Fourth Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 7:10–16; Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19; Matthew 1:18–25
Auditoire de Calvin, December 21 2025
When cats or dogs have nothing to do, they fall asleep. When men and women have nothing to do, we may tell stories.
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The apostle Paul is not big on stories. Paul writes letters.
In the long sentence that introduces his most famous letter, Paul tells the Christians in Rome that he is a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, and set apart for the gospel of God. He tells them that God promised this gospel beforehand through the prophets in the holy scriptures. He tells them what this gospel is: the good news of Jesus Christ our Lord, 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 from the dead.
All this and more in one long sentence (Romans 1:1–6).
But Paul doesn’t tell the gospel. He doesn’t narrate the story of Jesus. For that, we have to turn to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
They don’t just talk about Jesus of Nazareth. In their stories, they show us who Jesus is; and Jesus shows us who the one he calls Father is. This is why whenever we gather together to worship, it’s normal to have a reading from one of the Gospels.
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Not all of our Gospels have Christmas stories.
Mark, which is generally thought to be the first of the four Gospels, jumps straight to John the Baptist baptizing an adult Jesus in the river Jordan.
John’s Gospel, which is generally thought to be the last, starts its story in the same place; but before that it gives us a poem.
So why do Matthew and Luke have Christmas stories when the other two Gospels don’t? Well, for the same reason that John kicks off with a poem.
There’s an ambiguity in much of the New Testament, an ambiguity we can see in the sentence from Paul I just quoted: Jesus Christ was declared to be Son of God by resurrection from the dead.
The whole New Testament is written from this side of Easter. If it weren’t for Easter, no one would be celebrating Christmas. But is it only at Easter that Jesus of Nazareth becomes the Son of God, or was this always the case?
In his opening poem, John tells us this was always true: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
In their Christmas stories, Matthew and Luke say the same.
A man becoming God is a pagan fantasy, a fairytale told to people who like to believe that sort of thing. Matthew and Luke speak rather of God becoming human, of God becoming a little child.
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If we are to hear their stories right, we must listen to them in the spirit in which they are written. So what kind of stories are they?
We can say, to begin with, what kind of stories they are not. They are not, in our modern sense, news stories. Take these stories to a contemporary news editor, and she will spike them on the spot. She will ask, “How did you check your facts? And what’s with all those angels?”
If you look at the back of our order of service, you’ll see a nativity scene with a microphone in the foreground. But this is a modern re-enactment of the stories Matthew and Luke tell. At the original birth of Jesus, there were no eagle-eyed reporters with microphones, never mind television cameras.
But if not modern news stores, what then are they?
If we look carefully at how Matthew or Luke construct their stories, we can see what they are. In quite different ways, Matthew and Luke are each reflecting on the birth of Jesus in the light of (what they would have called) the Bible and reflecting on that Bible in the light of the coming of the Christ-child.
It’s not hard to see this if we look.
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Five times in the first two chapters of his Gospel, Matthew uses a phrase like the one we heard this morning: “All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet.” This happened to fulfil what the Old Testament foretold in the following words…
We can see this at work, for example, in the two readings we heard this morning.
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The eighth-century prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem is ticked off with Ahaz, the king of Judah of the day.
Like most Old Testament kings, Ahaz is reckoned to be a bad king. His neighbouring kingdoms, including the kingdom of Israel to the north, are ganging up on him. As so often in the Middle East, then and now, Ahaz responds by playing geopolitics. He forms an alliance with the empire of Assyria and adopts pagan Assyrian ways.
Isaiah is appalled. He keeps telling Ahaz to put not his trust in princes, but in the one true God. In today’s reading, he tells Ahaz to ask God for a sign; and when Ahaz refuses, he says the Lord will offer him a sign anyway: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel.”
Matthew says that this prophecy is fulfilled in the birth of Jesus. But he is not so crass as to think to think that this eighth-century text is in any straightforward sense predicting this birth. Ahaz isn’t interested in what might happen centuries after him. He is much more interested in whether he will lose his kingdom and his life.
If what Isaiah predicts was fulfilled in any obvious sense, it is fulfilled in the birth of the son of Ahaz, Hezekiah. By contrast with his father, Hezekiah is reckoned to be a good king. He rejects the alliance with Assyria, restores the worship of God in the Jerusalem temple, and keeps Judah safe, even if at times it is a near-run thing.
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What Matthew is doing with this and his four other quotations is something much more subtle and profound. What is Matthew telling us?
Hubert Richards sums it up like this: “The whole history of the Old Testament flows together in Jesus, from Moses and the exodus, through the judges and the splendour of the kingdom and the wisdom of Solomon, down to the exile and the hope of restoration. The texts I have chosen to suggest this are not simple foretellings of the future, but something much deeper – an evocation of the Old Testament’s most important themes: Passover, liberation, exile, restoration, kingdom of God. lt is in the light of those themes that I want you to see Jesus. He is the Messiah, not because he was predicted in a few scattered texts… but because he is the fulfilment of all that the Old Testament has been searching for, and the meaning behind all its questioning.”[1]
And where do all the angels come from?
Angels are a device the Bible reaches for whenever it wants to tell us that God is here.
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This has been in so many ways a terrible year. We get to the point where we dread to scroll down our screens or turn on our televisions to see what latest horror has been inflicted on our world.
It’s tempting to throw up our hands in despair. But if we listen to Matthew, we can hear him tell us again that Jesus is born, and Jesus is Immanuel. His birth means that God is with us.
And if God is with us, who can be against us?
[1] Hubert J Richards, The First Christmas (London: Collins, Fountain Books, 1977), 44f.