Matthew’s Begats
What a fun scripture to start our Advent season with. Right?
It’s just a long list of names, some of them difficult to pronounce. Names going back 42 generations…
When I was working on this sermon Friday morning, I found this Peanuts comic strip… in it, Linus walks out on stage, the spotlight comes on, and Linus begins reciting the scripture we just heard, except Linus read it in the King James version… “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob…” and so on.
The last image shows him walking off, and Lucy says: “Why didn’t you just start with the first chapter of Genesis while you were at it?”
And Linus replies: “Don’t be sarcastic. ‘Tis the season to be jolly.”
This scripture never appears in the lectionary; but we read it anyway, because it does appear in a resource we are using to shape our Advent worship services this year.
Jesus’ family tree
And it is how Matthew’s gospel begins. Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, so this is how the New Testament begins. This is how the story of Jesus and his followers begins.
I know; the list of names doesn’t mean much to us. We look at it, we hear it read, and it’s just a list of names. Nothing more.
But to people in the first century, it was something more.
For them, this was not something to be read through quickly. It’s not like the opening credits of a movie. It wasn’t something you just needed to get out of the way before the real story could begin.
Because for each of these names, there is a story; some of those stories are familiar to us. Many more - perhaps most of them - would have been familiar to those early followers of Jesus.
And when each name is read, we are meant to remember those stories, and to realize that these people, and their stories, are all a part of Jesus’s family tree. They are all his ancestors.
And it is the stories of our ancestors that help shape who we are. All our ancestors are a part of us. Our ancestors help make us who we are.
Now, in every family tree, there is a mixture of good and not-so-good. There is a mixture of pride and embarrassment. There is joy and love, and there is pain and trauma.
And for many of us, there is that one relative, that one ancestor, who we don’t talk about. The one ancestor who brought dishonor on the family, or turned their back on the family, or who withheld love from those who needed love the most. The one ancestor whose memory we try to erase.
Their name is never brought up in conversation. Their picture is taken down off the mantle. They aren’t honored by having any descendants bear their name.
Believe it or not, there were people like this on Jesus’ family tree. Not all the people on this list were saints.
The list includes liars and cheaters and murderers. The list includes those who used sex as a way to manipulate and control people. The list includes some who were considered enemies of God’s people, according to the Hebrew scriptures.
It’s quite embarrassing, really, to have these people on Jesus’s family tree. More than that, it’s scandalous! Jesus is God’s son. Jesus is God-come-to-earth. How could people like these be part of God’s genealogy?
Joseph & Mary
Even Joseph and Mary were a disappointment.
Think about it: Joseph was descended from kings like David and Solomon. Joseph was descended from those we consider to be “heroes of faith,” like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
What a disappointment Joseph must have been to those ancestors. He was an artisan, a carpenter, which was even lower on the social hierarchy than a peasant. He was poor.
So poor, that when it came time for his wife to give birth to their first child, he couldn’t even secure a decent place for her! She had to give birth in a barn!
If you lived in the first century, when society was more patriarchal than it is now; and if Mary were your daughter, and her husband couldn’t do any better than that for her - how would you feel? How would you feel about having Joseph on your family tree? How would you feel about having Joseph as the father of your grandchild?
From beginning to end, on Jesus’ family tree, there is so much disappointment. So much embarrassment. So much scandal and shame.
Follow along on the stories that go with the names on this list, and you’ll encounter moments of pride and triumph, but they are always followed by moments of disgrace and dishonor.
As if all that wasn’t enough… Matthew included the names of four women on this list. In the first century, that just wasn’t done.
Were the men so bad, that Matthew had to fill out the list with a few women? You might be tempted to think that, except that, by the norms of the day, having these women on one’s family tree wasn’t exactly something to brag about.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba
Some were tricksters. Some were manipulators. I spent an entire Advent preaching about just these women a few years ago.
Tamar. Rahab. Ruth. Bathsheba.
Tamar was considered cursed by God because her husband died, and she remarried, and that husband died, and both husbands had died before any children were born. So Tamar was twice-widowed and childless, with no one to provide for her.
So what did Tamar do? She disguised herself as a prostitute, and had sex with Judah, the well-to-do father of both of her deceased husbands! This led to her getting pregnant - pregnant by the father of her two deceased husbands!... How’d you like to have that story on your family tree? Is it one you would boast about?
