Insight In Sight
Commentary
The truth is out there, if you’re willing to see it. God spoke to King Ahaz through the prophet Isaiah when he was trying to solve a political conundrum, to the point where God was willing to grant any sign Ahaz asked for, but with the divine insight in sight, Ahaz looked away.
The whole story of salvation, the Good News “concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection of the dead” was “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures….” The insight’s in sight. One early Christian evidently paused in the middle of working in his ledgers, to practice his handwriting by painstakingly copying these very verses from the opening of Paul’s letter to the Romans. A little repetition wouldn’t hurt us either.
And finally, in the middle of a moral quandary Joseph receives all the insight he needs in a dream, and what helped him keep the best course in sight is because he’d already made the decision to wrestle with scripture and act righteously instead of acting biblically.
Isaiah 7:10-16
Without question, this text is a major part of our Advent and Christmas celebrations. We interpret it in light of Jesus. But it also had a meaning for Isaiah and his contemporaries. As stated in my installment for Emphasis for this week, the prophet Isaiah confronted King Ahaz of Judah. Just as there was a time you could walk up to the door of the White House and see the President, so too the King of Judah had his favorite walks and everyone knew them, so it was an easy task for the Lord to send the prophet, along with his son, to “the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the fuller’s field….” (Isaiah 7:3) so he could tell Ahaz as far as God was concerned, it was a bad idea to enter into an alliance with the king of Assyria against the king of Israel and his allies, who were evidently plotting to overthrow Ahaz. God would protect Ahaz better than Assyria.
When Ahaz refused to listen, the Lord spoke once more: “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” Instead, Ahaz wrapped himself around a single verse: “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” (Isaiah 7:12)
Ahaz wants to seem to trust God so much he does not need a sign, but in reality, he has no intention of asking for a sign because he knows he won’t like God’s will. With divine insight in sight, Ahaz would rather close his eyes and follow his own counsel instead of receiving God’s gift.
So, the conversation continues. If Ahaz won’t ask for a sign, God will give one anyway, and it’s the kind of sign no reigning king wants to hear — his replacement is already born.
Some wonder if Isaiah was pointing to an actual pregnant woman when Ahaz refused to ask for a sign. Was it the wife of Ahaz, who might have been expecting? Was God saying he was ready to give up on Ahaz and work with the next generation? Did Isaiah have a particular woman in mind, about whom we know nothing, which might suggest God was going to go in a different direction from Ahaz altogether? Was Isaiah pointing to a pregnant woman who happened to be walking by? Certainly, we find hope in every new infant. Every newborn carries with her or him seemingly timeless possibilities.
The message of God is that his aims will not be accomplished through a military alliance, but through God’s presence in newborns, and in the future. Our hope is also with newborns, who are themselves Immanuel, newly minted “God with us.” A young woman will give birth to a child, whose name will be Emmanuel. When the Hebrew word for young woman, alma, was translated into the Greek parthenos, it was clearly a virgin who was referred to. Some will quibble that alma doesn’t clearly mean virgin, but the default assumption, I believe, is that an alma was a virgin. Regardless, the New Testament is clear about Mary’s situation, and Christians, for whom the Hebrew scriptures were their Bible, saw these verses as a clear sign pointing to Jesus.
One final point. The word for sign, ‘ot, used by the prophet in these verses is the same word that is used in Exodus for the signs and wonders Moses performed in Egypt. That means it’s not a sign like pulling a quarter from a kid’s ear. This is big. As in virgin birth big.
Romans 1:1-7
Over 120 years ago, Arthur Hunt and Bernard Grenfell began to rummage through the trash heaps of an ancient Egyptian village named Oxyrhynchus, (“the city of the Sharp-Nosed Fish”) and came away with millions of scraps of papyrus. There were fragments of ancient Greek plays, Greek poetry, and other literary treasures, and among these tremendous finds, the earliest fragments of the New Testament, unknown sayings attributed to Jesus, along with other lost Christian writings. Mostly they found the remains of innumerable personal letters and treasure troves of business records and receipts.
Among the business archive of an early fourth-century flax dealer named Leonides. Among the records of business transactions is a piece of papyrus in which someone with the unsteady hand of a student practiced their penmanship by copying out this week’s lectionary passage, Romans 1:1-7. Some think this was a school exercise of a child preserved as we stick a child’s assignments on the fridge with a magnet. That is a possibility. There is some nonsense writing at the bottom of the page, as if the student was practicing penmanship before starting an assignment.
Other suggest this is the work of a scribe in training. If the latter, then perhaps he practiced writing this passage because it contains many sacred names, God, Lord, Jesus Christ, all of which in Christian practice were abbreviated.
