Call Him Immanuel

These words land in a political emergency. The kings of Israel and Aram (Syria) had allied against little Judah, and Ahaz was terrified, his heart shaking like trees in a gale (Isaiah 7:2). Isaiah goes out to meet him and tells him to hold steady, to trust God rather than scramble for a foreign rescue. Then God offers Ahaz a sign and tells him to ask for anything at all, from the depths below to the heights above (Isaiah 7:11). Ahaz refuses, dressing the refusal up as piety: he says he will not put the Lord to the test (Isaiah 7:12). It sounds humble. It is not. His mind is already made up to buy Assyria’s protection instead. So the sign in verse 14 is given over his head, to the house of David rather than to him alone. I find that steadying. The promise was not earned by a good king. It was given despite a faithless one, because God keeps his word even when we will not lean on it.

The name carries the whole weight of the verse. Immanuel is built from ordinary Hebrew pieces and reads like a small sentence: God (El) is with us (immanu). That last part, ‘us’, is plural. It is not just God with me in my private corner, but God with a people who feel cornered. The promise meets a nation under threat, and I think that matters when I am tempted to shrink it down to my own moods. There is a long and honest conversation about the Hebrew word translated ‘virgin’ here, which can also describe a young woman of marriageable age, and Christians have wrestled for centuries over how it reaches across the years to Bethlehem. I would not pretend that debate away. What I hold onto is what the text plainly does say: a child will come, and his very name will be a claim about God’s nearness. Isaiah loves to make names speak; his own children were walking signs to Judah (Isaiah 8:18).

For years I was puzzled by how this verse can belong both to Ahaz’s crisis and to a stable in Bethlehem long after. I have come to think prophecy often works with a near horizon and a far one, like hills that line up behind each other when you look down a valley. In Ahaz’s own day a child would be born, and before that child was old enough to tell right from wrong, the two kings frightening Judah would be gone (Isaiah 7:16). That was the near word, and it came true. But the promise was planted in the house of David, and Isaiah keeps reaching further. A little later he speaks of a child given titles no ordinary infant could bear, Wonderful Counsellor and Mighty God among them (Isaiah 9:6). The name Immanuel was waiting for someone who could fill it completely. Matthew, telling of Jesus’ birth, says this is exactly what happened, and that the child’s name means God with us (Matthew 1:23). The far hill turned out to be the highest one.

What moves me most is the direction of travel. Isaiah gives a name; the Gospels give a face. When John says the Word became flesh and made his home among us (John 1:14), he is saying what Isaiah said, only now you could touch it. The God who offered Ahaz a sign from the heights came no further away than a manger. And the nearness did not end with the cradle. The first promise was God with us, and among the last words of Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus telling his followers he is with them always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 28:20). The bookends match. That is not a tidy literary trick to me. It is a lifeline. When I sit with someone in a hospital corridor, or when I cannot find words to pray, the thing I actually need is not advice from a distance but presence in the room. Immanuel says that presence is who God has always meant to be.

Ahaz had God’s nearness offered to him and chose to manage on his own. I recognise that move, because I make it too. When things feel precarious, I reach for the contingency plan, the lever I can pull, the thing I can control, rather than simply trusting that God is with me. The strange comfort of this verse is that the sign was given anyway. God did not wait for Ahaz to deserve it, and he does not wait for me to feel worthy of it either. So on the days when he seems silent, I try to do something small and concrete. I say the name back to him: you are Immanuel, God with us, and that includes me, here, now. I do not always feel it the moment I say it. Faith is not a mood. But naming what is true has a way of slowly reordering what I feel. The baby in Bethlehem was God keeping a promise made to a frightened king, and he keeps it still, in the cold and mess of ordinary weeks, not only at Christmas.

For a long time I read straight past the little word in the centre of the name, and the little word is the whole thing. God could have called himself God over us, and he is, high and lifted up, the maker of everything. He could have called himself God for us, working on our behalf from somewhere far above the trouble, and he is that too. Immanuel claims something stranger and closer than either. Not God watching, not God acting at a safe distance, but God with us, in the same room, under the same roof, breathing the same cold air. I can admire a God who is over me. I can be grateful for a God who is for me. But the one I actually need on a bad night is a God who is with me, near enough to reach. That is the claim Isaiah hands the house of David, and it is the most daring word in the verse.

Ahaz was frightened of armies, and his fear had a real shape: two kings on his border, a city that could fall. But I think there was an older fear sitting underneath it, the one that hides under most of mine. It is the fear of facing the thing alone. We can carry a surprising amount when someone is in it with us, and we can be flattened by something small when we feel we are on our own. That is the fear Immanuel speaks to directly. It does not promise that the armies disappear, or that the diagnosis is wrong, or that the grief lifts by morning. It promises the one thing that changes how all of those are carried: you are not alone in them. God did not send word from a distance that he was thinking of us. He came and stood in the room. When I am most afraid, that is the promise I reach for, not that the trouble is gone, but that I am not facing it by myself.

