The Origins of Jesus

Cody Westcott

Sermon • Submitted 5 years ago

Genealogy of Jesus Christ

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An Exegetical sermon exploring the structure, meaning, and significance of Jesus's genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17. This sermon takes particular interest in the four women included in Christ's genealogy. The women are looked at as symbols for the working of God's grace and mercy as well as prototypes for his planned inclusion of all nations as His people.

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What is a Genealogy?

Let’s be honest: This is the passage everyone reading the Bible skips. You get through the Old Testament and all of its long lists of kings, laws, and how many goats and cows Abraham owned, and you think, “Finally, now we’re getting to the good stuff!” Then, right off the bat, Matthew hits you with yet another list! So, much like you did with the whole of Leviticus, you skip a bit.

I get it, though. This is not an exciting passage to read. It’s long, repititive, and dull. Perhaps we should pay it closer attention, however. There has to be a reason that Matthew chose to open up his book with a Genealogy. There has to be a reason that the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, when putting together the cannon of scripture, decided to open the New testament with a long list of names and “begatting”.

Genealogies, in the ancient world, were important. They meant something. They told you about who a person was. So there was really no better way to open up a book about Jesus than to start with his family tree. Because where a person comes from might just tell us about who he is and where he is going as well.

We shouldn’t be thinking of this genealogy as an Ancestry.com family tree though. It’s not that, it’s something a bit different. This has been a conundrum for biblical interpreters for ages. We come to this passage and expect Matthew to be doing family history like we do family history. When we make that assumption, however, we run into problems. First off, we might note that this genealogy of Jesus is quite different from the genealogy of Jesus found in Luke. They just don’t match up! Could the biblical authors just not get their facts straight? More than that, if we actually take the time to look up these people in Jesus’s family tree, we will quickly discover that Matthew has skipped over quite a few people! These are hints that we have been trying to read this genealogy all wrong.

Genealogies are very prominent in both the Old Testament as well as the Ancient Near East in general. They are meant to tell us about who a person is by pointing back to where they come from. So we should think of these less as a modern Ancestry.com report, and more like a hallway full of family photos.

When I was growing up, my granddad’s hallway was lined with protraits of our ancestors. Each picture had a story behind it, which I was reminded of each time I walked down that hallway (whether I wanted to hear it or not!). These portraits were handpicked in order to represent what it meant to be a member of the Westcott family.

As I grew older, however, I learned that there were certain members of our family who were not included in the hallway of portraits. Their stories were ones that my grandad did not want to remember, and they were people who were antithetical to what it meant to be a Westcott. They were the black sheep of the family that no one wanted to associate with, and thus were not included in the hallway of portraits.

This is a better way of thinking of ancient genealogies, such as the one we find in Matthew. Matthew is taking us down a metaphorical hallway, pointing out notable people to give us an idea of who Jesus was. Some people are more noteworhty than others. The portraits Matthew chooses to hang up in this hallway are important in that they provide a larger portrait of who Jesus is, and what it means to be a member of this family.

Looking at Structure

So how has Matthew organized his hallway of photos? Matthew has, notably, surrounded this genealogy with a literary device known as Chiasm. Chiasm is a rhetorical device employed in ancient literature to draw attention to a specific theme of pattern in a text. It is an invese pattern so that the text forms an “A-B-C-B-A” shape (or some variation thereof). Matthew uses a Chiasm to “bracket” his genealogy (thus combining it with another literary technique called “inclusio”, which further emphasizes the importance of this passage and provides a schema for reading and interpreting it in light of the “brackets”). The Chiasm isn’t that hard to see if you know what to look for:

(v. 1) An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah [A], the son of David [B], the son of Abraham [C]....

(v. 17) So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations [C]; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations [B]; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations [C]

Do you see the pattern? Verse 1 is: “Jesus->David->Abraham”, whereas verse 17 is “Abraham->David->Jesus”. The body of this passage (i.e. v. 2-16) also follows this basic pattern of “Abraham->David->Jesus”. Why is Matthew structuring his genealogy of Jesus in this way? As stated before, his use of Chiasm and inclusio is meant to draw attention to something, and that something is Jesus. Jesus the Messiah is at the beginnng and end of this genealogy. But what does Matthew want us to understand about Jesus specifically?

