• The morning is built out of two sizes
• The command was to ask
• What the refusal actually cost
• Then somebody asks
• The teaching this has to take apart
• Sunday said the same thing from the other end
• Three friends and a storage unit
• One word, kept by the Douay
• Where it lands

The morning is built out of two sizes

Start with the shape of the thing, because the Church has done something deliberate with it.

Ember Wednesday gives you two Lessons, and they are not the same size at all. The first is enormous. Every nation on the map moving toward one hill, the law going out from a city, weapons beaten into farm tools, and the whole species giving up the practice of war.

The second is one king in one conversation, being offered a sign and turning it down.

The liturgy makes you hear the huge one first. By the time Isaias says the Lord himself shall give you a sign, you have already been told what the promise is finally for, and it is not modest in the least.

Then the sign itself arrives and it is very small. A pregnancy. A child with a name. A diet of butter and honey. Nothing in that list would carry a headline in any century.

That is the scale shall give you a sign actually delivers at.

So the morning sets the two beside each other on purpose. The reach of the promise is every nation that exists. The proof offered for it is one baby, and the Lord himself shall give you a sign is the hinge between them.

The command was to ask

Now read the second Lesson slowly, because most of us have heard it summarised and the summary leaves out the first half.

God does not begin by announcing anything. He begins by giving Achaz an instruction, and the instruction is to ask. Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God either unto the depth of hell, or unto the height above.

Sit with the range in that sentence. Down as far as there is down, up as far as there is up, and no other condition attached. The king may name anything at all, and the naming is his.

Nothing in that offer resembles a test. Shall give you a sign is what gets said afterwards, and the first word on the subject is an instruction to speak.

I want to be exact about what that is. It is not permission grudgingly extended. It is an order. Before the Lord himself shall give you a sign is ever pronounced, the only thing asked of this man is a request.

And the request has no subject matter attached. There is no list of acceptable topics, no suggestion that some signs would suit better than others, no warning about asking for the wrong thing. The Lord himself shall give you a sign comes later, and only after the offer has been declined.

What the refusal actually cost

Achaz answers in one line. I will not ask, and I will not tempt the Lord.

That is a pious sentence. It is built out of good vocabulary and it sounds like reverence, which is exactly why it is worth stopping on. It is not the sentence of a man mocking a prophet. It is the sentence of a man who has found a devout-sounding way to keep his own situation to himself.

The Lord himself shall give you a sign is the answer that sentence gets.

Isaias does not receive it as reverence. He turns and addresses the whole house, not the king alone, and asks whether wearing out the patience of men was not enough without wearing out the patience of God as well.

Then comes the line the season is built on. Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign.

Read the therefore. It is doing something strange, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Achaz has refused, and the refusal is met not with withdrawal but with delivery. The Lord himself shall give you a sign is announced because the offer was declined, not in spite of it.

So the refusal did not cancel anything. Work out what it actually cost him and the answer is oddly specific: it cost him the naming of it. Achaz could have said what the sign would be, anywhere between the depth and the height, and now Isaias says it instead.

Shall give you a sign was never in doubt. The wording of it was.

That is the whole penalty. The Lord himself shall give you a sign either way, and the only thing at stake was whose sentence would describe it. The sign he ends up with is not the one a king would have picked for himself, because a king picks what helps this week.

Instead the Lord himself shall give you a sign lands on a birth, which helps a century.

Then somebody asks

The Gospel puts a second person in front of the same subject, and she does the opposite thing.

Gabriel arrives and makes an announcement, and Mary’s response is a question about mechanics. How shall this be done, because I know not man? There is nothing decorative in that. It is a plain question about her own body, put to the messenger, in the middle of the message.

This is what the other side of shall give you a sign looks like when somebody uses the offer.

And here is what does not happen next. She is not rebuked. She is not told the question is a failure of trust. She is not warned that asking about details is beneath the occasion, and the angel does not pause to check whether she deserves an answer.

He answers her. The Holy Ghost, the power of the most High, the child called the Son of God. A direct question about how, met with a direct account of how. The Lord himself shall give you a sign has by now become a person, and the person is having the mechanics explained.

Then he adds something she did not request. Elizabeth is six months along, and the woman the text says was called barren is carrying a son. Shall give you a sign turns out to arrive with a second sign attached, unrequested, handed to somebody who had already been given what she asked for.

So set the two askers side by side. One is the king of Judah, addressed through his whole house, ordered to ask and refusing. The other is a young woman in an unimportant town with no standing in any room that mattered, who asks the blunt question and is answered fully and then given extra.

The Lord himself shall give you a sign was said to the first. The sign, when it arrives, is announced to the second, and she is the only one of the two who gets an explanation with it. Shall give you a sign was spoken over a refusal and delivered into a yes.

The teaching this has to take apart

There is a habit in our own tradition that this pair of readings makes very hard to defend, and it is worth stating plainly rather than gesturing at.

It is the habit of treating a request as the problem. Not declining the request, which is at least honest, but reclassifying the person who made it: demanding, ungrateful, lacking in trust, a little too interested in their own case. The Lord himself shall give you a sign is spoken over a man who would not ask, which means the tradition that reveres this passage has the offer to ask sitting at the front of it.

Women have carried the sharpest version of this for as long as our tradition has had anything to say about them. The pattern is rarely a rule written down anywhere. It is a room in which a woman’s plain question about her own situation is received as a challenge to the room, while the same question from somebody else is received as a reasonable request for information.

Ask what that has actually produced. What grew is a great many women who learned to ask nothing directly, who put the real question at the end of a long apology or into somebody else’s mouth, and who were then described as indirect.

Shall give you a sign was spoken in a room where the asking had been declined, and the declining is the part our own record has quietly recommended.