I have handed this verse to frightened people as if it were a shield, and I have taken it that way myself on bad nights. Then I made myself read to the end of the chapter. A few verses on, Isaiah is describing the king of Assyria arriving, a razor hired to shave the land bare, vineyards gone over to briers and thorns, ground fit for nothing but letting the cattle wander, and curds and wild honey the entire menu because there is nothing left to harvest (Isaiah 7:17 to 25). The rescuer Ahaz was buying becomes the ruin. Isaiah says so in the same breath as the sign.

That is what stops me every time. The name was not handed over instead of the wreckage. It was spoken inside it, with the wreckage itemised on the next page, and nobody edited the two apart. So when I want to use verse 14 as a guarantee that the trouble will pass someone by, I read on first. It costs me the easy version of this verse. What I get back is something I could say to a widow without lying to her.

If I were preaching this I would fight to keep verse 13 in, and it is the bit nobody reads at carol services. Ahaz has just turned down what amounts to a blank cheque, and Isaiah rounds on the house of David and asks whether wearing out the patience of people is not enough for them, must they wear out God’s patience too (Isaiah 7:13, and I am putting that in my own words rather than quoting it). Read it slowly. You can hear the exasperation coming off the page.

I love that God is on record here as fed up. Not serene, not hovering above the mess, just tired of a man who will not be helped. And the sign arrives one line later, straight out of that tiredness, unearned and received ungraciously. Let a congregation sit in verse 13 before you take them anywhere near a manger. Feel the irritation first, and Immanuel in verse 14 stops being a Christmas card. It becomes a promise made by someone who had every reason to walk off and did not.

The most natural home I know for this verse is a christening. Two things happen at a font: a name is given, and someone entirely helpless is held up by other people. That is verse 14 in miniature. God with us, said over a baby in the same minute her name is spoken aloud, is a good and plain thing for a parent or a vicar to lean on. It sits well as an Advent call to worship too, in a room that is meant to wait rather than tie anything off. That is my own judgement about where it lands well, not a rule anyone has written down.

Where I would not reach for it is the first hour after the news. The scan result. The call at four in the morning. I have offered this verse in that hour and watched it arrive like a request: cheer up, I have brought Isaiah. Immanuel is true from the first second. It is simply not always sayable yet, and what that hour usually needs is a kettle and someone who stays.

There is a detail in Isaiah’s Hebrew that English cannot quite carry, and I want to handle it carefully, because I read Hebrew badly and I am leaning on people who read it well. The verb behind “shall call” is singular and feminine, and read most naturally it is second person: you, young woman, will call his name Immanuel. The same construction turns up when the angel finds Hagar by the spring and tells her what her son is to be called (Genesis 16:11). So at its plainest the promise is a young woman looking down at her newborn and saying God with us. I should add that the manuscripts are not unanimous on that verb ending, and one of the Isaiah scrolls found at Qumran does not read the same way, so I would not build anything load-bearing on it.

Then the moment came, and nobody said it. An angel tells Joseph in a dream to name the child Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). Mary called him Jesus. As far as the Gospels record, not one person ever called him Immanuel to his face. And when Matthew reaches back to Isaiah a couple of lines later, he quietly shifts the verb into the plural: they shall call his name Immanuel (Matthew 1:23). Not she. They. For a long time I read that as a slip, or a convenient bit of tidying. Now I think it is the truest thing on the page. Isaiah gave the naming to one woman in one room. Matthew hands it to every person who has ever looked at that man and worked out who he was. Immanuel was never for the birth certificate. It is what you end up calling him, whatever you called him at the table.

Outside this chapter the name surfaces twice, both within a page, and the first of the two made me flinch when I finally read it in place rather than lifted out for a carol service. Isaiah has just told Ahaz what hiring Assyria will actually buy him, and he draws it as water: the River rising, breaking its banks, coming through Judah, up as far as the neck. Then, describing that same flood spreading to fill the width of the land, he turns and speaks to the child directly. Your land, Immanuel (Isaiah 8:5 to 8). The name is spoken over a country going under. It is not a rescue line. It reads more like a label on the wreckage, telling you whose wreckage it is.

