Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”
NL Daily Devotion for Tuesday, December 20, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Let me be frank: this passage was not written about Jesus. It was a prophecy about a very human king that would one day rule Israel after all the warlords and empires around them petered out. Prophecies in the Hebrew Bible about a coming messiah did not have the concept of the kind of completely reality-changing king that Jesus—God in human flesh—would be. They were limited by their human experiences to that time.
New testament attempts to “prove” Jesus is the promised messiah by connecting him to Hebrew Bible prophecies, especially in Matthew, are sometimes, frankly, a stretch.
However, they lead us toward the most powerful—and really the only appropriate Christian way—to read the whole of the Bible: through the lens of Jesus Christ.
That means we can and do find Jesus’ presence throughout the whole of scripture, long before anyone had the slightest concept of who Jesus was. We find Jesus in the story of creation as one with God and the word God spoke to bring all things into being. (We also find the Holy Spirit everywhere, leading to the concept of the Trinity which is, as we understand it now, not found anywhere in scripture).
Is this revisionist history? By no means! The Bible is a living, breathing, dynamic document, the word of God set down (by men, mostly) on paper, through the lived experience of a particular people over the course of hundreds of years. Because it is alive and well, and because it is limited by its contextuality, we get to dive deep into it with eyes wide open and wearing the glasses that are our modern understanding of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When we do, we find that Jesus meets us on every page and calls us into divine relationship not only with the Triune God, but with every single human being and animal and everything in all creation from the beginning of time.
How awesome is that?
When have I looked for signs of Jesus in the Old Testament?
