Sermon Tone Analysis

Date: 2021-12-19

Audience: Grass Valley Corps

Title: Getting to the Root of Jesus’ Family Tree

Text: Matthew 1:1-17

Proposition: There’s often more going on than we think

Purpose: Expect more from Matthew’s biography

Grace and peace

Happy Christmas!

Week before we celebrate birth of Jesus –

Ideal time to talk about Matthew’s examination of what came before that birth.

Matthew 1 starts with one of most unread passages of scripture.

Most read verse 1:

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: [1]

Then skip to v.18, thinking that’s where the real story starts.

Who wants to read this boring “so and so begat so and so and so and so begat so and so,” and so what, right?

But…

Matthew was a religious Jew in a society where his original profession as a tax collector led him to be VERY detail oriented.

He builds a lot of detail into his biography of Jesus

New Testament – starts with four such biographies.

Probably third one written, but it’s the one that was chosen to go first.

Why?

Because it is the most Jewish in writing, style, ideas, and explanations.

It is the prefect bridge from the Hebrew scriptures of what we now call the OT.

It has layers and nuances that many First Century religious Jews would have picked up on and understood to be Matthew’s apologetic – his carefully constructed argument that Jesus was the long-waited-for Messiah.

Problem: We aren’t 1st C religious Jews!

People from most of the Western world, particularly Americans, usually lack education or training to understand everything that is going on in a book like Matthew, though we can certainly get a lot out of the story we do see, even if we take it at face value.

But there is MORE going on here than we may think.

The MORE is sometimes the coolest part of the story!

We need to expect MORE from Matthew and learn to see it.

Going to take us a year to get through the book, but I think I can keep each week self-contained for those who can’t make it every week, while tying everything in to the overarching narrative that Matt provided for his readers.

We need to keep our eyes open for the details he included which spoke volumes to his earliest readers, but which we might ordinarily miss.

For example, this genealogy he starts with.

Who in their right mind would start a really exciting story with a boring list of names?

Ah, that’s just it: No one.

Especially not Matt.

We may only see that he’s telling us about the family tree of Jesus, but what he’s really doing is exposing the roots of some radical ideas.

First thing noticed by most: Women listed in family tree.

Not normal for the time.

Male-oriented society and all that.

Highlighting women was odd, but to highlight these particular women was more than odd.

3 Judahthe father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, [2]

To say that Tamar’s story is a little twisted is an understatement.

Perez and Zerah weren’t just her sons -they were her brothers-in-law.

Twice!

And you thought your family was screwed up.

There’s some crazy happening in Genesis 38, where the center of Tamar’s story is.

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, [3]

Oh, dear.

These two aren’t any easier to understand.

Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute from Jericho – under Israelite law from the time of Moses, she couldn’t have been part of Jewish community.

But she was.

And now a part of the family tree of someone Matthew is trying to tell us is a kind of royalty?

Ruth is, believe it or not, even worse!

Ruth was a Moabite.

Here’s what Moses said about Moabites in Deuteronomy 23:

3 No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation.[4]

The people of Moab, from their very beginning, worked against the people of Israel, seducing them away from the LORD, into the worship of false gods and destruction.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,[5]

This woman not even named.

Of course, that’s true every time she’s mentioned.

Called Bathsheba – a woman of Sheba.

Played a role in one of King David’s great failures.

David took her and got her pregnant, then had her rightful husband killed so he could take her for himself.

She may have been helpless pawn, a conniving seducer, or a co-conspirator – we aren’t told.

But she is shown to be a political manipulator, convincing David to declare Solomon as heir to the throne, then, later, trying to help Solomon’s brother displace him.

Like the others, she is someone most people would avoid calling attention to in their family tree.

As part of the family tree of the man you are declaring to be the King of Kings?

Why highlight any of these women, let alone bring them all into clear view?

This is a theme Matthew is going to come back to frequently as he writes about Jesus: Jesus confounds the expectations of the people.

They expect someone who is going to be born to lead Israel to RULE over other nations, but here Matthew is showing us that he’s going to INCLUDE other nations in himself instead.

They are joined in his family history, they are joined in his teaching, they are joined in their ability to follow him and be a part of the Kingdom of God.

And in the last verses of his gospel, Matthew will remind us of these first verses by telling us how Jesus commanded his followers to go make disciples of all nations.

Jesus isn’t at all what people were expecting, so we’re starting by acknowledging that and pointing out even more ways that he is different.

Well, if he isn’t what people were expecting, maybe he wasn’t the Messiah.

No, Matthew is prepared for that as well.

First, the genealogy itself traces a family line that matches that predicted for the Messiah – he was to come from the line of David who came from the line of Abraham.

Second, Matthew is going to connect him to all three sections of the scriptures.

I should explain that.

At this time, the Jewish scriptures were separated into three collections of books.

There was the Torah, the first five books, also called the Law or the books of Moses.

There were the Writings, which is the history, like Kings and Chronicles, the Psalms, and the wisdom literature, like Proverbs.

And there was the Prophets, stuff like Daniel and Isaiah and all that.

Some of the names on this list are easy to remember from Israel’s history, even if you only have a Sunday school knowledge of events.

David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jehoshaphat – these are names of kings and they stand out.

But there is an oddity here too.

End of verse 7 and beginning of 8 refer to Asa.

Abijah the father of Asa,

8 Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, [6]

Well, it kind of does.

We’ve talked before about the difficulty in translating.

Sometimes things get translated in ways that obscure what is being said instead of clarifying it.

This is one of those.

Matthew didn’t write about Asa – in Greek, the language he wrote this book in, he referred to Asaph.

Asaph was well-known to people of the time as a psalmist, meaning that if you know the book of Psalms, you know that he wrote a bunch of them.

Jeffrey Kranz, author of The Beginner’s Guide to the Bible, said, “This is almost like a wink to the audience, because we’re going to see Jesus as the fulfillment of all Scripture.

[…] Matthew was bringing in the Psalms and the wisdom literature that the Hebrews already had in Scripture and saying this points to Jesus as the Messiah too.”

He does the same thing to make sure we know that the Prophets will connect us to Jesus the Messiah.

Manasseh the father of Amon,

Amon the father of Josiah, [7]