To answer this, we must understand a little bit more about how Ancient Genealogies, and specifically Jewish genealogies, work. If you’re familiar with the Old Testament, you’ll know that it is jam-packed with all kinds of genealogies. Every genealogy in the Old Testament begins very similarly to Matthew’s, e.g. “This is the genealogy of Abraham: Abraham had a son, who had a son, who had a son....” The person named at the beginning, the forefather of everyone else, is usually considered the most important person there. They are the one who gives significance to everythign else. If it weren’t for Abraham, then Ishmael and Isaac could never have been. Even more than that, it is the life and actions and deeds of Abraham that will ultimately shape the life, actions, and deeds of Ishmael and Isaac. It’s easy to follow the logic here: Abraham came first, Abraham is the “father” of everyone else in the list, and so Abraham is the one who gives significance to everyone else in the list.

This Genealogy, however, is somewhat different. The Genealogy begins with Abraham, but it is titled as teh genealogy of Jesus. The empahsis throuhout the genealogy is not on its progenitor, Abraham, but on its end in Jesus! By framing the genealogy in this way, Matthew is trying to tell us that it is Jesus, not Abraham, who gives significance to all of Israel’s history. It is Jesus who gives significance to Abrham, to David, and to the Babylonian exile. It is in Jesus the Messiah that all of these things are held together and find their meaning. What a bold claim to make!

Who Stands Out?

As I walked down my grandad’s hallway of portraits, there were always some that stood out. Most of the pictures hung there were smiling family photos. One, however, was a single man dressed in military garb. This was my grandad’s dad, who I called Pappy. This picture was hung there to recall a specific story: about my Pappy’s service in World War II, and how the Westcott family was saved by a ham sandwhich.

As we walk down the hallway of portraits that Matthew has hung up for Jesus, we will also notice some people that just seem different or out of place. Matthew tries to grab out attention in certain places by breaking his repetitive “x begat y” formula. Matthew does this eight times in this genealogy. Of those eight times, five of them are drawing attention to women. This is especially significant because women were generally left out of genealogies. The Jewish culture traced lineage patristically, i.e. through the father, and so women weren’t generally mentioned at all.

The five women mentioned are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, ‘the wife of Uriah’, and Mary. These women all have something in common as well: They have rather scandalous stories surrounding them! These women are the black sheep of the Jewish family tree whose pictures would typically not be displayed so prominently in the hallway of portraits.

Tamar was the daughter-in law of Judah, the namesake of the tribe of Judah. She ended up marrying two of Judah’s three sons, both of whom died before they could have sons with Tamar. According to the Law and Israelite social expectations, Tamar should have been given Judah’s third son as a husband in order to provide children for her and for Judah’s other sons who had passed away. Judah, however, refused to let Tamar wed his youngest son, for fear that he, too, would die. Tamar, faced with harsh poverty, came up with a plan. She disguised herself as a prostitute and tricked her father-in-law Judah to sleep with her. The scheme was soon found out by the whole community. This seems bizarre and even offensive to modern ears, but in her own context, Tamar was hailed as a hero. Without a husband or sons, Tamar would have been forced into extreme poverty. Judah had greatly wronged her by denying her his youngest son in marriage. He had doomed her to a life of poverty, but she was wise, and came up with a plan to make Judah provide the security he owed her.

Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute who lived in Jericho. When the Israelites came into the land of Canaan, they sent spies ahead to search out the city of Jericho. The spies went to Rahaab, most likely to sleep with her, but were apparently seen and were sought out by the city guards. Rahab, however, proved to be more righteous than these Israelite spies. She hid the Israelites and protected them from the guards, thus paving the way for an Israelite victory. For her righteousness and faith, she was spared in the attack on Jericho and became a member of the Israelite community.

Ruth was a Moabite woman whose Israelite husband died. Though she was faced with poverty in doing so, she stuck with her mother-in-law Naomi, whose husband had also died. She risked a great deal to provide for her mother-in-law. Eventually, she would find a man, Boaz, who was related to her late husband. Boaz agreed to marry her, and this Moabite woman’s faithfulness and good character paid off.

“The wife of Uriah” is no doubt meant to remind us of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba. Bathsheba is often given the short end of the stick and seen as an adulterous and seductress. Nothing could be farther from the truth! In the biblical account, we see that it is David who takes advantage of Bathsheba. He forces himself on her, then goes so far as to kill her husband Uriah to cover it all up. Bathsheba is eventually vindicated, however, when her son Solomon takes the throne. God is gracious to Bathsheba by allowing the Davidic monarchy to continue on through her.

