BEHIND THE STORY OF CHRISTMAS

BEHIND THE STORY OF CHRISTMAS 1. The gospel is GOOD NEWS not GOOD ADVICE. Pay careful attention to how Matthew begins his book; the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ another translation interprets it this way; the record of the origin of Jesus Christ. These opening words solidify Jesus existence. Why is this important? A 2014 Gallup Poll revealed that only 28% of American s believe Scripture is the Word of God. Today s text reinforces that the Christmas story isn t fairytale. More and more people today view Scripture as a book that uses outlandish stories to teach morality and virtue. People are denying Scripture as useful but as supernatural. They believe Scripture and Jesus to be a storybook much like Aesop s Fables. A book that begins not with a verifiable record but as one found in fairytales; Once upon a time. This view isn t new in 2 Peter 1:16 Peter reminds us of all of Scripture s genesis; for we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. When Matthew say, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ or this is the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ he grounding what Jesus is and does in real history. Why is that important? Here s why... Advice is counsel about what you must do. News is a report about what s already been done. Advice urges you to make something happen. News urges you to recognize something has already happened, and you must respond to it. Advice says basically, It s all up to you. News is, This has already been accomplished in history; it s actually happened. For example, let s just say there was an invading army coming to a town. What does that town need? What that town needs is military advisors. It needs advice. But what if you re a great king, and you have defeated the invading army? You ve saved the town. You ve already accomplished their salvation. Then what do you do? Then you send not military advisors. You send messengers. The Greek word for that is aggelos, angels. You send angels, like at Christmas. The messengers do not say, Here s what you have to do, but Here s has been done. You need to respond accordingly. What s been done changes everything. Christmas is not about how to live your life better. It s not an inspiring story to tell you how to live. In fact, think about it. What in the world would the Christmas story be inspiring us to

do? Be shepherds? Outdoor childbirth? Star following? Christmas is an announcement of something that s been done. Every other religion and, unfortunately, many churches, when they talk about salvation, they talk about it as advice. Salvation is advice on how you have to perform, to pray, to read, and to obey. But the gospel is a message. All other founders of all other religions say, I am come to show you the way to spiritual reality. Do all this. This is advice not good news. However Jesus Christ came and said, I am spiritual reality come down to you. I have gone where you could never go. You could never come up to me; therefore, I have come down to you. Christmas actually tells us what he came to do. Even Christmas is a foreshadowing of what he came to do. We have put ourselves in the place of God, that is, in charge of our lives. So God has put himself in our place where we deserve to be. Where is that? Out in the cold. Out in the stable. No room. Jesus Christ was thrown out in the cold where we deserve to be (spiritually speaking) so we could be brought in. Christianity is not primarily self-improvement. Christianity is not really a place to go to get some inspiration and get some guidance for life. Christianity does have implications for how you live, but primarily Christianity is not about adopting some ethics or living in a new way or even in joining a community. Christianity entails all that, but it s primarily, Do you believe the message? Is it true? Did God really become a human being? Did he really live and suffer and die for you? Did he really rise triumphant over the grave? If that s the case, Christmas shows us Christianity is not good advice but good news. This is the genealogy, first. Fairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, etc. They re not factually true and yet there seems to be a set of longings in the human heart that realistic fiction can never satisfy, because deep in the human heart there s a desire to escape death. There s a desire for the supernatural. There is a desire for love that never parts. There s a desire to somehow not age but live long enough to realize your creative dreams. There s a desire to fly. There s a desire to communicate with other non-human beings like angels. There s a desire to triumph over evil. The well-told stories, whether movies or books or plays, that have all those fabulous aspects to them have magic. We find them incredibly satisfying, because even though we know somehow factually those things didn t happen, our hearts long for or sense we really are enchanted. We really are under the power of a sorcerer of some sort. We really weren t meant to die. We really need to defeat death. We hear Beauty and the Beast, and we sense, There must be a love that can break us out of the beastliness we have created for ourselves. Here s Sleeping Beauty. We are really kind of in a sleeping enchantment, and there s a handsome prince or somebody, a noble prince,