But there are other reasons why this passage might have been important enough to copy and then for Leonides to want to keep this insight in sight, wrapped among his business records. Some very important stuff happens in these verses. While some may treat the letter’s opening as inconsequential, a throwaway opening before getting to what they consider the meatier and certainly more famous passages later in Paul’s letter to the Romans, the good news proclaimed in these seven verses is startling. This Jesus, a descendant of King David is the Son of God, not the Roman emperors who also bore the title “son of a god.” This Jesus was raised from the dead, and this is not just something that has happened, but “was promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures. These scriptures were available throughout the world because three centuries before they had been translated into Greek, which was everyone’s second language in the Roman Empire. This prophetic insight is in sight because prophecies such as Isaiah 7:10-16 are available for everyone to read in Greek, a language that in those days everyone understood.
This is in contrast to the secret knowledge that many of the mystery religions of that era claimed to have. Only initiates who worked their way into the inner circles were allowed to gain such knowledge in these religions. By contrast the central tenet of the Christian faith has been publicly available for centuries in the Hebrew scriptures. Moreover, this marvelous resurrection is not something that happened one time. The implication in the phrase “resurrection of the dead” is that this will be available to everyone, and that is why it is so important for Paul, as an apostle, or emissary of this living Christ, is commissioned “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the gentles for the sake of his name….”
This is the kind of good news worth copying out, and worth keeping in the box with your important papers!
(Want to know more? See “A New Testament Papyrus and its Documentary Context: An Early Christian Writing Exercise from the Archive of Leonides (P. Oxy. II 209/P10) Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010):575-96, and Christian Literary Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, p 194-197.)
Matthew 1:18-25
In the novel “Foundation,” by Isaac Asimov, the people on the planet Terminus are supposed to be following the plan set forth by the great mathematician Hari Seldon, but their idea of following the plan is to do nothing and let it happen. The Mayor of Terminus, Salvor Hardin insists the people must do something. And to guide them he has a saying: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
I wonder if Joseph, alarmed that his fiancé was pregnant with a child not his own, but with insight in sight in the form of a dream, talked it over with a friend, or his parents, or his rabbi? Did his friends help him answer questions like: Should I act on this? File it away until I get some sign? What if this is the sign?
The thing is, even before the dream Joseph was already leaning towards righteousness. By the standards of his society, Mary's pregnancy brought shame to his family, since an engagement was as binding as a marriage. As it says in Deuteronomy 22:20-21, 23-24,
If, however, this charge is true, that evidence of the young woman's virginity was not found, then they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father's house and the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act in Israel by prostituting herself in her father's house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. ... If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
We should still give Joseph credit. Even though he evidently didn’t believe Mary’s story at first, that she was a virgin even though she was obviously pregnant, and he knew very well that barring an unprecedented miracle there is only one way she could become pregnant, he nevertheless refused to obey the letter of the law and have Mary killed. He chose to divorce Mary quietly, doing less than the law demanded. He chose grace. In so doing, he opened the door to a miracle. All this was done before an angel spoke to him in a dream about the birth of a savior. Joseph made a righteous, if counterintuitive, choice.
There are times we may feel fully justified by scripture to do our worst, but Jesus came to teach us about grace, opening the door for the Spirit of God to dwell fully in us and among us. Graciousness, unexpected kindness, may be the best gift we can give each other this holiday season. Revealing God, speak to us in dreams, in scripture, and through your Spirit, that we may boldly choose to do the good thing.
Jesus came to teach us about grace, about opening the door for God's Spirit to dwell fully in us and among us. That's the best gift we can give each other this holiday season. Give Joseph credit. Take a little credit for yourself. Give everyone some slack!
Now let’s listen to what the angel said in the dream. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-21)
Notice the angel didn’t actually do anything. The angel only told Joseph he should not be afraid to take Mary into his home as his wife, that she conceived by the Holy Spirit, and would bear a son who would save the people from their sins. Now that I think of it, the angel did give Joseph one task — to name the child Jesus, which means “He rescues,” or “He saves.”
When all is said and done, it’s still up to Joseph to act, to take Mary into his home. To be open to the possibility of a miracle. And in order for Joseph to act in this manner, he will have to step away from fear.
Let me say that again. The dream from the angel inspired him to ignore the verses that were being quoted to him by friends and relatives, and people do love their clobber verses, and instead, listen to God, to God’s great wonders, and in obeying God make it possible for God to enter into history and save the people.
In response Joseph took action, and that action was to do the right thing. Adopt Jesus as his own. Bring joy to the world!
