a sermon on Matthew 1.1-17
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
What do you call a man who pretended his wife was his sister and offered to
marry her to another man—not once but twice? And a guy who made his way in the
world by cheating his own family? And a woman who seduced her father-in-law by
pretending to be a prostitute? And a real prostitute? And a foreigner? And a
murder and adulterer? And an idolater? And an insufferable show off? What do you
call such a motley group of flawed human beings? You call them Jesus’ family
tree.
I have preached the Christmas message from a lot of different angles. You might
think I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel preaching on Matthew’s genealogy of
Jesus. You would be wrong. The genealogy of Jesus is exciting stuff. Matthew
thought so. He started his gospel with it. The thing to remember is: Every name
is a story. Every name represents a unique human being, and in the case of the
genealogy in Matthew 1, we know some of these stories. It is not enough for me
to make you interested in this stuff. It is not enough to make you care about
it. I want you to perceive the hand of God and marvel because we took time to
think about Jesus’ family tree.
The genealogy of Jesus is far from a simple list of names. There is mystery
here. Personally I have more questions than answers about this passage. Here are
a few of the more vexing problems we face as we try to make sense of it.
1. Both Matthew and Luke give us a genealogy tracing Jesus’ ancestry. In very
few places do they agree. In fact, the differences begin with the name of
Joseph’s father. There simply is no way to square these lists. They are
different.
2. Both Matthew and Luke insist on the virginal conception of Jesus. In other
words, Joseph was not his father, except by adoption. Yet both of them trace
Jesus’ lineage, not through Mary, but through Joseph.
3. Matthew gives us a neat little pattern. Fourteen generations from Abraham to
David, fourteen more from David to the exile, and fourteen more from the exile
to Jesus. Here’s the problem: From Abraham to David was roughly 750 years, from
David to the exile 400, and from the exile to Jesus nearly 600. Plus, we know
from the lists of Israel’s kings in the Old Testament that Matthew has left out
several generations. In contrast, Luke divides his list into 11 sets of 7
generations. Matthew traces the line back to Abraham; Luke to Adam.
4. This is not so much a problem as a head-scratcher. Matthew includes four
women in his list. Luke does not name any. In other respects, Luke is very
concerned about the place of women in Jesus’ ministry and the early church.
Matthew does not share this interest. So why does Matthew mention the women?
Let me try to unravel these issues as far as I can, starting with the most
puzzling, the differences between Matthew’s and Luke’s lists. A skeptic looking
at these lists might laugh and say, “Ah, ha! There it is proof that the Bible is
not true. There is no way to reconcile these genealogies.” That would be a
mistake. First of all, our faith is not based on every little detail in the
Bible. It is based on the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead on a specific
day, at a specific place, and we can investigate that and know about it. Plus,
we can experience the presence of the risen Jesus with us today through his Holy
Spirit. Second, people get worked up about the Bible. Some say it is God’s Word.
Others say no it isn’t, it is the product of human beings. An issue like two
different lists of ancestors then becomes a bone of contention. After all, how
can the Bible be the Word of God if Matthew left out three kings of Israel? I
say all of this is short sighted. This isn’t an either/or question. I say the
Bible is both God’s Word to us and a book that reflects its human authors as
well. The model I think of to help me with this is Jesus himself. Jesus is both
God and human. When baby Jesus was born, he was as weak and helpless as any
human baby. He got sick. He got hungry. He got tired. And yet, he was also the
eternal Son of God full of grace and truth. So I say the Bible can be like that.
It is God’s Word, but we need not insist that every detail square up perfectly.
Matthew’s genealogy is exactly the kind of list we would expect a writer in the
first century to produce. It is organized into a neat pattern. It highlights
certain important figures. What sources he used we do not know. His agenda is
clear, however, and we can feel confident about it.
What was Matthew trying to show us? He wanted to show Jesus as a descendant of
Abraham. How do we know he got that right? Simple: Jesus was a Jew. All Jews go
back to Abraham. Matthew also wanted to show Jesus as a descendant of David?
Why? To show that Jesus fit the criteria for God’s promised Messiah. Matthew is
all about how God kept his promises, like the one to David. How do we know
Matthew got this right? Well, he is not alone. It seems the early church
recognized Jesus’ connection to David from the very beginning. Paul mentions it
at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, which was written long before
Matthew’s gospel. My point is, Matthew’s list may be different from Luke’s, but
both get the important stuff right.
OK, then, what about Joseph? Why trace Jesus’ ancestry through Joseph if he was
not Jesus’ father. I cannot give you a definitive answer, but I can offer my
opinion. I believe Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father, but I also believe
he was a father to Jesus. When Mary turned up pregnant before the wedding—and
keep in mind how different their culture was from ours—Joseph had two choices.
