Isaiah 7:10-16

Resources

1. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred, cites Isa. 7:3 on p. 151. His general summary of Isaiah is as follows:

Isaiah prophesied about 745-700 B.C.E. His vision of the new age includes a new Davidic king (Isa 9:1-7; 11:1-8), but there is no clear evidence that he knew or appealed to the Exodus-Sinai tradition. Likewise unclear is his view of how the sacrificial cult began. But there is no doubt that he condemns it in unmistakable terms. In fact, the connection of sacrifice and violence is made more explicitly than in Hosea and Amos. Those who bring "vain offerings," who think YHWH delights "in the blood of bulls," have hands "full of blood." This image, whether hyperbole or not, pictures mass violence and murder. The prophetic alternative is an ethical exhortation given in a staccato series of brief imperatives:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Torah, which for Isaiah is synonymous with the word of YHWH (1:10), does not make victims in cult offerings or in any sort of violence. Rather, it draws all the peoples to it in peace and leads them to "beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (2:4). This vision of the new age mentions "the house of the God of Jacob," undoubtedly a reference to the Temple, but quite strikingly there is no mention at all of a reconstituted sacrificial cult. The "house of Jacob" is associated with torah, with teaching, not with sacrifice (2:3). (pp. 151-152)

Romans 1:1-7

Resources

1. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, p. 210:

Traditional theology has, at the level of the inner-trinitarian relationships, unambiguously placed the Holy Spirit after the Father and Son in the order of salvation events. The justification for this was the idea of the incarnation (John 1:1, 14; Phil. 2:5-8); and the revealed facts that it was first the Son and only later the Spirit who was sent and that at Pentecost Father and Son together poured out the Spirit. This view, although it is correct, remains however somewhat one-sided. In our investigations so far we have seen what an important role the Spirit played already in the event of the cross. This fact impels us to draw the conclusion in retrospect that even the synoptic report that Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:9-11 and parallels) immediately after his baptism by John has a systematic significance, even if historical-critical exegesis likes to speak here of a later shaping by the community. Equally, it should be noted that according to all three synoptics Jesus was led into the desert by the Spirit (Mark 1:12 and parallels). According to Luke, Jesus, taking up Isa. 61:1ff. at the beginning of his public ministry, spoke himself of an anointing by the "Spirit of the Lord" (Luke 4:16-21; see also Acts 4:27; 10:38). Paul emphasizes finally that "according to the Spirit of holiness" the crucified one was designated Son in power at the resurrection of the dead (Rom. 1:4; see also 1 Pet. 3:18). In accordance with these important utterances, Jesus was himself led by the Spirit of God during his whole earthly mission. From this point of view it appears that a priority of the Holy Spirit over the Son who became man is shown.

2. Gil Bailie, "Paul's Letter to the Romans" audio tape series, tape #1.

Reflections and Questions

1. Vs. 5-6: "through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ...." The notion of "obedience of faith" makes sense, I think, in light of mimetic theory in that the human problem is one of conflicting desires. Through Jesus Christ, the One who was obedient to God's desire, the hope is for all people to become obedient to God's desire, a loving desire to care for all of Creation. The hope is a oneness of desire for both Gentiles and Jews that comes under the category of "obedience."

Obedience is not a popular idea under the umbrella of modern individualism, whose aim seems to be that everyone follow his or her own unique desires -- an impossible goal according to mimetic theory. The very nature of human desire, according to the latter, is that it follows the desires of others. So the only way out of the ensuing conflict of desires is to follow the loving desire of the Creator, the One whose Love can uniquely contain all of our individual desires while bringing them into harmony.

Matthew 1:18-25

Exegetical Note

1. I would suggest that Matthew's version of Jesus' genealogy in 1:1-17 very much sets up his telling of Jesus' birth in 1:18-25. The key is to notice that, within his naming of forty-two fathers from Abraham to Jesus, he inserts four of the mothers in addition to Mary. These four mothers: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba ("the wife of Uriah"). What do these four have in common? Some seemingly sexual impropriety in connection with them or the conceptions of the sons in the line of David. So the story of Jesus' birth follows as the story of a seemingly improper conception. Mary is found to be with child before she and Joseph are married, and so "Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly." What a scandal! But Joseph is a righteous man, i.e., he plays by the rules of sacred society. Into this scandal comes the angel, who basically tells Joseph to drop all of this self-righteousness, because God is doing something special through this child.

