Fourth Sunday of Advent by Rev’d Lucy

Isaiah 7.10-16
St Paul to the Romans 1.1-7
Matthew 1.18-25

Over the weeks of Advent, we have attended to the patriarchs, the prophets and John the Baptist. On this fourth Sunday of Advent, the Church’s attention turns to Mary.

That context makes the Gospel reading set for today immediately difficult, for Matthew gives us a Gospel in which Mary never speaks and nothing is said about what she thinks or feels. There is none of the tenderness of Luke’s Gospel or the words of the Magnificat. The story of the birth of Christ is told almost entirely through Joseph’s dilemma and decision.

For many readers today, that silence isn’t neutral. It reflects a world in which women’s voices are constrained, where authority passes through men, and where Mary’s body carries meaning without her being allowed to speak it. Matthew writes from within that world.

Matthew isn’t uninterested in Mary; everything turns on what happens in her body. But he doesn’t frame the meaning of that event through her voice or experience. Instead, he places us inside a situation that creates a problem - legal, social, and theological - and leaves us there long enough to feel its discomfort, in order that he can show how Jesus fulfils and reconfigures the expectations set up by the Law and the Prophets. This fulfilment doesn’t mean that Scripture determines Jesus in advance, but that Jesus discloses what the Law and the Prophets were bearing witness to all along.

Joseph is betrothed to Mary and in first-century Judea, betrothal was legally binding. Ending it required formal divorce.

When Matthew tells us Mary is pregnant, he describes a situation with immediate and distressing consequences. Joseph knows, without much need for reflection, that the child isn’t his. The pregnancy can’t be kept quiet. In a small, observant community, Mary will be exposed to suspicion and her reputation damaged beyond repair.

The situation implicates Joseph too. In a legally binding betrothal, a pregnancy is presumed to belong within the union. Proceeding with the marriage means being treated as responsible for a child he didn’t conceive. There’s no way of standing aside.

Matthew tells us Joseph is righteous. He takes the demands of faithfulness seriously. But those demands offer no clean solution. Public divorce would protect his reputation. A quiet writ of divorce would still bring permanent consequences. The law provides options, but none of them are without cost.

What Joseph doesn’t yet have is a way of reading the situation as anything other than failure. He has no revelation, no category for what God might be doing. Only a decision to make.

His dilemma doesn’t arise because he is cruel or faithless. It arises because he is trying to act rightly, and the moral and legal frameworks he relies on no longer yield a clear way forward.

The angel appears to Joseph in a dream. Not to Mary. Not to the community. To Joseph. And the instruction is precise: don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife.

The angel doesn’t tell Joseph to set the law aside. There’s no reassurance about reputation or consequence. Joseph’s told what to do: take Mary as his wife, receive the child, and give the child a name.

In doing so, Joseph establishes Jesus’ place within the house of David, not by blood, but by obedience to what God is doing. The law isn’t displaced. It’s understood differently in response to God’s action, as its deeper purpose comes into view.

What becomes visible is a pattern Matthew will return to throughout the Gospel: continuity with Israel’s Scriptures is maintained, even as their meaning is disclosed through situations that challenge inherited expectations.

Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth follows immediately after a genealogy.

In Matthew’s world, genealogies traced descent through male lineage, from father to son. The practice of tracing Jewish identity through the mother developed later, in rabbinic Judaism, after the Temple’s destruction. This genealogy does that work, but not without interruption.

Along a list that otherwise moves from father to son, a small number of women are named: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah. Their presence signals that there is precedent for God’s purposes moving forward through lives and situations that are not orderly, authorised, or uncontested.

Tamar stands within a family line where justice has failed her, denied protection and offspring, acting to secure a future that should have been hers by right.

Rahab belongs at the margins of the city, a foreigner and a prostitute, whose survival depends on sheltering Israelite spies at personal risk, trusting a promise made from outside her world.

Ruth enters the line as a poor foreign widow, whose place comes through loyalty to her mother-in-law and reliance on another’s protection.

And the wife of Uriah is remembered not by her own name, Bathsheba, but through the man whose death follows David’s abuse of power in sleeping with her and in ordering Uriah’s killing to conceal it.

