Year A—December 21, 2025
We are closing in on Christmas!
This week’s readings are compact: they get to the point. Sort of. They hold out familiar words and images, and we can walk right in and take those words and images as if from the shelf, and move along our merry way to Christmas.
Unless, that is, we pay closer attention.
Our Gospel reading today orients us toward the story of Jesus’ birth as told by the author of the Gospel of Matthew which focuses more on Joseph’s perspective than does the more familiar narrative in Luke. Matthew begins the story with Joseph finding out that his fiancée, Mary, is pregnant. This is distressing, of course; for one thing, he’s not the father. Breaking off the engagement is risky for her, in particular, though. And even though, as far as he knows, she’s fully responsible for this situation, he, being not just a decent guy but a “righteous man,” doesn’t want to publicly shame her. Life will be hard enough for a young, unmarried mother.
But an angel intervenes. Matthew has this happen in a dream, Joseph’s first of three or four. Matthew casts Joseph as an heir of David, and he also interprets this pregnancy through our Isaiah passage. In that passage, Jerusalem is under threat of attack by Israel and Syria. Ahaz, king of Judah, is promised by God through Isaiah that the threatening armies would be turned away. In fact, a young woman (not a virgin) who was already pregnant as Isaiah was speaking, would give birth to her son, and name him “God [is] with us,” or Immanuel, because God would already have delivered Jerusalem from their enemies. By the time the child would know right from wrong, he’d be enjoying honey and curds—that is, not starving under seige.
So what is Matthew doing with this passage? Well, Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ story portrays Jesus as recapitulating Israel’s history in significant ways (like going to Egypt and returning to Israel). We might also read it as a common Christian practice of reading Jesus through the templates offered by prophecy. We don’t have to believe the prophecy was about Jesus specifically (which is good, because it wasn’t). The earliest Christians used the Scriptures they had—and for Matthew, this was some version of the Septuagint—to interpret the Christ-event. This particular passage in Isaiah offers a child whose name is “God with us”—and, as with Matthew’s introduction of Jesus, the pregnancy is already underway. What’s more, the Septuagint’s translation offered Matthew a word for “young woman” that could refer to a literal virgin (which, as I understand it, the Hebrew really does not), allowing Matthew to portray Jesus’ birth as miraculous, something his Greco-Roman audience would expect of a divine figure’s birth.
What does all of this mean for us today?
We can be confident that the story of Jesus’ birth did not happen in the ways that Matthew and Luke recount. Rather, those stories are crafted to tell us more important things about Jesus than mere blow-by-blow accounts of the events around his birth. Matthew’s use of the Hebrew Scriptures in a narrative suffused with the supernatural (however couched in the natural, as angels in Matthew appear in dreams rather than in the flesh) communicates that Jesus is nothing less than the presence of God among us humans. The close attention paid this baby by angels, and thus by God, shows that he is an important part of God’s plan. Gentiles, in the persons of the magi—astrologers from the East who divined Jesus’ birth in their star charts—will be drawn to see and worship this baby, extending his significance beyond his own people. God’s intervention to save the infant Jesus from the (wholly non-historical) slaughter of the innocents recalls Moses’ rescue from a similar (also non-historical) slaughter, solidifying Matthew’s point that Jesus is deeply embedded in God’s salvific work in human history. We don’t need the stories to be literally historically true to understand Matthew’s points here.
And so the lectionary follows Matthew’s lead, including not only the Isaiah 7 passage (tailored to feed the Christian narrative, it should be pointed out) but also a portion of Psalm 80, which can be read with messianic overtones. Elements of that Psalm will leap out for Christians, as we read the salvific “light of [God’s] countenance” in the Incarnation. The “son of man” in verse 16, whether a king or a messianic figure, becomes the universal savior in this Christian reading. “And so we will never turn away from you; give us life, that we may call upon your Name”” can be “—we read this as an invitation to Gentiles to be grafted into the life God grants to the descendents of Israel.
The Epistle is a curious one this week: It’s simply the opening lines of Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome. But in that introduction, Paul lays out his apostolic credentials, tying them in to Paul’s understanding of the messianic history promised by God through prophets of old and fulfilled in Jesus, descended from David “according to the flesh” but declared to be God’s Son—not by angels at his birth, but by his resurrection from the dead. Paul didn’t know of any miraculous birth story, only of the resurrection. That is the center of the Gospel for Paul. The stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, which were written after Paul was martyred, are meant to prepare us to hear that Gospel and understand Jesus’ significance as God made present not only in a brief historical moment, but for all people in every time and place.
The Sound 
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