The birth of a child has many layers of meaning. When a baby is born into a family, there can be all kinds of different feelings, all sorts of different meanings.
For one family, this is indeed a blessed event, filled with joy, running over with excitement, the fulfillment of hopes and dreams and plans, surrounded with booties, blankets and bottles, and accompanied by Dad surreptitiously sneaking off to Toys-R-Us to ogle the electric trains and footballs. All kinds of joy and pleasure.
But for another family this birth may signal only dread and foreboding: the child was not wanted, the child was born out of wedlock, there are already too many mouths to feed, who will take care of him … nothing but hassle. And such a child comes into a world of hostility at worst, resignation at best, and is a sign of burdens and not hope.
Or there is the yuppie family – too busy for this; or the family into which a baby's coming means adjustments hurriedly and reluctantly made. We got a card from friends of ours we had not seen for a long time. We knew they had a couple of children about the ages of ours and assumed that that was the end of that. But the card said, "Announcing our little bungle from heaven" … you did hear me, didn't you? Our little bungle from heaven.
Personally I'm fascinated by what the birth of a new infant can mean in the Third World, in the developing nations where poverty stalks nearly every family and where hunger dooms millions of children to starvation or chronic malnutrition. You might think that for parents in the Third World the coming of yet another child to an already burgeoning household might mean a disaster. But no, we know now that so many of the our western notions about family planning are unacceptable because for many of these folks a new child is the birth of new hope. New hope because the family name will be perpetuated, new hope because there is a greater chance that someone will survive in a place where tens of thousands of children never make it past the first five years of life, new hope because there are to be another pair of hands to work the fields.
I say that the birth of a child has many layers of meaning, and different people see the coming of a baby in a wide variety of ways.
Then maybe it is no surprise to discover that the birth of some babies around the year 733 BC in Jerusalem could be used by God's prophets to convey some very powerful messages. Children, remember, are viewed according to the circumstance in which you live, and their presence, their coming, has all sorts of meanings. God's prophet Isaiah pointed to at least three babies and spoke with power both to Judah and to us through these tiny fragile lives.
Let me set the stage politically for you. The year is 733 BC, and on the throne of Judah is a young king, Ahaz. Not too many years before the great king Uzziah, whom all had trusted and who had kept the nation intact, had died, and a good many folks, Isaiah the prophet among them, were afraid for the future of the little kingdom of Judah.
It was not without reason, too, that Isaiah and his contemporaries feared the future. For one thing, there was the ineptness of the new king, Jotham. Jotham replaced the justice of Uzziah's rule with a reign of terror and chose to lead the people not with the power of solid living but with solid iron.
And the other component that frightened the people of Judah was the presence of Assyria and the mean-spirited plotting of king with king, nation with nation, all across the region. Even Judah's traditional blood brothers, the nation of Israel to the north, were plotting along with Syria to overthrow the rule of Assyria. And while that might sound good on the surface, everybody knew that Judah would get caught in the mess.
Sure enough, just about the time the young man Ahaz succeeded to the throne of Judah, the Syrians and the Israelites marched into Judah to force Ahaz out and gain Judah's support for their rebellion against Assyria.
What was Ahaz to do? He could fight the invaders; or he could accept defeat and humiliation; or he could appeal to the mighty Assyrian empire to rescue him. What could he do? But here at his elbow is the prophet Isaiah, whose message is a very, very simple one. "Trust in God; keep calm, be quiet, do nothing". We would say, and Ahaz no doubt said, well, that's too simple. That's foolish. God helps those who help themselves, you know. But still Isaiah, "Trust in God; keep calm, be quiet, do nothing."
And then, as if to drive home his point, Isaiah brought into the picture some children; he paraded some babies around Jerusalem, babies with symbolic names. Names with a message. You have to remember that in the ancient world the name of a person is not just an accident and not just a matter of personal preference. A person's name really tells you who he is and it carries a whole message, an entire story. So the prophet’s children:
His first child he named Shear-yashub. Try that on your grandson for size: Shear-yashub, which means, "A remnant shall return." The prophet is trying to say to the king and to the nation, yes, you are going to suffer a military defeat, but that doesn't mean that God is finished. That doesn't mean the end of everything; Shear-yashub, a remnant shall return.
There is another child, again the prophet's own offspring. This one gets a moniker which I guarantee nobody is rushing to put on a birth certificate today: Mahershalalhashbaz. Don't ask me to spell it for you. Mahershalalhashbaz; and this child's name means, "The spoil speeds, the prey hastens". Horrible as it sounds, this too the prophet Isaiah meant for a message of hope, to say, Assyria is coming, Assyria will take care of Israel and Syria, you don't have to get involved. You can sit this one out, Ahaz; God is working through Assyria to solve your problem, don't be afraid. Don't fear. Just wait, just let God handle it. Mahershalalhashbaz.