Two verses later it flips. Isaiah tells the nations to take their counsel and speak their word, and says it will come to nothing, and the reason he gives is those same two words: God is with us (Isaiah 8:10). One phrase, forty seconds apart, first as the description of a drowning and then as a taunt thrown at empires. I have never got over that. It means the name was never a weather forecast. It does not promise the water stays away and it does not promise the water wins, it tells you who the field belongs to while it is under water. That is a harder promise than the one I want handed to me on a bad night, and a far more durable one. It does not say the river will not come. It says the name survives the river.

The hardest question I have been handed about this verse came from a friend who thinks the whole thing is wishful, and he was right about more of it than I wanted him to be. The word is almah, a young woman of marriageable age. It appears only a handful of times in the Old Testament, once of Rebekah at the well before her wedding (Genesis 24:43). On its own it does not say virgin. There was a narrower word available, betulah, and Isaiah did not reach for it. Plenty of careful readers, and long traditions of Jewish reading, take the child here as one born in Ahaz’s own lifetime and the name as a clock rather than a miracle. I cannot make the Hebrew settle that, and I have learned to distrust anyone who tells you it does. It is easy to say further up this page that there is an honest conversation to be had about the word. This is that conversation, and it is not a comfortable one to have.

Here is what I actually have, and it is less than proof. Long before anybody had heard of Jesus, Jewish translators putting Isaiah into Greek for Greek-speaking Jews chose parthenos, virgin, to carry almah. That was not a Christian decision. There were no Christians. Then Matthew looked at a birth he believed had no human father and said this is the sentence that has been waiting all this time. A word that had held two possibilities for centuries turned out, once, to be holding the narrow one. I cannot hand that to my friend as a knockdown and I have stopped trying to. What I told him is all I have: a promise that stays ambiguous for centuries and then lands exactly is not the shape a tidy invention usually takes. He was not persuaded. We are still friends. I still turn it over at midnight.

There is one hymn I cannot get through without my throat doing something awkward, and it was never written to be cheerful. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” grew out of the O Antiphons, short Latin prayers sung one a night through the last week before Christmas, each calling the coming Christ by a different name: Wisdom, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring, King of the nations, and last of all Emmanuel. They are old. I cannot tell you how old, and I would be wary of anyone who gives you a confident date. But there is a trick buried in them that I love. Take the first letters of those Latin titles, read them backwards, and they spell ero cras, I shall be there tomorrow. The answer was hidden inside the asking all week. Whether that was designed or spotted later I do not know.

The English words are John Mason Neale’s, from the early eighteen fifties, and the tune is older and modal and flatly refuses to cheer up. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel, goes the refrain, and the verb stays in the future every single time. That is what I cannot get past. The church had the baby. It had Bethlehem, it had Matthew’s quotation of this exact verse, it had the entire story from both ends, and what it chose to sing in the season celebrating his arrival was a plea from people who do not yet have him, asking for him by name in a minor key. Nobody ever wrote the triumphant version. I think that is because Advent is telling the truth about where we still stand, up to the neck, and this promise was never a receipt.

Isaiah did not invent this claim, and that is what makes the scene sting. Israel had been singing it for years. Psalm 46 is a song for a city with the waters roaring and the nations in uproar and the kingdoms tottering, and twice it stops everything and plants the same refrain: the Lord of Armies is with us (Psalm 46:7 and 46:11). With us. The very thing Isaiah walks out to offer a king who will not take it. I am told the Hebrew behind that refrain holds the same “with us” that sits inside the name, and I believe it, though I would rather you weighed the situation than the philology, because the situation needs no Hebrew at all. A besieged city sings that God is with us. A besieged king is offered that God is with us. One of them believed it. This was no novelty sprung on Ahaz. It was in the songbook he grew up on.

And both places go on to say the same impossible thing about what to do next. The psalm’s answer to a shaking world is to be still and know that he is God (Psalm 46:10). Isaiah’s opening word to a king with two armies massing on his border is to keep calm and not be afraid (Isaiah 7:4). Be still. Said to a man whose heart was shaking like trees in a gale. It is the least practical advice ever handed to a head of state, and it is the entire argument of the chapter, because if God really is with us then stillness is not doing nothing, it is the only sane reading of the facts. Ahaz heard it as doing nothing and went shopping for an army. I am not sure I would have heard it any better, standing on that wall in the dark, counting the campfires.

• Where am I, like Ahaz, quietly arranging my own rescue rather than trusting that God is with me?
• What would change this week if I really believed the name Immanuel applied to my situation and not only to the Christmas story?
• Is there a person who feels far from God whom I could simply be present with, the way God chose presence over distance?
• When God feels silent, what small, concrete thing could I do to remind myself he is near?

If you want to keep going, you could read more from Isaiah or, on a day when nearness feels hard to believe, look through verses gathered by how you feel.