What’s In a Name?
December 28, 2022
Fr. John Riccardo
Some years ago, Archbishop Vigneron of Detroit shared something about the name “Emmanuel” that I have never forgotten.
Emmanuel, of course, is familiar to almost all of us because of the prophecy found in Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore, the Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.” This is the verse quoted by Matthew in 1:22 after Joseph’s dream, in which Gabriel reveals to him that the child in Mary’s womb is the result of God’s miraculous intervention.
In his book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, Pope Benedict XVI writes, “Exceptionally, we are able to date this verse from Isaiah quite precisely. It comes from the year 733 B.C.” Ahaz is facing a critical situation, where two neighboring kingdoms are entering into an alliance against the superpower of the day, Assyria. These two kingdoms are trying to pressure him into joining, but Ahaz thinks this foolish and will not do so. The king is fearful of these kingdoms and so enters a protection alliance with Assyria against them. The problem with this treaty was that the “payment” Assyria demanded was idolatry. Isaiah is trying to keep him from this, as idolatry will have devastating consequences for the people of God. As Benedict writes, the treaty indicated that Ahaz “trusted more in the power of the king then in the power of God… So, what was at stake here was ultimately not a political problem, but a question of faith.” Isaiah goes on to challenge Ahaz not to rely on such alliances but on God, and so, “quite unconventionally, he invites Ahaz to request a sign from God…The answer given by the king appears pious…[but] the king’s refusal of the sign is not, as it appears, an expression of faith, but on the contrary an indication that he does not want to be disturbed in his Realpolitk” (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, 46-8). It is at this point that the prophet utters his now oh so familiar words.
What has increasingly hit me over the past few weeks is that scholars have no convincing explanation of how these words were understood by Ahaz or the people of his day. Benedict notes, “Exegesis has…searched meticulously, using all the resources of historical scholarship, for a contemporary explanation – and it has failed.” There is, in fact, no entirely convincing interpretation of what these words mean.
Then, more than 700 years later, Gabriel explains to Joseph in a dream what these words mean and to whom they refer.
If you’re anything like me, I wonder often where God is when I read the headlines. Perhaps we can be tempted to think that God has forgotten about us, maybe because there are more pressing things in another part of the universe to deal with.
But this is not so!
The Old Testament is filled with spectacular prophecy that often waited hundreds of years to be fulfilled, and then was fulfilled in ways far beyond what anyone could ever have dared to imagine. God became a man for us! God went to war to rescue us from the powers of Sin and Death! A man – who is not just a man – walked out of a tomb alive and never to die again! And this God holds my life and your life in His hand. He holds the world and all of history in His hands. Let us not be fooled by headlines. Let us not be tempted, like Ahaz, to think that politics is more real than God. Let us put our trust in the One for whom nothing is impossible, who has acted in all the ways that we read about and celebrate in these spectacular days.
Which brings me to Archbishop Vigneron’s comment. “Emmanuel,” as Matthew explains to us after citing Isaiah, means “God is with us.” But this doesn’t just mean, “God is near us, or in our midst.” Emmanuel, the Archbishop encouraged us, means, “God is on our side.”
The one true God, the Almighty, the Creator of a universe that is 90+ billion light years across, the LORD, He who has no rival, before whom every knee will one day bend, is on our side. He is with us.
So, do not be afraid.