But Ahaz was afraid. I guess we can't criticize too harshly. We too would be afraid in a mess like that – Assyria hovering around like a hungry lion, Syria and Israel already marching and besieging Jerusalem, Edom to the south taking advantage of a moment of weakness to seize some territory. The prophet's word, "Be calm and of good courage and trust your God" seems to practical people to be a counsel of foolishness. Better trust God, sure, but also keep your powder dry.
And so maybe you and I can understand Ahaz and what he did, and can identify with why he did it. Maybe you and I are closer in spirit to this ancient Judean king than we know. See for a couple of moments what fear drove Ahaz to do:
In the Second Book of Kings we are told that Ahaz went out and sacrificed his own son in the valley of Hinnom outside the city. The Scripture says of Ahaz, "his heart and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind", and so, in an act of sheer desperation, in an act of utter paganism, Ahaz destroys his own child to appease whatever gods there may be. What an irony! Here is Isaiah the prophet who with his wife is bringing babies into the world as signs of the mercy and the care of almighty God, and over here is faithless Ahaz the king, destroying his child out of fear. Because Ahaz cannot, will not, trust a God of love, he trusts a God of vengeance and of blood, he worships the idol that fear brings forth. What a terrible, terrible irony!
But you see, you and I do this too. Put us in a bind in which we think the things we find precious are crumbling, and we too trust the idols born of fear. Let the stock market rattle, and we out of fear sacrifice our hopes and our dreams for the false comforts of financial manipulations. We cannot seem to hear the prophet’s word, "Trust God, be calm, be of good courage."
Let the boss on the job threaten us a little, and the fear that gives birth to idols will cause us to compromise our integrity in order to keep the job and to maintain bread on the table.
Let the kid across the laboratory counter make fun of our moral standards, and the fear that stalks us and gives birth to idols will lead us to pitch out baby and bathwater alike and to sacrifice something very precious.
Ah, yes, you see, we are like Ahaz, because we, even in the face of the signs of hope that God gives us, even in the presence of a loving and caring God who keeps on speaking to us, we will sacrifice the best that we have. Fear has done it.
And there is a second way in which we are like Ahaz, there is another way in which we can identify with this fear-ridden king. When Isaiah brought his messages to the king, and these two men met at the water supply, the spring called Shiloah, here is Ahaz, so afraid that he feels he has to check out every little detail. What if the water supply is cut off? What it the enemy has poisoned the wells? What if the troops of the Syrians find their way through the conduits? What if, what if, what if?
And standing at his elbow is Isaiah and with him Isaiah's little message, the child whose name is Shear-yashub, a remnant shall return. Isaiah's word is this, "You are afraid of these two smoldering stumps, Israel and Syria. But Ahaz, they're almost burnt out. They're finished. They can't do you any harm. Get real, Ahaz, the things you fear are more illusory than real."
But again Ahaz cannot hear it. He cannot see it. Fear has deafened him, blinded him. And you and I know exactly what that feels like, don't we? We are too often more afraid of the things that might be than we are of the things that are. We fear more what might happen, what could happen, than we do what is happening. And so like Ahaz, our hearts are not disposed to trust in the God who is right here, at our very elbows, supplying us with bread and shelter and meaning all day, every day. No, we fear instead what might happen.
We store up bank accounts against the day that something might happen and we will need all that money. We build up political treasures – you know, I’ll do you a favor so you will do me one. We accumulate security systems and protective devices, we barricade ourselves in our homes, we deny ourselves chances for significant ministry, all in the name of being afraid of what might happen. And you and I become, you see, the cousins of Ahaz. Fear has done it.
So it seems not even the presence of Isaiah's two babies with their prophetic names can drive away our fears. It seems that because fear will drive us to trust an idol before we will trust the living God; it seems that because fear will push us to protect ourselves against those things that haven't even happened yet … it seems then that we need yet more. We need something or someone else to speak to us and to drive away our fears.
In one of the most dramatic moments of the Old Testament, the exasperated prophet cries out to the faithless King, well, then, if you will not believe, God will try once more. God will give you another sign, another infant; our God will speak to you through the mouths of babes yet once again.
"Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel, God with us." A son whose name is to be Immanu-el, God with us. And before this child grows up, Syria and Israel shall be emptied and the things you fear will vanish. You will have to suffer many things, yes, but God is with us, Immanuel.
This morning we will leave aside the debates about who this child is, whether the prophet's child, the king's own son, or the Messiah to come. We will leave aside the scholars’ discussions about the question of whether this is a virgin birth. And we will set aside all the arguments about how best to translate these verses. Listen instead with the heart of faith; listen instead to the faith of the church. The Lord himself will give you a sign: behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
When Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit, and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. Joseph, in other words, had the Ahaz impulse; fear almost led him to sacrifice the best thing he had in his life, but not quite. But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear. .." Do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. And we might well imagine the Ahaz in Joseph again, fearing what might happen, imagining the worst, worried about his reputation, conjuring up a thousand anxieties of what might occur.
But, when Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took his wife, but knew her not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus.
All this, says Matthew, took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us. God with us.
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer's ear. It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, and drives away his fear. He drives away our fear.
