings that pregnant women "are home / and exile, beginning and end, / end and means."³ In her own being apart from the child whom she carried, the nameless woman of Isaiah 7, like all the outcast and marginalized, bears witness to our exile and our home.

In the silence and secrecy of her womb God knot together the child called Immanuel. The pesky Old Testament, always more concrete and literal than suits our neo-gnostic disdain for the sweaty flesh and the here-and-now, indicates the child of chapter 7 is Maher-shalal-hash-baz of chapter 8. In the years it took for this child to be conceived, born, and weaned the political threat against Judah would cease to exist. The Incarnation ever holds before our eyes the scandal of the concrete: If in the ancient past and the distant future Immanuel! God with us, so also now. In the cocaine baby abandoned at the hospital, God with us! In the child infected with AIDS, God with us! In the mother who must choose between welfare with medical insurance for her children or subsistent wages without it, God with us! In the street people who do not find shelter in our empty churches, God with us!

As we begin in a fragmentary way to appropriate for our own lives today the once-in-history Incarnation of the Christ in Bethlehem, we experience Immanuel. "Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me" (Mt 25:40, NRSV). As we live before the Eternal out of questioning and hope, out of courage and love, Immanuel, God with us, becomes not merely a doctrine with which the mind must wrestle, and to which the will must adhere. Immanuel becomes God with us, calling us out of non-being into being, out of death into life, out of darkness into incomprehensible Light.

John Hamilton

1. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 14.
2. Rosemary Radford Reuther, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 154.
3. Kathleen Norris, Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality, ed. Marilyn Sewell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 63.