Texts: Matthew 1:18-25; Isaiah 7:10-16

We have just heard how Matthew tells of the birth of Jesus. People tend to be more familiar with the account of Jesus’ birth in Luke, with its shepherds and angels, and the baby in a manger. The focus in Luke’s Gospel is also very much on Mary, but Matthew places Joseph front and centre. In the first seventeen verses of the Gospel, Matthew takes pain to show how Jesus’ ancestry placed him in the line of David, beginning with Abraham, and ending with Joseph, “the husband of Mary.”

Joseph finds himself in a difficult situation: Mary is found to be pregnant before their marriage. If Joseph had followed the letter of the law, as a righteous person ought to, Mary and the supposed father could have been stoned to death. Joseph, however, is not so much righteous as merciful, and seeks to have the marriage contract voided.

Enter the angel of the Lord, appearing to Joseph in a dream, not unlike many appearances in the Hebrew Scriptures. The angel has a simple message for him:

    …take Mary as your wife …name (her son) Jesus,
    for he will save his people from their sins.

Matthew associates Jesus’ name with God’s saving action. In Hebrew, the name is Joshua or “Yehoshuah,” which means “Yahweh is salvation” or “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh will save.” This association would not likely have been made by anyone but a believer, because it was a very common name. Nonetheless, it tells us what Matthew understood Jesus’ role to be, and what God was doing through him.

So Matthew asserted, and so the church continues to proclaim, that God sent his son to be our Saviour.

Matthew goes on to interpret Jesus’ birth by referring to the story from Isaiah, implicitly calling him “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.” Again, it is an association which would not be made by anyone but a believer, because the earlier event clearly has an historical context very different from the circumstances of Jesus’ birth.

Nonetheless, we learn something significant about Jesus from Matthew’s use of the name. An explicit reference to Emmanuel appears only here in the entire New Testament, but the idea behind it—the name’s meaning—is the final word in this Gospel, as the Risen Christ tells his disciples,

    Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:20b)

In this way, using interpretations of two names, the birth narrative sets the stage for the rest of the Gospel, in which Matthew tells how God saved his people through Jesus, and how Jesus remains “God with us” to this day and beyond.

The message has not changed, but the social context has. I suspect that many people today find the idea of needing a saviour quite foreign. We live in a society which admires self-reliance and rugged independence. And who needs a saviour when you can buy a self-help book on just about any topic imaginable? The promise in the Baptism rite that we will “turn to Jesus and accept him as…saviour” flies in the face of much of contemporary life.

It seems to me that part of the problem lies in our language. We tend to say “saved from…”, just as Matthew interprets Jesus’ name. What we should remember is that when we are “saved from” something, we are “saved for” something else. If we are saved from our sins through baptism, what then is Jesus is saving us for? There are many ways of expressing it, many theological terms, but for me it comes down to being saved for a life lived with God. And there’s the Isaiah reference again: we can live with God, because God has chosen to be with us through Jesus from now to the end of the age. “Emmanuel”—God is with us, and continues to be with us, even when we turn our hearts away, and fall by the wayside.

Jesus came to save his people, and continues to come to save us, from our own sinful natures and from the forces that crowd around us, separating us from God’s love. And Jesus continues to come to save us for the new life, the life lived in the presence of the God who is always present.

So what does this life look like? I can’t give a specific answer that for anyone else, but I know for myself that the new life is focused on God’s needs before my own, and that God’s needs are found in the world around me.

There is no magic formula, beyond the simple resolve to live with God, to put our lives in his hands, and to turn ourselves to God’s purposes.

God has saved us for this, and has sent his Son to be with us. Let us then give thanks for the new life in Christ, and turn ourselves anew to him.

Amen.