(This installment of Charting the Course is adapted from my book “No Room for the Inn,” CSS 2022.)
The whole story of salvation, the Good News “concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection of the dead” was “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures….” The insight’s in sight. One early Christian evidently paused in the middle of working in his ledgers, to practice his handwriting by painstakingly copying these very verses from the opening of Paul’s letter to the Romans. A little repetition wouldn’t hurt us either.
And finally, in the middle of a moral quandary Joseph receives all the insight he needs in a dream, and what helped him keep the best course in sight is because he’d already made the decision to wrestle with scripture and act righteously instead of acting biblically.
Isaiah 7:10-16
Without question, this text is a major part of our Advent and Christmas celebrations. We interpret it in light of Jesus. But it also had a meaning for Isaiah and his contemporaries. As stated in my installment for Emphasis for this week, the prophet Isaiah confronted King Ahaz of Judah. Just as there was a time you could walk up to the door of the White House and see the President, so too the King of Judah had his favorite walks and everyone knew them, so it was an easy task for the Lord to send the prophet, along with his son, to “the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the fuller’s field….” (Isaiah 7:3) so he could tell Ahaz as far as God was concerned, it was a bad idea to enter into an alliance with the king of Assyria against the king of Israel and his allies, who were evidently plotting to overthrow Ahaz. God would protect Ahaz better than Assyria.
When Ahaz refused to listen, the Lord spoke once more: “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” Instead, Ahaz wrapped himself around a single verse: “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” (Isaiah 7:12)
Ahaz wants to seem to trust God so much he does not need a sign, but in reality, he has no intention of asking for a sign because he knows he won’t like God’s will. With divine insight in sight, Ahaz would rather close his eyes and follow his own counsel instead of receiving God’s gift.
So, the conversation continues. If Ahaz won’t ask for a sign, God will give one anyway, and it’s the kind of sign no reigning king wants to hear — his replacement is already born.
Some wonder if Isaiah was pointing to an actual pregnant woman when Ahaz refused to ask for a sign. Was it the wife of Ahaz, who might have been expecting? Was God saying he was ready to give up on Ahaz and work with the next generation? Did Isaiah have a particular woman in mind, about whom we know nothing, which might suggest God was going to go in a different direction from Ahaz altogether? Was Isaiah pointing to a pregnant woman who happened to be walking by? Certainly, we find hope in every new infant. Every newborn carries with her or him seemingly timeless possibilities.
The message of God is that his aims will not be accomplished through a military alliance, but through God’s presence in newborns, and in the future. Our hope is also with newborns, who are themselves Immanuel, newly minted “God with us.” A young woman will give birth to a child, whose name will be Emmanuel. When the Hebrew word for young woman, alma, was translated into the Greek parthenos, it was clearly a virgin who was referred to. Some will quibble that alma doesn’t clearly mean virgin, but the default assumption, I believe, is that an alma was a virgin. Regardless, the New Testament is clear about Mary’s situation, and Christians, for whom the Hebrew scriptures were their Bible, saw these verses as a clear sign pointing to Jesus.
One final point. The word for sign, ‘ot, used by the prophet in these verses is the same word that is used in Exodus for the signs and wonders Moses performed in Egypt. That means it’s not a sign like pulling a quarter from a kid’s ear. This is big. As in virgin birth big.
Romans 1:1-7
Over 120 years ago, Arthur Hunt and Bernard Grenfell began to rummage through the trash heaps of an ancient Egyptian village named Oxyrhynchus, (“the city of the Sharp-Nosed Fish”) and came away with millions of scraps of papyrus. There were fragments of ancient Greek plays, Greek poetry, and other literary treasures, and among these tremendous finds, the earliest fragments of the New Testament, unknown sayings attributed to Jesus, along with other lost Christian writings. Mostly they found the remains of innumerable personal letters and treasure troves of business records and receipts.
Among the business archive of an early fourth-century flax dealer named Leonides. Among the records of business transactions is a piece of papyrus in which someone with the unsteady hand of a student practiced their penmanship by copying out this week’s lectionary passage, Romans 1:1-7. Some think this was a school exercise of a child preserved as we stick a child’s assignments on the fridge with a magnet. That is a possibility. There is some nonsense writing at the bottom of the page, as if the student was practicing penmanship before starting an assignment.
Other suggest this is the work of a scribe in training. If the latter, then perhaps he practiced writing this passage because it contains many sacred names, God, Lord, Jesus Christ, all of which in Christian practice were abbreviated.