Now, it is true that Tamar did all that in order to obligate Judah to provide for her and for her child, and that, had she not done all that, she would have remained childless and uncared for, and the family line would have ended. And we can’t hear this story without wondering: is the story of Tamar a story of a manipulating deceiver? Or is it the story of a woman so oppressed by society, but who fought for her rights by doing whatever it took to overcome that oppression?
Either way, it’s an interesting story to have on one’s family tree.
Then there’s Rahab, who was a prostitute, who betrayed her own king and country to help God’s people. Like Tamar, she was caught in a desperate position, and suffered under the oppression that many women suffered under in patriarchal societies - maybe that’s why she was willing to help the people of Israel instead of her own people. I’m not sure, but it does add another layer of complexity to Jesus’s family tree.
Next we have Ruth the Moabite. The Torah says that Moabites were enemies of God’s people, and that God’s people shouldn’t associate with them or even allow them into the temple.
Yet one of God’s people - a man named Boaz - went ahead and married Ruth anyway, and welcomed her into his household; and Ruth (even though she is a Moabite) is praised in scripture not only for who she is and what she did, but also because she was the great-grandmother of King David.
And then we have Bathsheba, who has been blamed throughout history for tempting King David, luring him into adultery - although, in all honesty, all the power and responsibility in that situation belonged to David and not to Bathsheba. King David’s coercion of Bathsheba led to a potential scandal that David tried to cover up by having Bathsheba’s husband killed.
All this would have been easy to omit from Jesus’s genealogy. Just don’t talk about it! It could all be so easily whitewashed, like so much of history. Just leave Bathsheba out. Just leave all these women out. These women are troublesome, they upset the perfect little world and the perfect little life and the perfect little history we want to imagine.
But Matthew chose to include them.
Then there are the men. Like I said, their stories are just as complicated, just as troubled, just as conflicted, as the stories of these women, if not more so.
Can’t we just change some of the names, and the stories that go with them? Can’t we just omit the particularly offensive ones, and rewrite the others? It’s what we do, right? We don’t want to talk about racism in our history, so we pretend that racism didn’t happen. We don’t want to talk about scandal in our past, so we pretend scandal didn’t happen. We don’t want to admit that we came from a troubled, not-entirely-innocent past, so we invent a new past for ourselves.
It all makes you wonder why Matthew didn’t just leave out the genealogy completely.
After the genealogy, in verse 18, Matthew writes, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place this way…” Why didn’t Matthew just start with that? He could have just left out the genealogy, and all its complexity, all its problems…
But Matthew brought them up, opened that can of worms, and placed it at the beginning of the story, to make a point. And that point is that, when God came into the world, God came to truly be with us. In every sense.
Still Loved
When we hear about the ancestors in Jesus’ family tree, we are more likely to acknowledge the entirety of our own family trees. We’re more likely to admit that we, also, come from a past that isn’t entirely innocent.
And we don’t have to pretend that the stories of our own ancestors are without complexity and issues. We can look at the pain, the trauma, and whatever else is there, and recognize that healing and wholeness come when we are honest about our past. We can see the good and the bad, and we can learn from both. And we can maybe see deeper, and discover some of the reasons for why our ancestors did what they did. Maybe they, like some of the women I’ve mentioned, were desperate.
No matter what we find there - no matter what’s in our past - we have a God who fully understands what we’re going through, and all the conflicting emotions we feel, because God experienced all that as well. Whatever situation you’re in: God’s been there.
Mary and Joseph might have been a disappointment to their ancestors, and certain stories of their ancestors may have been an embarrassment to Mary and Joseph.
But because of all this: ...because Mary and Joseph were poor nobodies, and because their family tree is filled with stories of shortcomings and scandal and sin, and because the Bible includes all these stories anyway, we see that God really is right there with us, that God understands what we’re going through, and that God’s love will never leave us.
Because despite the blotches on our family tree, and despite the non-innocent history from which we come, and despite all our own shortcomings, we are still worthy of God’s love.
You are still worthy of God’s love.
Nothing you do can ever change that.
Nothing in your past can ever change that.
Nothing about who you are or what you’ve done or what your ancestors have done can ever change that.
Even if you yourself are the one relative that no one in your family likes to talk about… God still loves you and God still rejoices over you.
As Paul writes in the book of Romans: “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
No comments:
Post a Comment