Malachi 3:1-4
Matthew 1:1-17
One summer when my Grandad was in his last few years of life, I was visiting him up at his cabin in Maine, and I asked him to tell me about his family history. His answer began with "my grandfather was a Frenchman who wandered into Maine from Canada." He went on to tell me that my Grandmother's family were French Canadians. And, apparently, and I didn't realize this at the time, there is a difference between French Canadians and "a Frenchman who wandered in from Canada" – or, at least, there's a difference to someone who was born and raised in Maine, like my Grandad.
My father's side of the family is a bit of a more complicated story. I don't know much about my biological grandfather on my father's side – he abandoned my dad's family when my dad was young. My biological grandfather met my grandmother, a native of London, in England during World War 2. They got married, and after the war they moved back to the states. She raised my dad and his twin sister mostly on her own, until she married Bill Johnson, who I call Grandpa. Bill Johnson adopted my dad and his sister, and Grandpa and Mama had a child, my aunt Wendy, who I always thought of as "the fun one." My dad always said that my two grandfathers were the best men he ever knew. Bill Ambrose, my mother's father, would give you the shirt off his back, and he always treated my dad like a son, even after my parents' divorce. Bill Johnson, my father's adoptive father, raised him as his own son, and taught my dad responsibility and hard work and how to be a man.
My roots trace back, within three generations, to Maine and England and America's rural deep south. And all of these stories shape who I am today. Our family histories are more than just dry facts from the past. They shape us. They are a record of relationships, of choices, of movement across time, of people and places that shape us.
Our family histories, as we tell them and re-tell them, are also tools that we use to shape our identities and form the future. My wife's family loves to tell and re-tell stories about Kim's Grandmother – who they call Grammy. They talk about her kindness, her loyalty, her being there for people, how she loved to cook for and feed people. And here's the thing about family stories – the stories we choose to tell, and the stories we choose not to tell – how we choose to remember Grammy, it's as much about us as it is about who she actually was – because that's how memory works. We tell stories about our families, we tell stories about the people who came before us – in order to shape the future. We try to highlight the good, and pass down what was good about them. So, my kids know about Grammy's loyalty, and her kindness, even though they never met her, because we want them to be shaped by, to practice, that same kind of loyalty and love.
This morning's Scripture reading from Matthew is one of those passages of Scripture that most people just skip over. It's the very beginning, the first words, of the New Testament – it's the beginning of the story of Jesus, and most people, when they read it, basically say "BORING!" and jump ahead to the angels and the messages of a special birth and all that stuff. All these names, this genealogy, this family tree, it's just a bunch of background, we think. It's not the real story.
But it's worth asking ourselves, why did Matthew, the author of this story, why did he write it down? Why did he start his story with a list of Jesus' ancestors? He didn't have to. Mark and John don't do it – they don't list any ancestors. They don't even really talk about Jesus' birth at all. Mark starts his story with Jesus being baptized, and John starts his story with some majestic poetry about the creation of the universe and how Jesus was with God from the beginning. So, what's the point of all these names, of this family tree?
Well, put simply, Jesus' family history tells us something about who he is. And, here's the thing about this family history, as Matthew tells it – this family history is the story of Scripture in miniature – this story hits all the key moments of the story of the people of Israel. And one of the things that Matthew suggests, is trying to tell us, in his Gospel, in his story of the life of Jesus, is that Jesus is the culmination of the story of Israel, that, in Jesus, everything God has done in the past is coming to its fulfillment, that the same God who liberated Israel from Egypt is with us in Jesus Christ. And so, by starting his story with a look back at Israel's past, Matthew is telling us that this past is relevant, that Jesus is connected to, shaped by, these folks who came before him. What Matthew is doing, in essence, is summarizing the Old Testament, pointing us to major themes that will be important throughout the life, the ministry, of Jesus and the church that he established. We are being told that Jesus is shaped by this story, and that this story – this family history – helps us understand who Jesus is and what he means to us and to the whole world.
So, let's look at it. Where does it begin? It begins with Abraham, father of Isaac. Abraham, to whom God said "through your descendants, the whole world will be blessed." Matthew opens his story by reminding us that Israel, through Abraham, is called to be light for a world dwelling in darkness, to bring all people to the worship of the true God. And Matthew is telling us that this Jesus is the one who will fulfill that mission, who will welcome all the gentiles – non-Jewish folks like us – Jesus is the one through whom God's promise to Abraham is fulfilled.
As we move through the list of the patriarchs – of Abraham's descendants, Isaac and Jacob – we are reminded that God doesn't choose the best or the most noble or the most saintly. Abraham and Isaac lied and failed to trust in God's protection on numerous occasions. Jacob was a thief and a manipulator, and yet God chose him. Judah was a man of violence – and someone who failed to keep his commitments to his family, who had to be tricked into doing right by his daughter-in-law, Tamar.
