Untitled Sermon (2)

Intro

How many of you can trace your family heritage back over thirty generations?

Bible

Read Matthew 1:1:17

Pretty boring Eh? Why do you think this is included in the gospel account of Matthew?

“What Matthew is saying to us by beginning in this way is that we will only understand Jesus properly if we see him in the light of this story, which he completes and brings to its climax. So when we turn the page from the Old to the New Testament, we find a link between the two that is more important than the attention we usually give it. It is a central historical interface binding together the two great acts of God’s drama of salvation. The Old Testament tells the story that Jesus completes.” -Wright, Christopher J. H.. Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament (Knowing God Through the Old Testament Set) (p. 16). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

So what do we learn?

Jesus was a real Jew

In Jewish society genealogies were an important way of establishing your right to belong within the community of God’s people.

Your ancestry was your identity and your status. Jesus, then, was not just “a man.” He was a particular person born within a living culture. His background, ancestry and roots were shaped and influenced, as all his contemporaries were, by the history and fortunes of his people.

The reason for this interest in pedigrees was that the Jews set the greatest possible store on purity of lineage. If in any man there was the slightest element of foreign blood, he lost his right to be called a Jew and a member of the people of God. A priest, for instance, was bound to produce an unbroken record of his pedigree stretching back to Aaron; and, if he married, the woman he married must produce her pedigree for at least five generations back

Jesus was a real man

This sinful world in which, God called Abram as the starting point of his vast project of redemption for humanity. The main point of God’s promise to Abram was not merely that he would have a son and then descendants who would be especially blessed by God. God also promised that through the people of Abram God would bring blessing to all nations of the earth. So although Abraham (as his name was changed to, in the light of this promise regarding the nations) stands at the head of the particular nation of Old Testament Israel and their unique history, there is a universal scope and perspective to him and them: one nation for the sake of all nations.

So when Matthew announces Jesus as the Messiah, the son of Abraham, it means not only that he belongs to that particular people (a real Jew, as we have just seen), but also that he belongs to a people whose very reason for existence was to bring blessing to the rest of humanity.

The women in it

In his long list of fathers, Matthew includes just four mothers, all in Matthew 1:3-6: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. It may be that one reason for Matthew including them is that there were question marks and irregularities in their marriages, which may be Matthew’s way of showing that there was scriptural precedent even for the “irregularity” of Jesus’ birth from an unmarried mother.

They were all, from a Jewish point of view, foreigners. Tamar and Rahab were Canaanites (Gen 38; Josh 2); Ruth was a Moabitess (Ruth 1); Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah, a Hittite, so probably a Hittite herself (2 Sam 1). The implication of Jesus being the heir of Abraham and his universal promise is underlined: Jesus the Jew, and the Jewish Messiah, had Gentile blood!

It is not normal to find the names of women in Jewish pedigrees at all. Women had no legal rights; a woman was regarded not as a person, but as a thing. She was merely the possession of her father or of her husband, and therefore his to do with as he liked. In the regular form of morning prayer, the Jew thanked God that he had not made him a Gentile, a slave or a woman. The very existence of these names in any pedigree at all is a most surprising and extraordinary phenomenon. (Barclay, W. (2001). The Gospel of Matthew (Third Ed., pp. 19–20). Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press)

Rachab, or as the Old Testament calls her, Rahab, was a harlot of Jericho (Joshua 2:1–7).

Ruth was not even a Jewess; she was a Moabitess (Ruth 1:4); and does not the law itself lay it down, ‘No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord’ (Deuteronomy 23:3)?

Ruth belonged to an alien and a hated people.

Tamar was a deliberate seducer and an adulteress (Genesis 38).

Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon, was the woman whom David seduced from Uriah, her husband, with an unforgivable cruelty (2 Samuel 11 and 12

But, surely, there is something very lovely in this. Here, at the very beginning, Matthew shows us in symbol the essence of the gospel of God in Jesus Christ, for here he shows us the barriers going down.

The barrier between Jew and Gentile is down. Rahab, the woman of Jericho, and Ruth, the woman of Moab, find their place within the pedigree of Jesus Christ. Already the great truth is there that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. Here, at the very beginning, there is the universalism of the gospel and of the love of God.

Jesus was the son of David

that Jesus was the expected Messiah of the royal line of David with the rightful claim to the title “King of the Jews.”

It would be through the son of David that the promise to Abraham himself would be fulfilled.

“Son of David” is frequently a messianic title (1:1, 6, 17, 20; 9:27; 12:23; 15:22; 20:30, 31; 21:9, 15; 22:42, 45), drawing from such Old Testament material as 2 Samuel 7:11–16 and Psalm 91

In verse 6: Here it is added that David was king, which stresses his centrality in Matthew’s genealogy and theology. David is the pivotal person at the end of Matthew’s first set of fourteen generations and at the beginning of the second set

Let’s learn more:

The first section takes the history down to David. David was the man who welded Israel into a nation and made the Jews a power in the world. The first section takes the story down to the rise of Israel’s greatest king.

The second section takes the story down to the exile to Babylon. It is the section which tells of the nation’s shame, tragedy and disaster.

The third section takes the story down to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was the person who liberated men and women from their slavery, who rescued them from their disaster, and in whom the tragedy was turned into triumph

In Jesus, God brought to completion what he himself had prepared for. This means that it is Jesus who gives meaning and validity to the events of Israel’s Old Testament history.

The genealogy of Jesus conceals a story that led up to Jesus but that, as Luke also perceived, led up to a new beginning with him (Acts 1:1). The story goes on, until the promise to Abraham will finally be fulfilled, in a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language. That is the goal of all history, as it was of Israel’s history. And in the church of the Messiah that goal is already being brought about in anticipation: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).

Wright, Christopher J. H.. Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament (Knowing God Through the Old Testament Set) (p. 61). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.