These stories aren’t explained or resolved. They’re allowed to stand as part of the line itself.

In Matthew’s telling, this is how fulfilment works: God’s purposes move forward through lives that would have been regarded, in their own time, as compromised, illegitimate, or outside the bounds of respectability.

Only then does Matthew turn to the account of Jesus’ birth, told through Joseph’s dilemma and decision, with Mary standing in continuity with the women already named.

Into that story a name’s spoken: Emmanuel, which means God with us.

That name doesn’t originate with Matthew. It comes from Isaiah.

When Isaiah speaks of a child called Emmanuel, Judah is facing a concrete political crisis. The kingdom is ruled by the house of David and is under direct threat. To the north, Israel and Aram have formed an alliance against it. To the east, Assyria is rising as the dominant imperial power. The Davidic line’s future looks fragile rather than secure.

The Biblical narrative tells us that King Ahaz responds by seeking protection from Assyria. He prepares tribute and sends envoys, placing Judah under Assyrian authority in exchange for security.

At that point, the Lord speaks to Ahaz and offers a sign.

The sign isn’t given simply to predict how events will unfold, but to press the question of where trust will be placed while the outcome remains uncertain.

Ahaz refuses, invoking religious language, insisting he will not put the Lord to the test. But the decision has already been made. The refusal functions as a refusal to allow God to interrupt a course of action that appears politically prudent.

The sign is given anyway. A child is named.

In Isaiah’s setting, the name Emmanuel doesn’t undo Judah’s submission to Assyria or secure the future of the kingdom. It names God’s presence as remaining bound to this people, even as fear, compromise, and constrained choices shape their history. That’s what Matthew hears.

He doesn’t treat Isaiah’s words as a prediction now fulfilled and set aside. He recognises a name whose meaning wasn’t exhausted by its first moment. Prophecy here isn’t something used up by fulfilment, but something that remains active because God continues to act. What was spoken into one threatened situation is spoken again into another.

Ahaz refused the sign. Joseph trusted it. The difference lay not in what they knew about the future, but in where they placed their trust while that future remained uncertain.

In Matthew’s account, the angel instructs Joseph to give the child a different name – Jesus – which he does. Matthew then places Isaiah’s word alongside that act of obedience. Joseph names the child Jesus while Scripture speaks over that child the name Emmanuel.

The two names aren’t in competition. They belong together. One names the saving work God is bringing about. The other names the manner of God’s presence while that work unfolds.

Paul, writing to the Romans, approaches the same question of fulfilment from within a different context. Jesus belongs fully within Israel’s story, descended from David according to the flesh, and declared Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.

Yet this same promise now addresses those beyond Israel, including those Paul writes to, Gentiles drawn from the nations rather than from Israel’s lineage.

This isn’t a new idea. Isaiah had already imagined a time when the God who dwelt with Israel would be sought by the nations, when God’s house would become a place of prayer for all peoples, when the light given to Israel would be seen by those far beyond its borders. The promise hasn’t changed, but its horizon has widened.

What these passages show us is how fulfilment works in Scripture: not as a neat correspondence between prediction and event, but as meaning disclosed as God acts in history. Words spoken in one moment are heard again because God’s purposes continue. The prophetic word carries meaning that cannot be exhausted by any single moment or situation.

Scripture doesn’t stand still as an object of our interpretation. As God continues to act, it addresses the Church, shaping how we recognise God’s work in the present. It unsettles assumptions about legitimacy, respectability, and control, and asks whether God might be at work through situations where God’s promise is spoken without worldly guarantees, or through people who don’t fit easily within inherited expectations.

That is what the Christmas story embodies. God’s purposes move forward through a young woman without a voice in the narrative, a righteous man forced to act without certainty, and a child whose names carry more meaning than anyone present can yet grasp.

God with us, not once everything is settled, but while it remains exposed.
God with us, not only through what is expected or secure, but through lives that don’t fit easily within inherited expectations.
God with us, calling for trust before outcomes are known.

On this fourth Sunday of Advent, as the Church stands one week from the feast of the Incarnation, the child is named:

Emmanuel - God with us
Jesus - God who saves

These prophetic names continue to speak. Their meaning is never exhausted.