We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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One of the things that mark the writers of the New Testament is their appreciation for the fact that, since scripture is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit and not merely of human authors, it therefore conveys more meaning than merely human words. So the New Testament writers read Old Testament scripture looking for meanings beyond the literal sense of the words. They do this, not because they are crazy Dark Age nuts who decided to treat Jewish holy books as a Rorschach blot upon which to project their own ex post facto Christian fantasies, but because the Risen Christ met them on the Road to Emmaus and said:
These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:44-47).
In short, it is from Jesus that the Church gets the idea that everything revealed in the New Testament was hidden in the Old. This way of reading scripture is, for instance, what enables Jesus to see that the manna in the wilderness (cf. Exodus 16) is a divine foreshadow of himself, the true Bread of Life (cf. John 6). It is why Paul says that the passage of Israel through the Red Sea (cf. Exodus 14) is a divine foreshadowing of Baptism (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:1-6). It is how John sees in the unbroken bones of the Passover Lamb (cf. Exodus 12:46) a divine foreshadow of the unbroken bones of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (cf. John 19:33-35).
The Church sees these other senses of scripture, not only in looking for Christ in the Old Testament, but also in seeing other aspects of the Christian revelation as well. So, for instance, in Romans 8:36, Paul looks at Psalm 44, which was written as a lament for the sufferings of Israel in a time of national disaster, and sees in the innocent suffering of the psalmist a foreshadow of the innocent sufferings of persecuted Christians. Likewise, Peter takes the description of Israel as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) and applies it to the Church (cf. 1 Peter 2:9), since he regards the Church as the New Israel.
Matthew is doing the same thing when he cites Isaiah’s famous Emmanuel Prophecy in his infancy narrative, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’ (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:22-23).
This sign, like most of the signs of the Old Testament has an immediate fulfillment in the Old Testament setting. However, that does not mean the sign has been drained of meaning by its immediate fulfillment and can now be disposed of. Rather, as is the way with God, we discover that Old Testament signs go on becoming even more meaningful with the passage of time.
To illustrate, consider Moses’ promise to Israel:
The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren—him you shall heed—just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the Lord said to me, ‘They have rightly said all that they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not give heed to my words which he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. (Deuteronomy 18:15-19)
In fact, of course, there are multiple Old Testament fulfillments of this promise. Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea and the noble company of Old Testament prophets are all fulfillments of Moses’ promise to Israel that a prophet like him would arise. But the fascinating thing is that Jews at the time of the New Testament did not look at the prophets and say, “So that’s over with. Prophecy fulfilled. Expect nothing further.” Instead they saw these Old Testament prophets as a divine foreshadow of some great and ultimate Prophet who was yet to come. That’s why the delegation from Jerusalem asked John the Baptist, “Are you the Prophet?” (John 1:21). Jews at the time of Christ were still expecting The One whom all the prophets of the Old Testament foreshadowed.
Exactly the same thing obtains with the One whom the prophets refer to variously as the Son of David, the Servant of the Lord, the Branch, the Star Out of Jacob, the Anointed One, and the Messiah. There are, in fact, lots of sons of David, some good, some not so good. When one of the “sons of David” named King Ahaz is in deep trouble five hundred years after David, the prophet Isaiah goes to him, reminds him that God is still with the house of David, and tells him to ask for any sign in proof of that fact. Ahaz refuses, so Isaiah returns to him, chews him out for his faithlessness and then declares, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14)
The immediate fulfillment of this promise takes place shortly thereafter with the birth of Ahaz’ son, Hezekiah, to the “almah” or “young woman” Isaiah speaks of (namely, Ahaz’ wife).[1] But that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of the prophecy for Matthew, because for the evangelist Hezekiah himself becomes a sign pointing forward to the Ultimate Son of David who is born, not merely of a young woman, but a virgin. Some debunkers will tell you that Matthew believes that Jesus was born of a virgin because of a textual error since the pre-Christian Jewish translators of the Septuagint rendered the Hebrew almah (young woman) as the Greek parthenos (virgin) and it is this translation that Matthew cites in his gospel. The problem with this theory is that Matthew does not get his information about the birth of Jesus from Isaiah. He gets it from the only possible source: the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is only after hearing it from her that he reads Isaiah in its Greek form and realizes the connection of the Emmanuel prophecy to Jesus.
In this, the parallel to the apostles’ behavior at the mouth of the empty tomb is striking. Just as they “did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9) even when standing at the mouth of the empty tomb and, indeed, even when the Risen Christ Himself is explaining scripture to them personally on the Emmaus Road (cf. John 20:9; Luke 24:15-16), likewise it is only after the Church has received the story of the Virgin Birth from the Blessed Virgin herself and been enlightened by the Holy Spirit that they finally smack themselves on the forehead, read the Old Testament and say, “It’s been staring us in the face the whole time.” As Paul says, the mystery is veiled until the Holy Spirit takes away the veil (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:14-15).
So Matthew does not derive his faith in the Virgin Birth from Isaiah 7:14. Rather, he sees the Virgin Birth prophetically reflected there, both in the birth of Hezekiah the Son of David and in the curiously providential way that the Greek translation of the Old Testament speaks of the Son of David as the son of a Virgin. His purpose in quoting the passage is to remind the reader that Jesus is not a hiccup or an aberration in the history of Israel, but the whole point of the story. Everything has been leading up to him, the ultimate Son of David who now sits upon the throne of David from everlasting to everlasting, as Nathan promised David. It is, therefore, no accident that the words of the angel to Mary are “The Lord is with you” and the name given the Messianic Son of David in Isaiah 7:14 is “Immanuel”—”God with us.” Mary is a kind of icon of the whole Church. As God was with her by being present in her womb, so he is with us on the altar, when we receive him into our body and soul in the Eucharist.
[1] For a good argument that Isaiah’s prophecy is immediately fulfilled by the birth of Hezekiah, see Rev. William G. Most, “The Problem of Isaiah 7:14,” Faith and Reason, Summer 1992. Available at http://www.ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/FR92203.TXT as of March 5, 2011.
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