Reflectionary VIII

"Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel."

I'm not sure our present generation can have any sense of the power and meaning behind the simple prophecy of Isaiah, quoted above.

For any meaning to be clear, there must be a frame of reference. When wearing the lenses of an early 21st-Century person, these messianic prophecies lose all of their magic, their poetry, and majesty. There is no frame of reference. No common themes. The words do not even mean the same thing.

"Look." or, "Behold." To truly look at something, or behold it, as Isaiah intended, you have to be willing to stop and wait. We are enjoined to cease what we're doing, read, ponder, even pray, for understanding of what we are about to hear. This takes patience. It takes the ability to put off anything that does not stimulate our physical senses, instantaneously. It requires a willingness to learn, to gain understanding, to be proven wrong, to reach new levels of awareness, or actualization.

We can't do that. We don't know how to "look."

"The young woman." To the ancient Hebrew culture, it was a given that a "young woman" was what we would call today, a "virgin." But we can't access that concept. When a pre-Christian Era Hebrew woman was a "virgin," that meant she hadn't done "any" of "it." None of the substitute acts that are common today. No "dates." No time alone with another boy. No hand-holding. Her eyes had not seen everything imaginable on cable TV, in her parents' home and even in their presence, with their tacit approval. It was also assumed that the "young woman" was unmarried. If you were a virgin, you were not married, and vice versa. But it also entailed a certain expectation that she would one day become married . . . which was understood to be, to a man . . . and that the marriage itself would result in children . . . many of them . . . because God had created beings in His image . . . like Him . . . which meant we could create others (reproduce) in our own image (our children), just as our creator created us.  The culture believed that God was both Love and Life, and that when you combined the two, new generations of God-imaged humans would result.

No, I am not being naive. I am not suggesting that everybody in Hebrew culture, even in those times, were happy prudes. But when Scripture talks about "the fullness of time," perhaps it's an indication of how rare it is to find a person, let alone a woman, like Mary . . . who could so perfectly fulfill the requirements of her calling.

"With child." Meaning, if you were "with child," then you had to be married . . . prior to getting in that state. Mary was not. To understand the emotional scandal that this entailed, think about what it's like if your best friend unfriends you on Facebook, without telling you ahead of time, or worse yet, your significant other unfriends you as a way to break up. Think about how that feels, now multiply it a couple hundred times and you may begin to understand the feelings of people around Mary, when they discovered she was pregnant.

And I will leave the rest of the text to another time. 

My prayer is that, in the midst of a world that is awash with images that no one should see, or think about (let alone children), that has perhaps eaten too freely of a Tree of Knowledge for which we, as a species, are not morally ready; that you find the power to erase all those images from your mind, and be able truly to look . . . behold . . . see . . . and be blessed.