But there are other reasons why this passage might have been important enough to copy and then for Leonides to want to keep this insight in sight, wrapped among his business records. Some very important stuff happens in these verses. While some may treat the letter’s opening as inconsequential, a throwaway opening before getting to what they consider the meatier and certainly more famous passages later in Paul’s letter to the Romans, the good news proclaimed in these seven verses is startling. This Jesus, a descendant of King David is the Son of God, not the Roman emperors who also bore the title “son of a god.” This Jesus was raised from the dead, and this is not just something that has happened, but “was promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures. These scriptures were available throughout the world because three centuries before they had been translated into Greek, which was everyone’s second language in the Roman Empire. This prophetic insight is in sight because prophecies such as Isaiah 7:10-16 are available for everyone to read in Greek, a language that in those days everyone understood.
This is in contrast to the secret knowledge that many of the mystery religions of that era claimed to have. Only initiates who worked their way into the inner circles were allowed to gain such knowledge in these religions. By contrast the central tenet of the Christian faith has been publicly available for centuries in the Hebrew scriptures. Moreover, this marvelous resurrection is not something that happened one time. The implication in the phrase “resurrection of the dead” is that this will be available to everyone, and that is why it is so important for Paul, as an apostle, or emissary of this living Christ, is commissioned “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the gentles for the sake of his name….”
This is the kind of good news worth copying out, and worth keeping in the box with your important papers!
(Want to know more? See “A New Testament Papyrus and its Documentary Context: An Early Christian Writing Exercise from the Archive of Leonides (P. Oxy. II 209/P10) Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010):575-96, and Christian Literary Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, p 194-197.)
Matthew 1:18-25
In the novel “Foundation,” by Isaac Asimov, the people on the planet Terminus are supposed to be following the plan set forth by the great mathematician Hari Seldon, but their idea of following the plan is to do nothing and let it happen. The Mayor of Terminus, Salvor Hardin insists the people must do something. And to guide them he has a saying: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
I wonder if Joseph, alarmed that his fiancé was pregnant with a child not his own, but with insight in sight in the form of a dream, talked it over with a friend, or his parents, or his rabbi? Did his friends help him answer questions like: Should I act on this? File it away until I get some sign? What if this is the sign?
The thing is, even before the dream Joseph was already leaning towards righteousness. By the standards of his society, Mary's pregnancy brought shame to his family, since an engagement was as binding as a marriage. As it says in Deuteronomy 22:20-21, 23-24,
If, however, this charge is true, that evidence of the young woman's virginity was not found, then they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father's house and the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act in Israel by prostituting herself in her father's house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. ... If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
We should still give Joseph credit. Even though he evidently didn’t believe Mary’s story at first, that she was a virgin even though she was obviously pregnant, and he knew very well that barring an unprecedented miracle there is only one way she could become pregnant, he nevertheless refused to obey the letter of the law and have Mary killed. He chose to divorce Mary quietly, doing less than the law demanded. He chose grace. In so doing, he opened the door to a miracle. All this was done before an angel spoke to him in a dream about the birth of a savior. Joseph made a righteous, if counterintuitive, choice.
There are times we may feel fully justified by scripture to do our worst, but Jesus came to teach us about grace, opening the door for the Spirit of God to dwell fully in us and among us. Graciousness, unexpected kindness, may be the best gift we can give each other this holiday season. Revealing God, speak to us in dreams, in scripture, and through your Spirit, that we may boldly choose to do the good thing.
Jesus came to teach us about grace, about opening the door for God's Spirit to dwell fully in us and among us. That's the best gift we can give each other this holiday season. Give Joseph credit. Take a little credit for yourself. Give everyone some slack!
Now let’s listen to what the angel said in the dream. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-21)
Notice the angel didn’t actually do anything. The angel only told Joseph he should not be afraid to take Mary into his home as his wife, that she conceived by the Holy Spirit, and would bear a son who would save the people from their sins. Now that I think of it, the angel did give Joseph one task — to name the child Jesus, which means “He rescues,” or “He saves.”
When all is said and done, it’s still up to Joseph to act, to take Mary into his home. To be open to the possibility of a miracle. And in order for Joseph to act in this manner, he will have to step away from fear.
Let me say that again. The dream from the angel inspired him to ignore the verses that were being quoted to him by friends and relatives, and people do love their clobber verses, and instead, listen to God, to God’s great wonders, and in obeying God make it possible for God to enter into history and save the people.
In response Joseph took action, and that action was to do the right thing. Adopt Jesus as his own. Bring joy to the world!
(This installment of Charting the Course is adapted from my book “No Room for the Inn,” CSS 2022.)