He could disavow Mary and her child, leaving himself in the clear. Or he could
claim them and take responsibility for them. When he went ahead and married
Mary, he made a legal claim: “This is my wife. This is my child.” Joseph played
a unique and important role in God’s plan of salvation. Let’s not take that away
from him became of DNA. How many men do we have today who are biological fathers
but have nothing to do with their children—fathers in the biological sense only?
They are not fathers. A father is someone who takes care of his children and
teaches them and all the other stuff. Bottom line: If they had issued birth
certificates in those days, Joseph would have been listed as Jesus’ father. It
would have been biologically fictitious, but it would have given Jesus all the
rights and privileges he enjoyed because Joseph answered God’s call.
What about the women, what are they doing here in Matthew’s list? I think I know
this one. And as we answer it we will move toward what I think the genealogy of
Jesus means to us today.
The four women are Tamar, who pretended to be a prostitute in order to seduce
her father-in-law; Rahab, the real prostitute who hid the Israelite spies in
Jericho; Ruth, a foreigner from the land of Moab; and Bathsheba, whom Matthew
calls “the wife of Uriah,” reminding us of that ugly affair when King David
stole another man’s wife and then had him killed. All this, however, is one side
of the story. There is always another side, and it might surprise you to know
that all these women were highly esteemed in first century Judaism. They were
not looked down on. They were respected. Why?
Tamar acted desperately, but her motive was pure: to preserve her dead husband’s
line. Ancient Israel had what are called laws of levirate marriage. They were
designed to keep families from becoming extinct. If a man married and died
childless, his brother was to marry his widow and the resulting offspring would
be considered the deceased brother’s, and they would continue his line.
In the case of Tamar, Judah (father of the Israelite tribe of Judah, from which
Jesus came) had three sons. Tamar married the oldest. He died childless. Judah
told his second son to obey the levirate law, but the second son didn’t because
he knew the children would not be legally his. Genesis says God punished him for
his disobedience, and he too died. Judah then told Tamar to wait until his
youngest son grew up, but when he did, Judah refused to follow the law. Tamar,
desiring to provide he dead husband with an heir, disguised herself as a
prostitute and seduced Judah himself. When he discovered what had happened, he
said, “She is more in the right than I.” She had twins, Perez and Zerah. Matthew
and Luke both claim Perez as an ancestor of Jesus.
Rahab was a foreigner and a prostitute, but when the Israelite spies were in
danger in Jericho, she hid them. Why? Because she believed God’s promise to give
Israel the Promised Land. She and her family were spared and incorporated into
God’s people.
Ruth may have been a foreigner by birth, but her commitment to her
mother-in-law, Naomi, is legendary. She moved to Bethlehem with her in order to
take care of her, saying, “Your people shall be my people, and your God, my
God.” Ruth married Boaz, and she was the great-grandmother of King David.
Bathsheba became David’s wife in a very sinful way, and yet her son Solomon was
the one who inherited the kingdom and ruled wisely. He built the first Temple in
Jerusalem.
What does all this mean? It seems to me that Matthew, or whoever organized this
list, wanted to show that often God’s plan unfolds in less than respectable
circumstances. Why? I think it goes back to Mary’s pregnancy. The gospels
preserve hints of some scandal surrounding Jesus’ origins. Something was a bit
wrong about it—something like a pregnancy before the wedding. Now, does this
prove that Jesus was “conceived by the Virgin Mary,” as the creed states? No, it
doesn’t. You can have a scandal without a miraculous birth. But, could you have
a miraculous birth without a bit of scandal? Probably not. Matthew is going to
claim a miraculous birth, and he deftly sets it up by reminding us how God’s
plan has advanced through many unusual circumstances. …
Excellent. I hope you are beginning to see what this means to us today. It would
be easy to stop short and say, “Jesus’ family tree shows us that God uses flawed
people. God has a plan, and he can unfold it even in less than perfect
circumstances. If he used people like Rahab and David, he can use me.” All that
is true. It is important and good, but try to see the whole picture.
Are the people in Jesus’ family tree sinners? Of course they are. Sinners being
the only kind of people who exist, except Jesus, what else would we expect? They
had faults, but they also had good qualities. They were, like us, deeply
ambiguous people. They were not pure evil. They were a mix of good and bad—like
us. Like us they desperately needed a Savior, and God sent them one. He sent us
one.