who can come and destroy it. Here s Peter Pan. Eternal life, forever young, can it really be possible. We read and hear these things, and it stirs something deep within us. Our hearts want to believe these stories are true. Even though the stories aren t true, we want to believe the underlying realities behind the stories are. And along comes Christmas, a story about Someone from outer space who breaks into this world and has miraculous powers and can calm the storm and raise people from the dead and heal people. His enemies turn on him, and he is put to death. It seems like all hope is over. But then he rises from the dead, and he saves everyone. What do we do? We read that, and we go, Another great story! Wait till Peter Jackson gets his fingers on this. It will be incredible! We ll cheer, and it will make us feel good. Then we ll leave the theater and get back to reality. It looks like the Christmas story is one more story pointing to these underlying realities, but the book of Matthew says no. It won t begin, Once upon a time It says, This is the genealogy of Jesus. Do you know what the book of Matthew is saying? Do you know what the Bible says? Jesus Christ is not one more story pointing to these underlying realities. Jesus Christ is the underlying reality to which all the stories point. Jesus is real. Jesus really happened. Jesus Christ has come from the ideal world we know is there, we sense is there. He has come from that world, and he has broken through the ideal and the real, and he has come into our world. If what Jesus says is right? If the Bible is right? If Matthew is right? Then guess what? There is an evil sorcerer in this world, and we are under enchantment. There has been a noble Prince who has broken the enchantment. There is a love we never part from. We will fly, and we will defeat death. This world was created by God and Someday the trees are going to dance. That s what it says, and it s saying. In other words, even though all those stories aren t factually true, the fact is the true story of Jesus makes all of the best stories true and real. If you re a Christian and you understand the gospel and you see some little boy or girl put down a book and say, I wish there was a noble prince. I wish there was a Superman. I wish there was a Hercules. I wish we could fly. I wish we could live forever, and you can repeat Wendy s words to Peter in the movie Hook; Peter, these stories are true! When Des told Jenny, We finished the last of Matthew today, she replied, What about the first seventeen verses. Oh yes. Those uninteresting verses that told of Jesus ancestry back to Abraham. They had to be tackled before he had really finished the book. Surprisingly, Sisia [his language helper] sailed through the long genealogy without a trace of boredom. He made no comment on the translation as he often did. But when he rose to go, he said with some deliberation, There s going to be an important meeting in Nameepi s house tonight. I want you to come and bring what we ve done today.

Des wondered, What s he up to? Why a meeting tonight? Perhaps he wants to celebrate finishing Matthew. But why does he particularly want me to bring what we ve translated today? That night, Des took the lantern and walked the short distance to Nameepi s house, just above his own. He walked into the central room to find it already filled to capacity. All Sisia s family were there around the fire. Two other rooms, off to either side, were also packed with people. Des had never seen so many packed into a house before. There was also an odd sense of tension in the air that made him nervous. He was led immediately to a seat on the floor beside the fire. Sisia took command and spoke in his usual authoritarian voice. I have asked Des to come and read what we translated this morning. I can t tell it to you. I want you to hear it for yourselves. The room became extraordinarily still. Des was conscious that all eyes were focused on him. He cleared his throat and began to read: These are the ancestors of Jesus Messiah, a descendant of King David and of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac; Isaac was the father of Jacob; Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers; Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah; Des could not look up. His eyes were glued to the text. He was trying to read as naturally as Sisia had spoken the sentences to him that morning, but the tense atmosphere in the room made this difficult. He did not see Fofo s eyes grow wider and rounder, as did Mara s and several others near him. He could sense, though, that every word he spoke was being grabbed and critically examined by the listeners. He became conscious that several people were moving near to him. As he continued reading, more and more people began pressing. The people from the other rooms were pushing into the central room. Fofo was so close that his beard almost touched the written page. Yawo s arm was rammed right against Des. Des suddenly felt scared. He had a sense of being crushed. It was not only the pressure of bodies; it was the uncanny silence. It seemed that not a dog barked, not a baby cried, not a person released his breath. He did not know if the list of names offended some ritual taboo about which he knew nothing. If so, and the people were angry that it was being so blatantly publicized, he was in an awkward position. There was no way of escape, hemmed in as he was. And with the

