THE NATIVITY
THE NATIVITY
MATTHEW 1:18-25
Jesus is described as “Immanuel”: “God with us.”
Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus is completely independent of Luke’s; where Luke tells the story from Mary’s viewpoint, Matthew tells it from Joseph’s, but both evangelists agree in affirming that it was by the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus was conceived. The law as it affected a betrothed woman in Mary’s condition is laid down in Deuteronomy 22:20f.,23f.; Joseph’s decision not to expose her to the serious consequences of public repudiation marks him out as a man of decent feeling. Here it is he who receives an angelic annunciation and is told to call the child Jesus. The name (the Greek form of Joshua or Jeshua) means “Yahweh is salvation”; hence its appropriateness, “for he will save his people from their sins” (1:21).
1:22f. present the first of several Old Testament quotations in this Gospel which are preceded by an introductory formula which, with minor variations in wording, indicates that an event took place to fulfill a certain oracle. This quotation, from Isaiah 7:14, comes from Isaiah’s address to King Ahaz—when Judah was threatened with invasion from Syria and Israel. Isaiah in the name of God bade Ahaz keep calm, and invited him to name any sign that he might choose to confirm that the threat would vanish; Ahaz, who had already invited the intervention of the Assyrian king, pretended to be too pious to put God to the test by asking for a sign. Isaiah, discerning the truth behind the king’s affected piety and foreseeing the disastrous consequences of his overtures to Assyria, gave him the sign of a royal child soon to be born who would not be able to distinguish right from wrong before the two kings Ahaz feared were laid low, but who would grow up to a devastated heritage because of Ahaz’s fatal policy. The language of Isaiah’s oracle is that of an archaic annunciation form (attested in a text from Ugarit c. 1400 BC and perhaps echoed in Micah 5:3). Matthew recognizes its definitive realization in the birth of Jesus, the virgin’s son (according to the Greek version of the Old Testament which is quoted here) and Emmanuel, “God with us,” in the fullest sense (cf. 28:20).