Immanuel: “God With Us”
I thought a short Christmas message would be appropriate for today, when we celebrate God himself in the person of his Son coming to be, “God with us.”
We’re generally familiar with the story, from nativity plays and the classic Bible readings, so we’ll focus on just the relevant verses.
An angel visits Joseph to reassure him about what’s happening with Mary’s pregnancy and says to him, in Matthew 1:21, “You are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
So far, so good. But in the next two verses, Matthew appears to contradict himself: “All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).” So which is it? The angel has apparently said one thing—“You are to give him the name Jesus”—but Matthew is saying that, according to Isaiah, the Messiah was supposed to be called “Immanuel.”
You may have heard preachers explain this discrepancy based on a distinction between “they will call him” and “you are to name him.” Which is half right! It’s right insofar as the intent: the first is functioning as a descriptive title while the second is a proper name. The NIV reflects this interpretation. But it’s wrong insofar as the original Greek is concerned. Both verses are using the same Greek words, kaleō (call) and onoma (name).
Throughout the Old Testament, many “names” are attributed to God in describing who he is, what he is like, and the things he does. The same is also true in relation to the prophesied Messiah who was to come. In Jeremiah 23:6, we read, “This is his name by which he will be called, ‘The Lord Our Righteousness.’” Clearly, Jesus was not named that—it wouldn’t have worked very well when his teacher was taking the attendance register at the beginning of the school day: “Has anyone seen ‘The Lord Our Righteousness’ today?”—but once again it’s a description of who Jesus is for us and what he does for us, on which Paul reflected in 1 Corinthians 1:30 (“Jesus became to us . . . righteousness, sanctification, and redemption”) and 2 Corinthians 5:21 (“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”).
In the famous messianic passage in Isaiah 9, which is itself often read in Christmas services, the prophet says, “To us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Again, none of those were proper names given to Jesus.
If we turn to the New Testament, we see similar things. In Luke’s version of the nativity, we have an angel telling Mary to name him Jesus (Luke 1:31), but he then adds that he will be “called the Son of the Most High” (verse 32). A few verses later, the angel reinforces that: “The holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (verse 35). Just out of interest, these verses in Luke all use those same two Greek words: kaleō (call) and onoma (name).
Why, then, am I focusing here on that one descriptive name of Jesus: Immanuel, meaning “God with us”? Humanity has always sought to reach out to a God who may be “up there” or “out there”—a God whom we cannot see except through the things he is perceived to do. The story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 reflects a rather embarrassing (foolish) human effort to ascend to heaven. We dream of connecting with God—Jacob did so literally: “He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven” (Genesis 28). Many have a sense of there being a supernatural, eternal dimension beyond the finite, physical dimension that reflects our present, limited experience. But that reality is one that seems far from us and remains invisible to us; only a sixth sense of some kind tells us it is there.
But all of this changed forever in the coming of Jesus that first Christmas when that eternal Word* who was God and was in the beginning with God “became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (or as The Message so nicely puts it, “moved into the neighbourhood”). We could not get to him, but he came to us. The invisible God became visible in a person whom we could relate to.
*The logos—a Greek concept of God first used by a philosopher named Heraclitus around 600 BCE.
Jesus did not just fly in for a guest appearance as God, he became just like us (he fully participated in our humanity). Hebrews 2:14-18. Whatever is true of us, including every form of temptation, was true of him, aside from sin. Hebrews 4:15. He “laid aside” everything to do with being God that would have been incompatible—that would have given him an unfair advantage over us—in having to live life as we do. He “emptied himself” of divinity and took on full humanity. Philippians 2:6-7. He laid down all of “the omnis”—omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. He experienced the same kind of relationship with God, through the Holy Spirit, that we have.
As the fourth-century theologian Athanasius said, “Jesus became as we are, in order that we might become as he is.” In the same period, Gregory of Nazianzus said, “That which is not assumed is not healed” (or, “not redeemed”). Both see Jesus’ salvific work as uniting humanity to God—bringing humanity and divinity together in his person. Both theologians are drawing on Hebrews 2:17: “For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way . . .” And when the perishable meets the imperishable, as it did in Jesus, it’s the imperishable that wins out. Light overcomes darkness, and life overcomes death, not the other way around.
As a result of Jesus’ incarnation (rather than just a guest appearance in which some divine features were retained to make life more comfortable for him), no one can ever say to God—no one need ever say to God—“You wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me; to have to live the life I have to live.” Is that true literally, in every respect, in every case? No, of course not; it could never be so. For one thing, Jesus was a man. But in terms of the same range of experiences that come with being human, not least in suffering and struggles, hardships, abuse, injustice, abandonment, worries and fears, and ultimately facing death, we may all identify with Jesus.
That’s wonderful in itself: a God coming to us—a God becoming fully and completely one of us, to transform humanity from within humanity. But it doesn’t stop there.
Firstly, Jesus didn’t just come to be God with us for a bit and then go away again. In the very last verse of the last chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, he promised his disciples, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
You may say, “But doesn’t that just put everyone back in the same position we were before? Having to believe in a God that we can’t see?” No, not at all. It’s not the same. Because as John 1:18 explains, yes, it remains true that “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”
And unlike before, we now know the God we pray to and listen to. We know his nature and character. We know what he is like; the kind of person he is; the things that matter to him. The God whom we experience today through the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit is the exact same God we see in Jesus: the God who came to be Immanuel, God with us, at Christmas—who lived among us, experiencing relationship with God through the Holy Spirit just as we do.