Family
histories are interesting things to dig into.
If we were to look into anyone’s family history, we would find heroes
and villains and saints and sinners.
People are people and one could say that there’s nothing stranger than
people except for family. True, family
history makes for an interesting read,
Looking
at Jesus' family history here in Matthew, at face value it would seem he has an
impressive pedigree. Matthew tells us
right off that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of David, who was Israel’s
greatest king, and the son of Abraham who was the forefather of the Jewish
people and the father of our faith. But,
like all family histories we can’t just read the names and ignore the persons. Do a little research and we soon find the
troubling reality that Matthew begins his account of Jesus with a family tree
that consists of mostly the blacksheep.
If
we look at Jesus’ family tree from Abraham up to David, before things got
royal, we find Matthew does something interesting by mentioning the names of
women in a line that should be all men.
He mentions Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth—three women that some would say were
of questionable virtue but who stand out as models of faithfulness. Let give you the goods.
First,
there’s Tamar and Judah. Tamar was
actually Judah’s daughter-in-law. He had
three sons. She originally married his
oldest son. The story goes that he was
wicked and God killed him. According to
their way back then, Judah had to give Tamar to his second son. He was also wicked and God killed him
too. So, Judah figured Tamar was cursed
and sent her back to her father falsely promising that he would give her to his
youngest son when he was old enough. A
few years go by and in the meantime Judah’s wife dies and the youngest son
grows up but Judah doesn’t send for Tamar. So, she gets quite upset and cooks
up a scheme that the next time Judah came to her village to get his sheep
sheered she would disguise herself as a prostitute and get pregnant by Judah
himself in order to become his wife. The
scheme worked.
Next,
there’s Rahab. Well, Rahab was a
Canaanite prostitute who ran a house of ill repute in Jericho at the time the
Israelites were going to invade their way into the Promised Land. Before attacking Jericho Joshua sent a couple
of spies to see what they were up against and, lo and behold, the first place
they visit is Rahab’s happy house. Word
gets out that circumcised men were a-town in Jericho and so she faithfully
hides her foreign customers on the promise that when the Israelites invaded
they would not destroy her house and kill her.
The spies keep their word and in the end she marries an Israelite named
Salmon and becomes the mother of Boaz who married Ruth.
That
leads us to Ruth and Boaz. We are very
familiar with the story of Ruth, that she was a Moabite woman married to one of
the sons of an Israelite woman named Naomi who had moved to Moab due to a
drought in Israel. Naomi’s sons die and
she decides to move back to Israel so that her family can take care of her
since she was a widow. Ruth had no
obligation to go with her, but out of shear loyalty Ruth left the security of
her family in Moab to go with Naomi.
Naomi and Ruth settle on the land of Naomi’s kinsmen Boaz, who allows
Ruth to glean from his fields. Ruth sets
her sights on him and following Naomi’s advice one night during threshing time
she goes to where Boaz is sleeping and “uncovers his feet” and stays there all
night. He takes a liking to her and then
comes Obed, the grandfather of David.
Now let’s move on to the royal lineage following king David. Everybody likes royal gossip.
So,
Jesus is connected to David by means of the wife of Uriah. That’s Bathsheba. Uriah was a very faithful soldier to
David. While Uriah was at war David saw
Bathsheba conveniently bathing on her rooftop in plain sight of the royal
balcony. David decides she is a must
have and so they have an affair by which Bathsheba becomes pregnant. Out of options for hiding the affair, David
winds up having Uriah sent to the most heated part of a battle where he is sure
to die, and he does. David, Israel’s
most faithful king is an adulterer and a murderer. David winds up making an honest woman of Bathsheba
and marries her. That baby dies but she
later gives birth to Solomon.
Solomon
is known for his wisdom, his wealth, for building the Jerusalem temple, but
also for conscripting his people into hard labour to build fortresses, and…for
his 700 foreign wives who were princess and 300 concubines. Yes, there were biblical laws concerning
kings having too much wealth and too many wives (Deut. 17:14-20), but Solomon
was above the law. Solomon’s downfall
was that he allowed his foreign wives to build shrines to their own gods in the
temple he build for Israel’s God and he worshipped their gods there with
them. He set in motion a trend of royal
idolatry. Things only get worse. Solomon’s son Rehoboam increased the hard
labour Solomon had imposed on his people so aggressively that they revolted
causing Israel to split into two kingdoms that were almost always at war.
Moving
on, there is hardly a faithful king from David until the Babylonian exile. Almost all of them were remembered for their
idolatry and their abuse of the poor except for Uzziah and Josiah who were
known for religious reform. The kings of
the Davidic line actually got so wicked that two of them, Ahaz and Manasseh,
sacrificed their own children to foreign gods. The Bible says that the sins are
Manasseh are the reason God let the Babylonians conquer the Jewish people and
take them away in exile to Babylon, why God let them destroy Jerusalem and his
own Temple. God had had enough.
The
rest of the men named in Jesus’ family tree after the Babylonian exile up to
the birth of Jesus were never kings.
Only one, Zerubbabel, ruled for a brief time as a governor in the land. These men are only mentioned in Matthew’s
genealogy of Jesus and nothing else is known of them. For four centuries there was not a Davidic
king ruling in Israel. Rather, foreign
kings and emperors ruled over them.
Then
comes Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Looking at his family tree here one would
think him destined to be a real estate mogul and not the one to bring in the
Kingdom of God. Add to all of this that
Matthew goes further to note that there is scandal surrounding the question of
Jesus’ paternity. In fact, if Joseph had
not been faithful to an angel of God who appeared to him in a dream and adopted
Jesus as his own, Jesus would not have had any connection to the Davidic line
at all. In fact, if Joseph had been
faithfully obedient to Scripture he could have had pregnant Mary stoned to
death. But, Joseph is a kind and
faithful man who loved an innocent, brave, and faithful young woman and they
together faithfully rose to the occasion of the call of God.
Well,
by now you are probably asking where I’m going with this and you have every
right to ask that question and I could very easily say, “I don’t know”. This one needs more pondering than we have
time for. Nevertheless, one thing we do
have to note is that no matter how messed up our families may or may not be God
can and will still work through us.
God’s plans and purpose of saving the world still come about regardless
of how downright evil his own people get.
This world is so messed up that even the birth of Jesus, the Saviour,
isn’t without scandal. This world is so
very messed up, but God doesn’t abandon it.
In love and faithfulness God gets his hands dirty and carries through
his grand plan for his creation no matter what sin, evil, and death might
do. God himself becomes part of his
creation. God himself becomes human; a
weak, vulnerable baby who will save it all.
Amen.
