Commentary on Isaiah 7:10-16

On this final Sunday in Advent, the lectionary includes one more passage from the book of Isaiah. All four of the Advent Isaiah passages come from the first part of the collection and, therefore, share the same historical backdrop. All four passages promise impossible hope, given the dire straits of the Assyrian aggression against Judah. 

A literal or virtual trip to the British Museum provides ancient pictures of this very war. The Assyrian reliefs excavated from the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh chronicle the siege of Lachish, a Judean city 18 miles southwest of Jerusalem. The towering panels depict the aggression of the Assyrian army with its battering rams, the fearful Judeans on the city walls, the mutilation of Judean soldiers, and the parading of Judean families as they are deported from their ancestral home. 

Separate from the reliefs, archaeologists also discovered the Lachish letters sent to Jerusalem begging for military aid, which never came. These letters attest to the fact that those in Jerusalem knew what was coming their way. Ancient armies moved slowly, only about three to five miles a day. The enemy would arrive in a week.

Imagine the excruciating days for those in Jerusalem, leading to the appearance of this enemy on the horizon. Imagine looking at your pregnant wife or daughter during that week and knowing you will never meet that child. Judah may not have had the resources to construct monumental visual art, but their scribes found other ways to commemorate their version of this watershed disaster.

Isaiah 7:10–16 provides a verbal panel in Israel’s series of images of this war. On one side of the panel, a prophet stands before an enthroned king whose duty it is to protect the most vulnerable citizens in his care. The king, holed up in his palace as the enemy advances, feels utterly impotent and defeated. His head droops, refusing to even consult the prophet about the city’s fate. He knows its fate too well: The city and all of his flock will be slaughtered. 

The prophet, who stands in the center of the panel, points to a pregnant woman. Really, she is no more than a girl, just having reached puberty. She sits on a smaller throne representing all the vulnerable people, born and unborn, who will be victims of the king’s ineffectiveness. The king does not want to look at her, even though the prophet commands it. Her fate is already emblazoned in his psyche. The king assumes the prophet is about to tell him why he deserves this fate, and what has made his God so angry with him that he would allow this to happen.

When we hear this panel during Advent, it is so easy to forget this horrible context. We have less than a week until Christmas. We sit in the pews composing the final shopping lists or mentally packing our bags for holiday travel. We can smell not the fires of a dying city but the spice of cookies and roasting meat. Our mangers have been dusted off and set up, with their idyllic tableaus of parents and newborn child. Let’s call him Immanuel and toast his birth. 

Let’s rush over the fact that in one version of this child’s story, the king was so determined to murder him that he executed a slew of infant boys as insurance. Can you hear the cries of their families in the background? In another version of this story, this child is born in a barn to parents, having been forced to make a long trip on foot to Bethlehem during the mother’s third trimester because some ruler commanded it. Can you see how tired, dirty, and far from home they are? The hope of the season becomes trite without these backgrounds. 

Advent attests to brutal reality. The king in Isaiah had it right: There was no reason to expect anything but disaster. He would never have the chance to give this child a name, no matter what the prophet said. The mother in the gospel could expect that her child would die in childbirth or infancy and that she would be rejected by her betrothed because he knew the child was not his.

The readings of anticipation in Advent prepare us, but for what? In many churches nowadays, the Easter Vigil service starts in darkness and ends in an eruption of light to liturgically recreate the move from despair to joy that accompanies Jesus’ death and resurrection. What if our midnight services for Christmas had the same movement? 

The final panel in Isaiah 7 portrays the same king standing with his wife. They both look down, but this time, not in despair. The viewer follows their gaze to the healthy child playing at their feet. He is talking now, and when he starts to reach for something he shouldn’t, he echoes his parents’ no-nos. He looks at them with a mischievous grin, a piece of cheese in one hand. He has survived! The army unexpectedly retreated, and life in Jerusalem went back to normal. The father knows in his heart that God has saved this particular child for a reason. He surely will be the ideal king someday.

As history goes, that happy panel’s fairy tale ending did not, in fact, come to pass. The artists or scribes who created these panels knew that. They knew that, although Jerusalem survived the siege by the Assyrians around 700 BCE, they would not be so lucky in 586 when the Babylonians razed the city walls and turned Jerusalem into a pile of ruins. They knew that the descendants of these royal parents would end up exiled to Babylon, where they would give birth to children who would never even see Jerusalem, let alone rule there.

But what is this literary artwork’s legacy? Generations of scribes, Jewish and eventually also Christian, kept these stories alive, added to them, recast them, and maintained that illogical hope was not a fantasy. It could happen at any moment. Isaiah proved that. It may not have happened during the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but it could, it would happen again. Someday. And this time, it would stick. God-with-us would become a permanent reality for Israel. Just wait… wait for it… wait for it.

Advent commemorates the time of pregnant pauses and reminds Christians that the birth of Jesus is not the end of the story either. It is another moment of impossible hope as we continue to wait… wait… wait in our impossible hope.