A first time reader of Matthew’s gospel may not be familiar with the last woman in the genealogy, Mary. Like the other women, however, Mary seems to be wrapped up in something scandalous. Of all the men mentioned in Jesus’s family line, Joseph is the only one who does not “beget” their son. Jesus is born of Mary, the woman married to Joseph, but Joseph is not said to be the father! Even without knowing the story of the virgin birth, we can tell that Mary, like these other women, is involved in something that could be seen as less than pure.

Messiah of Scandalous Women

So why would Matthew hang these portraits up Jesus’s hallway? Why would the author want us to think of the Messiah of all people as one who comes from these women?

Firstly, I think Matthew is making a statement about these women themselves. These women, though often remembered as heroes in the Jewish tradition, lived hard lives. It was not easy to be a woman in the Ancient Near East, but it was harder still to be a woman put into these kinds of circumstances. To be denied marital rights, as was Tamar, to be forced into prostitution, as was Rahab, to be left without father or son to provide for you, as was Ruth, to be the subject of Royal lust, and then to have one’s husband murdered and be left with no choice but to marry his murderer, as was Bathsheba, or to be found with child yet unmarried, as was Marry, these situations were beyond difficult for these women.

Yet, in each of their stories, God does not turn a blind eye. God sees women like Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. He understands their plight, and it is not in his will to leave them to suffer. I think this is what Matthew wants us to know concerning Jesus as well. He is the Messiah who sees the lowly and oppressed. He is the Messiah of scandalized women. He is the Messiah of those the social systems have taken advantage of. He is the one who gives significance and status to the statusless. This Messiah, born from the line of Kings, has come for the poor and powerless.

I think Matthew has put these women here to remind us that we worship the God of all people. The Christ has come, and not just for the Abrahams and Davids, but also for the Tamars and Rahabs. It may also be of some significance that, aside form Mary, each of these women mentioned was a non-Israelite. Tamar was a Canaanite, Rahab was a Canaanite, Ruth was a Moabite, and though it is never made explicitly clear, we have reason to believe Bathsheba was not native to Israel. None of these women belonged to Israel, and yet God had graciously included them in his salvation history.

So perhaps these women also tell us that this Messiah, born of Mary, is Savior not just of Israel, but even of Canaan, Moab, and all of the Gentile Nations. By including these women in Jesus’s Genealogy, Matthew is making a powerful statement about who the Christ is and what he will do. Jesus the Messiah is savior of all, rich and poor, esteemed and lowly, of both the Jew and the Gentile.

Invited to the Family

I think the striking difference between my grandad’s hallway of portraits and the portraits hung here by Matthew is that Matthew doesn’t try to hide the black sheep in the family. There aren’t any scandalous aunts or uncles tucked away in the attic where no one can see.

Perhaps this should serve as a reminder of our family portraits as well. Jesus Messiah has invited the whole world to join his family. He has opened up the way for all to be called Sons and Daughters of the Most High, and he has not taken exception even to the most scandalous. He not only dined with prostitutes, tax collectors, adulterers, drunkards, and criminals, but called them to be a part of the family.

It think it tells us that he is not ashamed

Jesus did this because he knew how the Father works. Throughout the history of the world, God has lifted up the lowly. He has worked amazing wonders through the most unexpected people. Even through the kinds of people that the rest of the world would have been offended and scandalized by. This is who Jesus came to redeem. He is the Messiah of the scandalous ones.

There is no one too offensive to invite to the table. And we, as the body of Christ, are now called to carry on where Jesus left off. Just as we have been invited into the family of Jesus, we are now called to invite others. And if Jesus was not afraid to proudly display the Tamars, Rahabs, Ruths, Bathshebas, and Marys in his hallway for all to see, neither should we be.

Unfortunately, it has not always been the case that we as the Church follow in Jesus’s steps. Too often we ignore the poor. We are ashamed of the beggar, the drug addict, or the promiscuous woman who desires to come and sit in the pew next to us. Perhaps we would do well to remember, then, that these are precisely the people who look most at home in the family of Jesus. And these are precisely the people whom Jesus came to redeem and lift up.

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