And mention of Tamar is an important moment to pause here. Tamar was Judah's daughter-in-law, and when her husband died, Judah refused to care for her – as he was expected to do. She had to pretend to be a prostitute in order to trick Judah into doing right by her. She is a person who many would see as a complicated figure – and this genealogy is full of many folks who we might consider complicated figures. Liars and cheats and prostitutes and sinners. These folks are not part of Jesus' family tree because they are better than anyone else. They are here because God chose them, God saved them, by God's free grace. And this is a reminder, here at the start of the story of Jesus, that none of us deserve God's love, none of us can earn it on our own. Here at the beginning of this Gospel, we are reminded that Jesus came to eat with and drink with and save tax collectors and sinners, that he ultimately will die for us while we are still God's enemies. While we are calling out for his blood, he gives himself away in love for us. He dies for sinners – including the sinners in his own family tree.
It's also worth noting how many women are listed in this family tree. When Matthew wrote this, family history would have been traced exclusively through men, so there's no cultural reason for him to list any women. Except that the story of Jesus is a story that includes outsiders, that welcomes the rejected at his table. And so we see 5 women – Tamar, who we already mentioned, and Rahab, the prostitute who helped the people of Israel when they were coming to claim the promised land, and Ruth, a foreigner whose faithfulness and love gives her a place in God's people, Bathsheba, a survivor of violence whose husband is murdered and afterwards becomes wife to King David, and, of course, Mary, the mother of Jesus. These women – who, in the ancient world, are outsiders simply by the fact of being women – these women include two prostitutes, three foreigners, three who use tricks and deception in order to survive, and all sorts of complicated stories. These women all have complicated marital situations, they don't fit cleanly into our categories, and they nevertheless have essential roles to play in God's work of bringing salvation to the entire world. The story of Jesus, again, is a story that, from the beginning, breaks the rules – breaks even the God-given rules – about who is in and who is out, about who is welcome and who is not, about who is holy and who is unclean. God, in Jesus, from the beginning, even in his family history, is bursting through boundaries, tearing down walls, crossing borders, reshaping God's people into something new and radically inclusive.
After the stories of the patriarchs, Matthew moves on to a list of Israel's kings – many of whom we know from the Old Testament. They are a complicated and contradictory bunch. Some of them, like Josiah, are described in the Bible as heroes of faith. Most of them, like Manessah, are described as faithless idolaters who turned away from God and led their people into sin. Some of them, like David and Solomon, are a little bit of both – heroes and models of faith who also over and over again fall into sin, turn away from God, do violence, flounder and fail. Jesus is descended from a corrupt monarchy, from people who were corrupted by their pursuit of power. And he is born, Matthew suggests, as the perfect King, as the promised King who would save his sinful forbears, who would turn God's people into what they were always meant to be, who would be the leader who David and Solomon and all their descendants should have been but couldn't be. In the Old Testament, the monarchy is an institution that is described as holy, it is an institution through which God works, but it is also a total mess that causes a ton of harm when it's not treated with care and respect. That sounds a lot like the community that Jesus established – this thing called church – a holy institution with a holy purpose that is sometimes a mess of sin and failure, and that God, in Jesus Christ, nevertheless redeems.
And, after he lists the kings, Matthew moves onto people who have been described as "the unknown and unexpected" – though, as we saw with Ruth and Rahab, there have been unexpected ancestors throughout this story. The last group – the descendants of kings, the ones who are born after Israel is defeated, after its monarchy is smashed into dust, after it goes into exile, after the people have lost their hope and have begun waiting for a messiah, a savior, to set them free – these names are names that we don't know, that don't show up in the Bible. And they remind us that God's purpose – throughout the Old Testament, throughout the New Testament, throughout the story of Jesus, throughout history – God's purpose is repeatedly, consistently, accomplished through people who others regard as unimportant. People who go unnoticed, people who don't have the proper qualifications, sometimes those people are exactly the people who God uses to change the world.
This story, Jesus' family history, is full of a mix of saints and sinners, of well-known heroes and unknown nobodies – and it is telling us that, from the beginning, the story of Jesus is a story that makes room for the mix of saint and sinner that we – all of us – are. All of us are a mixture of goodness and evil, of holy and sinful, of loving and hateful. Because, you see, Jesus' family history continues with his new family, the family he established, this weird community called church. We are the heroes and the nobodies, the saints and the sinners, the all-put-together and the hot messes, that Jesus has chosen to continue his story. And like these folks at the start of Matthew's gospel, all of us are welcome, not because of who we are, but because of who God is. All these random, insignificant characters in Jesus' family history remind us that we are not too insignificant to continue the story, to join his family – the genealogy of Jesus is an invitation that tells us that all of us, no matter what, are welcome, invited, called, to join together and be part of this thing called church, through which God is sharing the light and love of Jesus with the world.
This complicated family history is a reminder that the people of Jesus have always been broken and complicated – church conflict and hypocrisy is nothing new – and, that we can't get to Jesus without the complicated, messy, people who deliver him to us. We need each other, mess and all, to get to this person, this Jesus, who is born to save us.
That's the Good News of these first seventeen verses of Matthew, of this list of names – the Good News is that God can work even through people like us. Jesus was born into a family of people like us – complicated, messy, sinful, and yet loved by God, chosen for God's work. And Jesus continues his work through his continuing family – us and people like us – welcoming the outcast, loving the unloved, making room for the excluded, feeding the hungry, proclaiming Good News to the poor – God has worked through people like us. God can work through people like us. God continues to work through people like us. That's the story of Jesus. Thanks be to God.