atmosphere so charged, he felt he dared not ask a question. These people were so volatile; they could erupt in a fury so easily. So he kept on reading. Matthan was the father of Jacob; Jacob was the father of Joseph (who was the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus the Messiah). There are fourteen generations from Abraham to King David; and fourteen from King David s time to the exile in Babylon; and fourteen from the exile to Christ. They had heard him out. Des raised his eyes to look at those within a breath of his face and saw, not anger, but amazement. Why didn t you tell us all this before? Yaa a demanded. Des recoiled instinctively as if he d been struck. No-one bothers to write down the ancestors of spirit beings, Fofo stated. It s only real people who record their genealogical table, A aaso added. Jesus must be a real person! someone else cried, his voice ringing with astonishment. Then everyone seemed to be talking at once. Fourteen generations, that s two hands and a foot, from Abraham to King David And two more hands and a foot, to the time of the (the captivity) And another two hands and a foot till Jesus time That s a very, very long time. This ancestry goes back further than ours. Yes, none of ours goes back two hands and a foot three times. Jesus must have been a real man on this earth then. He s not just white man s magic. Then what the mission has taught us is real. Yes real. Des pondered on that as he made his way home. The ancient list of names which he had always found boring and pretty well meaningless had ratified Jesus as a real person to his unlettered friends. He possessed a genealogy like their own! To this tribe, the truth of the scriptures was now beyond doubt. 2. The gospel is GOOD NEWS but not for GOOD PEOPLE. Jesus genealogy turns the world s values upside down. In Jesus day your genealogy was more like your resume. Your family, your pedigree, your clan, who you were connected to was your résumé. Therefore, a family s genealogy or a person s genealogy was essentially the way in which the person recommended himself or herself to the world. By the way, back then as today people polished their résumé. We all tend to leave out the parts of the résumé that might not make us look good. We know Herod the Great purged all kinds of names out of his genealogy. However, Jesus does the opposite. Jesus does the very opposite. It is a most astounding genealogy and unlike any other in the ancient world. It is amazing because there are five women in the genealogy. That might not seem strange in today s climate, but it was startling in a Jewish genealogy. In both Greek and Jewish culture a woman had no legal rights. She could not inherit property or give testimony in a court of law. She was completely under her husband s power. Jewish men thanked God

each day that they had not been created a slave, a Gentile, or a woman. And yet here are four women in Jesus genealogy. And what women! Tamar (3) was an adulteress. Rahab (5) was a prostitute from pagan Jericho. Uriah s wife, Bathsheba (6), was the woman David had seduced and whose first child had died, but through whose subsequent son Solomon the royal line was traced. Ruth (5) was not even a Jew at all, but a Moabitess, and Moabites and their descendants were not allowed near the assembly of the Lord. These are the women introduced into the genealogy to prepare us for the climax of them all Mary (16)! Why did he choose them? Sinners they may be, but God works to rescue sinners and to use them in his service. Here at the outset of the Gospel, Matthew goes out of his way to show that... the barriers between men and women are broken down: women share in the official genealogy of the Messiah alongside men. The barriers between Gentiles and Jews are broken down too: Ruth plays her part in the coming of one who was to be not only Messiah of Israel but Savior of the whole world. And the connection of sinful women like Bathsheba and Tamar with Mary, the gentle mother of Jesus, shows that the barriers between good people and bad people have also come crashing down. As Paul put it, There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace (Rom. 3:22 24). At the very beginning of the Gospel the all-embracing love of God is emphasized. Nothing can stand in its path. There is nobody who does not need it. Maybe the genealogy is not so dry after all! In the genealogy, Jesus is presented as the one who will ignore human labels of legitimacy and illegitimacy to offer his gospel of salvation to all, including the most despised and outcast of society 1 These are people who weren t allowed into the Holy Place. They weren t allowed into the tabernacle because they were unclean. They were spiritually unclean but they are in the family of Jesus. Not only were they outsiders as it related to their gender but as it related to their race. So they were racial outsiders. They re in Jesus genealogy. Guess what? Not just gender outsiders and racial outsiders also moral outsiders. 1 Blomberg, C. (1992). Matthew (Vol. 22, p. 56). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Because Matthew goes out of his way to talk about some of the most sordid and nasty and immoral and sinful incidents in the Bible out of which came Jesus Christ. For example, go up to verse 3 where it says Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Do you know how that happened? Tamar tricked her father-in-law, Judah, into sleeping with her. It was an act of incense. It was against the law of God, against the Mosaic law. You know, even though Jesus was actually descended by Perez not Zerah, Matthew puts both Perez and Zerah, Judah and Tamar, in there. Why? To make sure the reader remembers the whole story. Then there s Rahab a prostitute in Jericho, a Canaanite prostitute. But the most interesting of all is in verse 6, and Jesse the father of King David. Now there s somebody you want on your genealogy. You want royalty on your résumé. But wait a minute it goes on to say, David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah s wife That s weird. What was her name? Why doesn t Matthew just put her name in there? Let me tell you who Uriah was. Uriah was one of David s best friends. When David was running for his life from Saul and his life was at stake and his life was hanging from a thread every minute, a group of men went out into the wilderness with David. They put their lives on the line. They were his mighty men. They were fugitives with him, and they risked everything for him to save his life. Uriah was one of them, one of his very best friends, a man who had risked his life for him. Later on when David became king, he looked at Uriah s wife, Bathsheba, and he wanted her. He loved her. What he did was he arranged to have Uriah killed so he could marry Bathsheba, out of whom came Solomon. Matthew has the audacity See, do you know why he leaves the name Bathsheba off there? That s not a slight at Bathsheba; it s a slam at David. Here you have moral outsiders, adulteress, adulterer, incest, prostitution. You have moral outsiders. You have racial outsiders, gender outsiders. They re all in Jesus genealogy! We have to remember the law of Moses precluded these people from the presence of God. An illegitimate, an illegal child, prostitute, Canaanites, adulterer these are people who could not go into the presence of God, and yet there they are in Jesus genealogy. He is owning them. Why? What does it mean? Here s what it means. These people who were excluded by culture, excluded by respectable society, and even excluded by the law of God, Jesus Christ brings them in. It doesn t matter your pedigree. It doesn t matter how low you are on the social ladder. It doesn t matter what you ve done. It doesn t matter whether you ve killed people. It doesn t matter the grace of Jesus Christ can cover you. On the other hand, do you know what it s also saying? Look at this King David. Look at this great guy. He is a man, not a woman. He is a Jew, not a Gentile. He is royalty; he is not poor. Yet he has done something worse than any of the women in this entire history. Yet there he

