Sermon for Sunday July 31st 2022, So who do you, think you are? (Matthew 1: 1-17)
It would have been easy to skip over the Genealogy of Jesus Christ! At first glance it looks about as interesting as the phone book! You rarely hear sermons on this passage. But there are great truths hidden in this daunting list, only some of which we will see today…
Roots are fascinating. Forty or more years ago some of us watched Alex Haley’s TV series of the same name. More recently… a fascinating series of BBC programmes, “Who do you think you are?” in which well-known celebrities have been helped to trace their own family trees. Samantha Janus was quite nervous about what she might discover. Her late father was a notorious London gangster, and she was a bit ashamed of his/her past; Samantha was looking for some redeeming feature in her genealogy. She had to go back to the time of the Black Death to find that one of her distant relatives was a much-loved Christian Minister working in the East End of London with victims of the plague. She discovered that he was buried underneath the altar of an Anglican Church, and there were inscriptions describing this man’s love of God and his people. The actress was relieved but discovered the ordinary, the disappointing; the heroes and villains; the black sheep and plenty of skeletons in the cupboard of her history…
Genealogies were (are) very important to the Jews. To be a king of Israel you had to be a Jew, not a foreigner (Deut. 17); and you had to be a legitimate descendent of King David (2 Sam 7:14). If a man could not trace his history back to Aaron then he could not serve as a priest (Ezra 2: 62). Matthew’s gospel begins with his tracing of Jesus’ earthly family (on the paternal/Joseph side) all the way back to Abraham and to David (while Luke traced the Saviour’s origin all the way back (on the maternal/Mary side) to Adam. Having written chiefly for a Jewish audience, Matthew’s objective is to show that Jesus belonged to the royal line of David, that Jesus is King over Israel, that he is the Messiah promised to Abraham, the Messiah (the Christ) would come from his blood line. The genealogy is the outline plan of God to show who Jesus is. Many Jews have come to faith in Jesus by reading this account and gospel.
On closer inspection we find that (with the exception of Jesus Christ Himself) all the names were sinners, and some of them were real “skunks” – our forefathers were not so squeaky clean after all! Even the best of them were far from perfect! They were real people who lived real lives. All life is there – more exciting than any soap opera!
Take, for example these: Abraham (the Father of Israel): he lied about his wife to save his own skin (Gen 20); Judah committed incest; David: he was, among other things, an adulterer and an accomplice to murder! Solomon was the wise king and the king of polygamists; and his son Rehoboam was a tyrant who divided and despised God’s people; his son, Abijah: followed in his old man’s shoes… and these were just some of the men!
Women were rarely part of the Jewish family tree. Where are the model matriarchs? They are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, we find the name of four women… conspicuous by their presence!
TAMAR (Gen 37/8): Why is she in the genealogy of Jesus Christ? Why do we find this at the beginning of the story? We look back and discover that Tamar is childless when her husband dies. His brother is bound by tradition to provide her with children who would always be regarded as his brother’s, not his (Dt. 25:5). He reneged. So the father-in-law tells Tamar to wait until his 3rd son is old enough to marry but he too fails to keep his promise. One day the father-in-law is passing by and the childless widow disguises herself as a prostitute in order to have a child. The older man is not slow to take advantage. Eventually the truth comes out: an illegitimate child, serial abuse within a family, little sign of care, concern or remorse. It has a very familiar ring to it. You might not want to dig up this skeleton in your family tree, but the God of grace can make something good out of the worst parts of a person’s life. She’s no angel (of course), but perhaps Matthew saw Jesus as a victim of abuse as well; that he had a fellow feeling for the Tamars of the world. She is part of the gospel record; she is proof that God is a God of grace. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
RAHAB: we know little about Rahab, except that she is the Canaanite woman who sheltered the 2 men sent by Joshua to spy out Jericho… she is the one who put the hounds off the scent and that she is a prostitute. We don’t know why Rahab helped. Perhaps she sensed God was in the visit of the 2 Israelite spies on their mission to scope out the land God had promised His people. Perhaps, living on the fringe (in every sense) herself, she was more willing than most to risk everything she had (family/security) to do the right thing. Your past does not determine your future – your choices do. She is a Nonconformist: “a heroine of faith” (Hebrews 11:31); she is a woman of “righteous works” (James 2:25). How can that be?
