The prophecy of Isaiah 7 must be one of the most famous in the Old Testament. “The maiden is with child, and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel.” St Matthew tells us, in his narration of the annunciation to St Joseph, that “all of this took place to fulfil” this prophecy – the first of many times when Matthew makes it explicit that the life and works of Jesus are the fulfilment of the prophecies of old. Indeed, he relates how Jesus himself says: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17).
A straightforward understanding would go something like this: the prophets predict the future – perhaps not in complete detail, but they create an expectation; Jesus satisfies that expectation. Indeed, Moses himself tells us in Deuteronomy 18 that this is how we can tell a true prophet from a false one: if a prophet says something is going to happen and it doesn’t, then the prophet was false and we can ignore him.
However, the Old Testament scholar might respond by telling us that Isaiah’s Immanuel prophecy was nothing to do with Jesus. It was not a prognostication of some distant miracle, but a warning to King Ahaz not to make the mistake of allying himself with some great foreign power in order to secure his realm during the Syro-Ephraimite Crisis. Matthew’s Gospel, it might be suggested, has misappropriated Isaiah, and we need to realise that a prophet is not some Nostradamus figure gazing into a crystal ball, but a spokesman for God against injustice and faithlessness.
There is, though, a more sophisticated way of reading prophecy that allows it to speak to its own time while at the same time truly pointing towards Christ’s self-proclaimed fulfilment. Perhaps Isaiah’s own principal concern was the geo-politics of the eighth century BC; does that require that the meaning of his prophecy was exhausted by – let us say – the birth of a royal baby 800 years before the birth of Christ? Surely not. If we believe that God’s hand is at work in history, and most especially in the history of his chosen people, then it must be possible that the words of the divine prophets, and the histories of their own times, point beyond themselves to some deeper meaning.
I suggest that the words of Isaiah did, in the first instance, point to a royal pregnancy that God offered as a sign of the transient nature of the threat to Ahaz from his near neighbours. It may well be that, as far as Isaiah himself was aware, this was the whole meaning of this particular prophecy. But the fundamental message of Isaiah was that God was present among his people, that he would never abandon them though they might abandon him, that indeed “God is with us”, the meaning of the name Immanuel. The birth of the child is a sign of this divine loyalty.
Yet God’s loyal commitment to his people extends far beyond the imaginings of the ancient Israelites, even the greatest of the prophets. That commitment reached its zenith when, in the fulness of time, God offered more than a sign, more even than a solemn promise. He offered himself. In the previous paragraph I wrote that Immanuel means “God is with us”, and that would be the natural way of reading it. But it can also mean simply, “God with us”. St Matthew’s great insight is that this is precisely who Jesus is.
At the end of his Gospel, St Matthew reports Jesus’s promise, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” There is a strong and deliberate echo here of the meaning of Immanuel, stronger yet when we remember that “I AM” is the name God gives himself at the burning bush. By surrounding his narration of Jesus’s birth, ministry, death and resurrection with these two “God with us” verses, Matthew is telling us that the whole of his Gospel is the story of how God has indeed been with us, and continues to be with us. The life of Jesus, from the moment he was laid in the manger to his cry of dereliction from the Cross, through the resurrection and beyond to the present moment, is the definitive expression of the constancy of the love and loyalty of God which is at the centre of Isaiah’s prophecy. Truly Christ does, in the deepest possible way, “fulfil the prophets”.
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