M. Eugene Boring has a nice comment on Matthew 1:1-18 as follows:

The messianic story is inclusive, extending to women and men of all nations. Inclusiveness is not merely a contemporary buzzword. It is a deep note sounded in the first paragraph of the New Testament, a paragraph that sums up the story of the Old Testament, binding together the two books of the covenant (testament means "covenant" in both Hebrew and Greek) into one book of the story of God's saving acts in history. God's purpose is to include all. The story of redemption, the story of God's reuniting of divided and scattered humanity after the judgment of the flood and the fragmentation and alienation of the tower of Babel (Genesis 6-11) began with God's act of calling Abraham and Sarah and the promise of blessings for all peoples through them (Gen 12:1-3). As "son of Abraham," Jesus is declared to be the fulfillment of God's promises to the Gentiles.

This inaugural note of inclusiveness corresponds to the inclusiveness of the whole genealogy, which names five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, "the wife of Urlah," and Mary. Since ancestry and Inheritance were traced through the father's line, reference to women in a genealogy was uncommon, but not unheard of. Since all of the women mentioned are involved in some sort of questionable sexual behavior, it has often been suggested that this was Matthew's apologetic response to non-believers' insulting versions of the story of Jesus' birth from the virgin Mary. It could well be that, while not apologetic, Matthew is interested in affirming that the plan of God has often been fulfilled in history in unanticipated and "irregular" ways, as was the case in the birth of Jesus from Mary, and that Matthew is interested in showing that God worked through irregular, even scandalous ways, and through women who took initiative, like Tamar and Ruth. Yet the main reason for Matthew's inclusion of these women corresponds to one of the Gospel's primary themes: the inclusion of the Gentiles in the plan of God from the beginning. All of the men in Jesus' genealogy are necessarily Jewish. But the four women mentioned, with the exception of Mary, are "outsiders," Gentiles, or considered to be such in Jewish tradition. Just as the following story shows Jesus to be the fulfillment of both Jewish and Gentile hopes, so also the genealogy shows that the Messiah comes from a Jewish line that already includes Gentiles. (New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 8, p. 132)

1. René Girard, Things Hidden; link to an excerpt of the sections "The Divinity of Christ" and "The Virgin Birth."

Reflections and Questions

1. With the exegetical note above in mind, this text follows on last week's "Blessed is anyone who is not scandalized (skandalizo) by me." See last week's notes on the Gospel Lesson (Advent 3A) and the Girardian take on skandalon. Joseph, in obedience to the angel's message, is not scandalized by the seemingly scandalous nature of Jesus' conception and birth.

2. What is at stake in holding to the virgin birth? Let me suggest that our salvation depends on it to the extent that Jesus' birth represents God's intervention into nature in a decisive way.

On the Ecunet Girard htm list, I commented on the Genesis 3 story of the fall, that it represents the choice we have between following after God's desire or a fellow creature's desire. The former represents the possibility of a non-rivalrous desire; the latter represents a perpetual fallenness into rivalry. To which someone raised the question about what biology might have to say about this. Doesn't biology show us a natural world which is dominated by the rivalry of the fall? Can non-rivalrous desire ever hold sway in nature with persistency?

I might have to answer "No" to such a question -- except for the advent of the Christ into the world. Perhaps St. Paul in Romans 6 gives us a more accurate picture than Genesis 3, with his typology of the First Adam and the Second Adam. The First Adam is locked in sin and can't get himself out. Only with the coming of the Second Adam can we find true liberation from sin. In Girardian terms, we are locked in a perpetual fallenness into rivalry with one another, and into our scapegoating solution to attain relative peace. This would seem to be part of our biology. Left to ourselves, we are locked into the biology of following the desires of fellow creatures.

Thus, it takes a divine intervention into biology itself to unlock the possibility of being able to follow God's desire. We are created in God's image. We are capable of responding to the true God with God's loving desire. But biology is trapped into always falling short unless by some miracle God's loving desire could actually come into biological form, becoming human. Then, our biology of following the desires of other creatures could at least follow the desire of the creature who embodies God's desire, Jesus the Christ, the Second Adam.

How might we express such a miraculous divine intervention into human biology? "Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary" might be the best way to express such a miracle.

What is at stake? The incarnated possibility of unlocking our biological potential to follow God's desire by the incarnation of God's desire into human biology. What's at stake is our salvation via the incarnation of Christ.