We might not want to find her in our family tree, but here she is at the beginning and at the very centre of the Christian story! We do admire her courage: more than any other person Jesus knows what one person has to do to save another person. Think about it.
There is hope for a prostitute. In spite of what I have done, the LORD of grace can renew me!
BATHSHEBA: we probably all know the story of the well-connected femme fatal; we tend to concentrate on the sin of King David, but it “takes two to tango!” It is a sad story in which her adultery resulted in the murder of her husband and in the death of her illegitimate child. She (the wife of Uriah) was involved in some grievous sins. You have not committed the unforgivable sin (adultery).
RUTH: her name and story is a bye-word for love and loyalty. But she is also a Gentile, from the wrong side of the tracks; she is an immigrant. King David’s great Grandmother, Ruth was from Moab – they were a despised enemy of God’s people Israel. The blood of the king is mixed with that of the foreigner.
Here is a message to a woman who slept with her father-in-law while pretending to be a prostitute; to a harlot who harboured criminals; to a foreign immigrant known for goodness, whose people had worshipped idols; to an adulterous whose husband and child died as the result of her actions.
Here at the heart of the Christ story is a message for the church. God’s work is interracial – from start to finish. You might not want to discover them in your tree! You might want to edit them out; we don’t belong because we are great but because the God who loved us (all along) is great! The purest of Jews (Paul) could say to the Galatian church: “You are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ…there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female. If you belong to Christ, then you ARE ABRAHAM’S SEED and heirs according to the promise.”
Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
That’s another way of saying; the gospel is good news for bad people! The illegitimate product of a brief inter-racial, adulterous encounter: that product (me) with no sense of belonging, who became a selfish drunken misogynist, a drug addict, drunk and egotist who abandoned those he loved and stole from them, who almost killed a man but could hardly remember a detail of it. That man discovered a Father in heaven whose Son forgave him all his dreadful sins and gave him a new life through the Spirit of God. This man knows he is accepted, loved and belongs!
For those who know where they come from, who know they did nothing to earn God’s favour. God’s favour is shown over and over again to the undeserving, to the outsider;
Like the farmer paying a full day’s wages to a crew of deadbeat day labourers with only a single hour punched on their time cards (Matthew 20:1 – 16).
Like the man marrying an abandoned woman and then refusing to forsake his covenant with her when she turns out to be a whore (Ezekiel 16:8 – 63; Hosea 1:1 — 3:5).
Like the shepherd who insanely puts ninety-nine sheep at risk to rescue the single lamb that’s too stupid to stay with the flock (Luke 15:1 – 7).
Like the father who hands over his finest rings and robes to a young man who has squandered his inheritance on drunken binges with his fair-weather friends (Luke 15:11 – 32)…
The God of grace who has room for the skunks and the squeaky clean alike;
The God of grace who can make something good from the worst parts of a person’s life;
The God of grace who says your past does not determine your destiny;
The God of grace who says there is room with me… for the wicked who repent.
The God of grace who says to you, to all who come here: my story is not so different from your story! At the end of the day it’s not about who you are… it’s about Him!
God of the war and peace… God of the druggie and the priest… God of the greatest and the least… I come to you…
God of the refugee… God of the prisoner and the free… God of my doubts and certainties… I come to you …
Mark F-R
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God of the moon and stars… God of the near and far… God of the fragile hearts we are… I come to you…
God of our history… God of the future that will be… what will you make of me? ... I come to you…
God of the meek and mild… God of the reckless and the wild… God of the unreconciled…
God of our life and death… God of our secrets unconfessed… God of our every living breath… I come to you…
God of the rich and poor… God of the princess and the whore… God of the ever-open door… I come to you…
God of the unborn child… God of the pure and undefiled… God of the outcast and reviled… I come to you…
God of the war and peace… God of the druggie and the priest… God of the greatest and the least… I come to you…
God of the refugee… God of the prisoner and the free… God of my doubts and certainties… I come to you …
God of our joy and grief… God of the judge and the thief… God of our faith and unbelief… I come to you…
God of the wounds we bear… God of the deepest dreams we share… God of our unspoken prayer… I come to you…
God of a world that is lost… God of a lonely cross…God who has come to us…
We come to you…
(From a song, God of the moon and stars by Jonathan Veira)