is. Why? The grace of Jesus Christ. The gospel is good news not good advice. Therefore, it s what he has done for you that gives you a standing before God. This means everyone, even the greatest, needs the grace of Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ... prostitute and king sit down as equals, male and female, Jew and Gentile, one race and another race, moral and immoral. This is amazing grace! 3. The gospel is GOOD NEWS which means there is a GREAT REST. What are all these numbers about? Jesus Christ is the seventh seven. Fourteen means two sevens. Jesus is the seventh seven. What s that? Well, God rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath points to rest. Every seven years, the land had to lie fallow. You had to give it a chance to replenish its nutrients. So the seventh year represented rest. In the book of Leviticus 25, we re told every seventh seven, every Sabbath Sabbath In other words, the forty-ninth year (the seventh seven), there was a Jubilee year. The Jubilee year meant all the slaves were freed, and all the debts were forgiven. All the land and all the people have rest from their weariness and from their burden. What Matthew is trying to say is if you understand that Jesus Christ was born not once upon a time, that he really broke in to time and space, if you understand that If you understand he has accomplished your salvation so prostitute and king sit down together at Jesus table and he is equally proud of all of them, if you understand all that, that will give you rest. He is the thing to which all the sevens in the Bible point, all the Jubilee, all the Sabbath. He is! You say, How does it give you rest? Well, first, you stop having to prove yourself because whether you re a prostitute or a king in this world you need God s grace. You can have God s grace. In spite of your failures, you don t have to prove yourself. It brings an inside rest. I want to do better in my life to please him, but I don t have to do better in order to know him. As a result, that brings rest on the inside. A lot of us need rest from the troubles of this world. We feel are out of control because we are trying to control everything. Nothing works out right because we are trying to make everything go right. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my

yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28 30, ESV) Someday we will meet our true love who will turn our beastliness into beauty. Someday we will meet the true, noble knight who will slay all the dragons, put everything right. This is our ultimate and final rest. It is where will be lay aside all beastliness. It s where we will be free from all torments of the dragon. It is where we will live for never and never again feel aging effects. This is where we rest because our story is not rooted in Once upon a time but Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see. Not Once upon a time but Christ the Savior is born. A question for the church to ask itself in any age is how well it is visibly representing this commitment to reach out to the oppressed and marginalized of society with the good news of salvation in Christ. At the same time, Matthew inherently honors the five women of his genealogy simply by his inclusion of them. So it is not enough merely to minister to the oppressed; we must find ways of exalting them and affirming their immense value in God s eyes. 2 2 Blomberg, C. (1992). Matthew (Vol. 22, p. 56). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.