The amazing thing about Jesus’ family tree is, it reminds us how gracious God is
to become one of us in order to rescue us. These people are no different from
everyone else. They just happen to play a special role in God’s plan. They are
the ancestors of Jesus. God came down and took flesh and became part of this
family—the human family—despite our ambiguity, in order to save us from it.
Consider a few of the men on the list, who were as bad—and as good—as the women.
Start at the beginning with Abraham. He is the one who pretended his wife was
his sister. Not his brightest moment, but he was also the one God chose, and the
one who believed God’s promises and left everything he knew behind and set out
on pure faith.
Then there is Jacob, the cheater, who swindled his brother out of his birthright
and stole his brother’s blessing by deceiving their father. Jacob is the Bible’s
textbook example of a sinner redeemed by God’s gracious, sovereign choice. God
loved Jacob and chose to establish the nation of Israel through his line. This
was a blessing, but it meant some hard lessons and lots of changes for Jacob.
Or how about Judah? That business with Tamar was not the first time he sinned.
Judah was one of the sons of Jacob who sold their brother Joseph into slavery in
Egypt. In fact, selling him was Judah’s idea—although it was better than the
original plan of killing him. Reuben stopped that and planned to set Joseph free
later, until Judah came up with the idea of selling him. But, when Joseph rose
to power in Egypt and put his brothers, who did not recognize him, to the test,
it was Judah who begged to take Benjamin’s place in jail. He said, “Don’t keep
Benjamin. I will stay in his place and be your slave.” Joseph was so moved by
that he forgave his brothers. I say Judah, who was willing to take his brother’s
place and suffer punishment he did not deserve, was a worthy ancestor to Jesus,
who did the same thing for us.
David was the murderer and adulterer. He was also a terrible father. And yet, he
loved God with his whole heart. When the entire Israelite army cowered in fear
before Goliath, young David refused to stand for the giant’s blasphemy. David
united God’s people and brought them peace. The psalms he wrote still inspire us
today to greater intimacy with our heavenly Father.
Solomon was the idolater. He was wise and ruled God’s people well. He built the
first Temple in Jerusalem. Yet scripture lays at his door the idolatry God’s
people struggled with throughout the time of the monarchy. Solomon married a lot
of foreign princesses in order to cement political alliances. They brought their
own gods and goddesses with them. Solomon was OK with that. He did not have the
same passion for the One True God that his father David had.
Most of the kings also had an ambiguous record. Jehoshaphat is typical.
Personally he did what was “right in the sight of the Lord,” as the Bible
expresses it. Nevertheless, he allowed the worship of idols to go on around the
country. Another example is Hezekiah. He was one of the better kings, but he was
proud. He couldn’t resist showing off his wealth to ambassadors from Babylon. It
wasn’t long before Babylon decided to invade.
On and on it goes, and of course we do not know anything about many of the men
Matthew names as ancestors of Jesus. But that’s OK. We know enough. It becomes
obvious before we are far into the list that this family is as good and as bad
as any other. These are ambiguous people—flawed, of course, but also capable of
great faith and courage. We are that way too. God takes our good qualities and
our bad, and he redeems all of it. Everything about us needs redeeming. In Jesus
Christ he makes us a new creation. The old passes away. Everything becomes new.
All this happens because of Jesus, who decided, “These are my people. Not
because they are bad. Not because they are good. Just because I love them.”
Allow me, please, to say one thing more that I find in Jesus’ family tree.
Family can be a fluid concept. Family is like gold, you might say. It is
precious. It is solid. And yet it is also malleable. In other words, there is
more to family than biology and DNA. Think of Rahab and Ruth, who became part of
God’s people and Jesus’ family tree because they believed God’s promises and
acted in faith. Initially they were outsiders, strangers to God and his people,
but they became family. It makes sense. Abraham became God’s friend in the exact
same way.
Or consider again the relationship between Joseph and Jesus. What made them
family? It was several things working together. It was God’s choice. It was
Joseph’s faith and obedience. It was the love they shared.
There may be something encouraging here for people who are adopted—as I was—and
also for blended families. Family is more than genetics. I know there is
something valuable here of all of us when we talk about God’s family. Part of
what Jesus offers us is the chance to be God’s people, a part of his family.
Jesus said those who do the will of God are his true family. By faith in him, we
become part of his family tree too. Matthew puts Abraham at the start of it, but
being a child of Abraham does not require biological descent from Abraham. All
you need is faith like Abraham’s. Trust God’s promises and live on the basis of
that trust.
Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. He looks at us—with all our
faults and strengths—and he says, “These are my people—my family. Not because
they are bad. Not because they are good. Just because I love them.” Amen.