Too Scandalous
The Problem With Christmas - Part 1
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Matthew 1:1-18
An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Matthew 1:1
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
Imagine you’re reading the Bible for the first time. You decide to read it straight through like any other book. Genesis goes pretty well. It’s filled with great epic stories like Creation, the Flood, Abraham, Joseph and so on. Exodus starts out pretty well too. Baby Moses put in a basket and floated up the river to the palace of the very pharaoh who would have had him killed with all the other male Hebrew infants. Then he grows up among the Egyptians only to turn on them and set his people free from slavery. God parts the Red Sea and leads his people through the wilderness to the promised land. The story moving along just fine and then we get stuck. Our exciting pageturner almost instantly becomes a boring and sometimes incomprehensible file box of ancient legal documents. We might skim through to a couple of other highlights…. stories like David and Goliath or Daniel in the Lion’s Den, but for the most part we have a tendency to get lost in this ancient text.
Then some well-meaning Christian friend tells us we should start in the Gospels. “That’s the good part,” they say. “It’s the story of Jesus.”
Great, back to the story…. and so we turn to Matthew Chapter 1, the first page of the New Testament. If Moses’ story was exciting, surely this story about Jesus will be even better.
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham: Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah and his brothers…
17 verses and 14 generations later, we finally get to Jesus. That is, of course, assuming we make it that far without giving up. What kind of a story is this. No “Once upon a time,” or even “It was a dark and stormy night.” All we get is an ancestory.com report for a family we know nothing about… nothing, that is, unless you happen to be a 1st century Jew who knew the lineage of Abraham like their own.
And that is precisely why this often overlooked beginning is so central to the story of Jesus. Matthew is writing primarily to a Jewish audience anticipating a Jewish Messiah who would it on the throne of David and restore Israel to her former glory. Nothing could be more important than establishing Jesus’s geneological credentials for such a position. The Messiah’s bloodline means everything.
Even here, however, we run into a few problems. First Matthew includes the two worst kings in Israel’s history, Ahaz and Manasseh, who together were the reason Israel was exiled to begin with. Secondly, he includes four women, who are not typically part of ancient geneologies. Three of these four have a checkered past. This list of women also includes a Cannanite, a Moabite and a Hittite… only one Isralite.
Perhaps this story is a little more exciting than it first appears. Jesus, whoever he turns out to be, comes from a long line of dysfunction and foreigners. There is nobody Matthew exludes from his list to make Jesus’ bloodline seem a little more pure and holy. And so this geneology gives us hope. If Jesus carries in him the blood of Israels enemies like the Cannanites, Moabites and Hittites, and if he carries the blood of the worst of Israel’s evil and idolotrous kings, than perhaps maybe, just maybe, there is room in the body of Christ for sinners and outsiders like me and you.