1 FAMILY CHRISTMAS: THE FAMILY TREE MATTHEW 1:1-17 DECEMBER 29, 2013 In one Peanuts comic strip Snoopy was sitting at his typewriter, starting to write a story with the same opening line he always used, It was a dark and stormy night. Lucy, ever the critic, said, Don t you know all good stories start out, Once upon a time? So Snoopy started over, Once upon a time, it was a dark and stormy night. The way a story opens is important. Writers, story tellers, preachers, all sorts of communicators, rightly insist you have to hook your audience early on, or you could lose them. So Mark opens his gospel by plunging into the ministry of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus, followed immediately by a confrontation between Jesus and Satan. Luke opens his gospel with angels paying visits to Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and the shepherds, and people breaking into song about the goodness of God. John begins with deep and mysterious sounding theology, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The incarnation. But Matthew. Matthew opens his gospel in a way that says to the modern reader, I DARE you to keep reading. He opens with a genealogy. MATTHEW 1:1-17 To the modern reader that list of names is deadly. and largely unpronounceable. But for the people for whom Matthew wrote his gospel, that list is full of significance. Matthew s first readers were mostly Jews who had come to believe in Jesus as the messiah. The Jewish people defined themselves not just by a shared faith in the one true God, but also by blood. Especially after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and so many people carried off into exile in the Babylonian empire, genealogies became very important to them, to solidly identify them as belonging to the nation of Israel, and to identify their tribe within the nation. So they would not have skipped over the genealogy to start their reading with verse 18. They would have read these verses carefully, soaking up the details. And what would they have seen? First Jesus family tree s roots are found Abraham. Luke s genealogy doesn t start there. He goes all the way back to Adam. (Lk.3:37) Because Luke was writing to both Jews and Gentiles, and he wanted to link Jesus with all of humanity.
2 But Matthew begins with Abraham, the Father of Israel, a man of God. To start the family tree there is a way of saying Jesus embodies the true identity of who God called Israel to be, and perhaps the suggests Jesus gives rise to a new Israel, the church. There smack in the middle of the list of names is King David. David was the king people looked back to with a sense of longing. Like Democrats look back to Franklin Roosevelt or Republicans hearken back to Ronald Reagan. King David became a symbol of their ideals. As God had promised all the legitimate kings of Israel and, later, Judah could trace their lineage back to King David. (2Sa.7:16) And as hopes for a messiah began to rise, the image of messiah was most often cast in the image of King David. For Jesus to come from this line was significant. It s notable that during his ministry some people referred to him as Son of David. It all says messiah. Matthew explicitly notes there are three sets of fourteen generations. Why fourteen? No one is 100% sure. But it may be the numerical values of the three letters that spell the name of David in Hebrew, 4+6+4=14. So it might be saying Jesus is the fulfillment of God s promises to Israel, the long-awaited messiah from the line of King David. These are all things you might expect to find in the family tree of the messiah. But there are some other names in this tree that just don t seem to fit. Every tree has knots in its wood, but this family tree has some doozies. There are women named in this lineage. It was unheard of to list women in an ancient Jewish genealogy. And it was really scandalous to list THESE women. The first unlikely woman is Tamar, in verse 3. First of all, Tamar was a Canaanite. Not a Hebrew, but from one of the pagan tribes in the region, a hated tribe, an enemy of Israel. But she was the daughter-in-law of Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, from whom came one of the twelve strives of Israel. Tamar s husband died. So, following the law of the day, she married her husband s next brother. He died, too. The next brother in line was too young to marry. But Judah promised her that when he was old enough he would marry her. But Judah didn t keep his promise. To get even with him, Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute, slept with her father-in-law Judah, and became pregnant with twins. One of those twins, Perez, is found in Jesus genealogy. (Ge.38) Tamar was a woman, a Canaanite, she played the role of a prostitute to create an incestuous encounter. But here she is in the family tree of Jesus.
3 The next woman in the line is Rahab, in verse 5. Her name means pride, insolence, or savagery. She was also a Canaanite, like Tamar. And she was a professional prostituted in Jericho. But when the Hebrew people were crossing the Jordan River and beginning the conquest of the Promised Land, Rahab sheltered their spies and gave them valuable information. She hitched her wagon to these people whose God was clearly going to overpower the Canaanites in the land. And she ended up in the family tree of Jesus. (Jo.2) Then there is a woman named Ruth, just a line later in verse 5. Ruth s story is best known by a verse that is often read at weddings, Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. (Ru.1:16) Beautiful words and a powerful commitment. But it was not spoken between a bride and groom or husband and wife. It was daughter-in-law to mother-in-law. Ruth was not a Jew, but a Moabite, a tribe the Bible says was the product of an incestuous relationship. (Ge.19:30-38) Ruth s husband had died. But she soon had her sights set on one of his near relatives, a man named Boaz. She managed to catch his eye, but needed to accelerate the relationship. One night Boaz was sleeping out by some stored grain. Ruth decided to pay him a visit. The Bible says she uncovered his feet and lay down or she lay at his feet. It s a strange phrase at best, and there s some evidence from the culture that may be a euphemism for making herself available to him. At any rate, shortly after that Boaz took her as his wife. And so Ruth was grafted into the family tree of Jesus. Next up is a woman named Bathsheba in verse 6. Though her name is not given by Matthew. She is called Uriah s wife. Matthew is emphasizing the act of adultery that was the beginning of her relationship with King David And Bathsheba was not a Jew, but a Hittite. (2Sa.11) So there are four women named, all four NOT Jews, all four with questionable and probably sinful sexual histories. None stand out as examples of moral virtue or spiritual depth. But all four firmly rooted in the family tree of Jesus. Matthew has written a family tree intertwined by vines of grace. Matthew is insisting that the family of Jesus is not reserved for the most spiritual and virtuous among us. It s not an exclusive club for the pure and righteous. It s not just for folks who are religious and church-broke. It s not for people who measure up and are somehow good enough. You don t earn you way into this family. You don t get in by deserving it.
