A genealogy doesn’t seem a great way to start off a Gospel, not least the Gospel that, in Protestant Bibles, opens up the entire New Testament corpus.
But for Matthew, and his Jewish readership, there was nothing more compelling than seeing how the birth of Christ was firmly grounded in the muck and madness of Jewish history.
Let’s never forget that our faith is rooted in real, often messy, but utterly factual history. We know it is true, in part, because it is so messy. As we reel off names from Jesus’ genealogy, we can’t help recalling the stories behind Abraham’s wife-swapping adventures, Jacob’s life of deception, and being deceived by his 12 sons, then Judah’s illicit relationship with Tamar. It reads like a particularly gruesome episode of Eastenders!
This is the stuff of real, gritty, chaotic life. God is not building His kingdom on the ivory tower of spotless saints, but on the tawdry ups and downs of real-life, flesh-and-blood sinners – and we are part of this notorious Hall of Faith today! How reassuring, as we struggle with our own fallen nature, that our Lord was pleased to link Himself, genetically, to a whole host of immoral, doubting, bad-tempered men, who entered a topsy turvy but vibrant relationship with the God of Israel, and left a legacy that gave birth, quite literally, to the Son of God and Saviour of the world!
The story includes some amazing women, often considered second-class citizens in the Ancient Near East: Rahab the prostitute (see illustration), whose courage James commends, alongside Abraham no less, as an example of living faith (James 2:25); Bathsheba, named only as the ‘wife of Uriah’ (Matt.1:6), mistreated by David, losing her husband to a devious murder, yet becoming mother to Solomon the Great, the ‘king of kings’ from an Old Testament perspective; Ruth, the Moabitess, a young widow, who clings to her broken mother-in-law, only to become grandmother to King David.
Jesus Christ’s family tree includes the lowly, the mistreated, and even the abandoned, which fits so well with His own birth in a manger, and His life as Isaiah’s ‘man of sorrows’, rejected by His own (John 1:12). How beautifully He draws near to us in bereavement and sorrow, when our children are being bullied, or we find ourselves in the middle of a disagreement in church. Our Lord openly identifies with the oppressed, the suffering, the depressed, and those who lose out in this life for the sake of the world to come.
And yet, out of the muck and madness, a glorious, ordained symmetry emerges: ‘So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations [the perfect 7x2!], and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations [yes, even exile was part of the perfect plan], and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations’ (Matt.1:17). What a journey from Israel’s lowest moment as slaves in Babylon, to the birth of her glorious Saviour, who would enter exile on a cross, to bring her fully and finally back home!
Like creation week in Genesis 1, God brings order out of chaos. The messiness of Jewish history fits symmetrically into 14 x 14 x 14, as though Matthew was teaching us that, out of the swamp – sometimes absurdity, often distress, and certainly huge questions and mysteries – of our daily lives, God is building His perfect story, that will end in our eternal glory.
And how beautiful and worthy is our Saviour, who left His perfect throne to enter the madness, be rejected by sinners, witch-hunted by the religious elite and slain by murderers, yet rose triumphant to bring us out of exile and take us to the home He left behind – and all for love. Trust Him in the chaos, worship Him for His sacrifice, and follow Him as a stranger in this world, until the day of your homecoming.