What also grew is a body of preaching that praises silence and calls it humility, taken from a book in which the woman at the centre of this morning’s Gospel asks a direct question about her own body and gets a full answer on the spot. Our record and the text do not agree, and the record is the part that has to move. The Lord himself shall give you a sign is not addressed to whoever behaved best.

The refutation sits inside the passage rather than being imported into it. Gabriel treats the question as ordinary. He does not soften it, escalate it, or turn it into a test, and the account he gives is more than she asked for. If asking had been the failing, this was the moment to say so, and the moment goes by without a word of correction in it, which is doing as much work as shall give you a sign is.

Two pages in this archive stand near that and neither is making this claim. On the seventh the question was whether a question already asked counts afterwards as a resignation, which is about what happens to you once you have spoken. On the fifteenth the question was whether help may be made conditional on a satisfactory account of yourself, which is about what a room demands before it hands anything over.

Today’s sits earlier than both. It is about whether the asking may happen at all, and about which of two people in one morning’s readings is granted a plain answer. The fruit test runs where it always runs in this space, on our own record and on no other community’s.

Sunday said the same thing from the other end

Three days ago this space read Paul telling a church to make its requests known in every thing, and the whole of that morning turned on the fact that the sentence puts no limit on the subject.

Same territory, different claim, and the difference is worth stating rather than assuming. Sunday was about the permission: you may say the true thing, and the true thing may be anything.

Today is about what happens on either side of the asking. Achaz has the permission, in the form of a direct order, and does not use it. Mary uses it and is answered. The Lord himself shall give you a sign holds steady underneath both, and shall give you a sign sits there unaffected by which of the two you are.

Three friends and a storage unit

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who lost a flat she had been in for nine years, and of three people who were not related to her in any way a form would accept.

They met her at a self-storage place on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of December, because the van had to go back by five and the unit closed at six. Orange roller shutters down one side of a strip-lit corridor, a flat trolley with a bad wheel, and about forty minutes of carrying boxes without much being said.

Somewhere in the middle of it one of them stopped, put the box down, and asked her what she actually needed.

She gave the answer people give, which is that she was fine and everyone had done more than enough already. He did not accept it. He said he was not asking whether she was fine, he was asking what the thing was, and then he stood there and waited, which is the hard part and the part most of us skip.

That is a small human copy of shall give you a sign. The answer was coming either way, and the question only settled who got to describe it.

So she told him. A kettle that worked, because the one in the box had been broken for a year and she had kept it anyway. And a lamp with a switch on the flex, because the room she was moving into had its only light on a cord by the door.

That is what she got. A kettle and a lamp, in a carrier bag, three days later. Not a hamper, not a collection, not a speech about it, and nothing she had not named herself. She named it, so she got the naming, and the Lord himself shall give you a sign is the large version of that arrangement.

I want to be careful about what this story is, because it does not resolve. The unit is still rented and the year is not up. The nine years never get explained to anyone, the pull cord is never mentioned again, and a fourth person who said they would come on the Sunday did not.

What it has in it is one question asked properly and held open long enough to be answered. Ask thee a sign, the Lord said to Achaz, either unto the depth of hell, or unto the height above, and the man in the corridor was doing a very small version of the same thing.

And she named something almost embarrassingly small. That is what happens when the asking is genuinely allowed. People do not ask for the height above, and shall give you a sign is the promise that the lamp arrives regardless. The asking only settles whether it is the right lamp.

One word, kept by the Douay

There is a small thing in the last exchange of the Gospel that the Douay preserves and most modern English drops.

The angel’s closing line is usually quoted as nothing shall be impossible with God. The Douay-Rheims does not say nothing. It says because no word shall be impossible with God, and the Latin underneath it is omne verbum, every word.

Then read what Mary says next, with no gap: be it done to me according to thy word. The same noun twice, in consecutive sentences, from two different speakers.

So the guarantee is about spoken things holding. Something was said to a king centuries earlier, and the angel’s last argument is that words of that kind do not fail. Yesterday’s page turned on the same translator’s care with a different letter, and this is one line rather than a whole argument.

Which is why the Lord himself shall give you a sign carries across the centuries. Shall give you a sign is a spoken thing, and spoken things hold.

Where it lands

Put the morning back together and it is not complicated.

You were ordered to ask, and the range was the depth of hell to the height above. If you cannot do that, or will not, or were trained out of it before you could talk, the Lord himself shall give you a sign anyway, because that is what the therefore in the second Lesson is for.

What the refusal costs is real but small. It costs the naming, and shall give you a sign is not in question. You do not get to say what arrives, and what arrives will very likely be smaller and slower and more domestic than what you would have picked, exactly as a baby is a poor substitute for anything a king would have named for himself.

That is what the Lord himself shall give you a sign produced for Achaz, and it was the better sign.

And if you can ask, ask like Mary and not like the king. Plainly, about the actual mechanics, without an apology in front of it, in the middle of the message rather than at the end. She got a full answer and an extra piece of news she had not requested, and the record does not contain one word of reproach for the asking. Both of them are inside shall give you a sign, and only one of them is inside the explanation.

Here is the same thing with the theology removed, and it holds on its own. Not one person in that corridor was owed anything, and the question that changed the afternoon was not a kind offer, it was a specific question held open past the first polite no. Most people you know are carrying something small and nameable and are quite sure that saying it out loud would make them a burden, and you can test that against your own list this week.

The Introit asks the sky to send something down and the earth to open and produce it. The first Lesson says every nation is coming to the same hill. The second says the Lord himself shall give you a sign, to a man who would not ask for one, and by the last page of the morning the sign is a girl in Nazareth saying yes out loud in her own words.

↑ The order resumes below.