4 You get in by grace, by the grace of God that became flesh in Jesus. Jesus said, For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (Lk.19:10) The first visitors after Jesus birth were those dirty, smelly shepherds, men who were considered unclean and so could not participate in the temple sacrifices. His next recorded visitors were the magi, foreigners, pagan dabblers in the occult. As an adult Jesus spent time with tax collectors and prostitutes and adulterers. And some of his followers smelled like fish. Imagine what the church would be like if we did things the way Jesus did things. There d be all sorts of people around here. People with all kinds of dark sins in their past. People still struggling with temptations, people still sinning even! People who don t know how to behave in church. People who don t dress the way church folks dress. It would be soooo messy. Come to think of it, it often IS messy around here! And that s the way it OUGHT to be. As much as it might ruffle the feathers of us lifelong church folks, messy is the way it ought to be, if we re doing things the way Jesus did things. We need to be reminded from time to time, we re not in God s family because of anything we did. We didn t earn our way. We were drawn in by grace just like those people. In the eyes of God we re not better; we re not higher up. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. There is, of course, a fifth woman named in this hit parade of surprises. It is Mary in verse 16. Mary is obviously different from the other women in the line. She was a Jew. And she did not have a history linking her to sexual sin. But, though we know the inside story of the virgin birth, there were certainly wonderings about her sexual history. After all, even then people could count back 9 months and know she was pregnant before she and Joseph married. But Mary is brought into this tree by her marriage to Joseph. This is Joseph s lineage, not Mary s. What is interesting is Jesus only human bloodline is through Mary. Yet Joseph s family tree is presented as if it is Jesus own family tree. It s presented that way because, from a Jewish perspective, it IS Jesus family tree. Joseph took Mary s child as his own, effectively adopting Jesus. Jesus was adopted into the lineage of King David, adopted into the lineage necessary for the messiah. Just as WE are ADOPTED into the family of God. (Ro.8:15) Which, if you ve been a Christian for a while, you might take for granted.
So consider the young man who finally told his parents he was gay. He d felt different for as long as he could remember, and it troubled him, scared him. It certainly wasn t a conscious decision he d made. Who would decide such a thing, when it was clearly disapproved of by so many, including his parents. And maybe by God. There came a point, when he was 17, that he felt he had to tell them. He was met at first by stony silence, then his mother s tears and his father s fuming. Several weeks went by, and it only got worse. Eventually things became so unpleasant he had to leave. After a few nights on the street he managed to locate a friend who had an extra room in his apartment. He patched together a couple of part time jobs. They didn t pay much, but at least he could contribute a little something to their living expenses. He drifted in and out of things that left him feeling well, not good about himself. Fleeting relationships, anonymous encounters, drugs and too much drinking. And eventually the diagnosis: HIV positive. He called his parents, for the first time in a very long time. They hung up on him. He d never been so low. He was at work, flipping burgers, when a deep heaviness settled over him. At his break he sat at one of the fast food chains tables with his head in his hands. A middle-aged lady sat down at the next table, noticed him, and asked, Is everything OK? He looked up, shook his head, and put his head back down. She said, Can I pray for you? And she did, right then and there. Their conversation filled his break time. She met him after his shift was over, and they talked some more. And the next day, and the next. Eventually she brought him home to her husband and two teenagers, and they took him in as one of their own. He lived in their spare bedroom. They got him the medical care he needed. He even agreed to go to church with them. Their friends at church embraced him. And after a few months he received Christ into his life. He still struggled with his sexuality, 5
still was HIV positive, still missed his mom and dad. But he had a family, and a larger church family, where he was loved, where he was included, where he belonged. And his life was never the same. If you are a Christ-follower, you have been adopted into the family of God. It doesn t mean you ve got your act together. It doesn t mean you ll have no more troubles. It does put you in line with other some folks in Jesus family tree. It does mean you are loved, you are included, you belong, you never again have to do life alone. Treasure that gift. 6