Unwrapped: Shady Family Tree

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Unwrapped: Shady Family Tree

The Story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the most important account of any person. You are here today because of his story and how his story impacted and changed history for every person who has ever lived or will live in this world. With someone so important and critically influential as Jesus and you know about him, how would you tell his story? What would you include to share with the world if you were one of the eyewitness of life of Jesus? And especially for this season of the year how would you begin to tell the story of Jesus?

One of Jesus’ best friends starts his account of Jesus’ story using Jesus’ family tree. How would you like your story to be told beginning with your entry from Ancestry.com?

There was a story this week in the New Yorker. The headline read: How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer. Is that what your family tree could be used for? The article traces the story of genetic testing in forensics. There is coming a day when you will be able to upload your DNA to a database and not just know names, but stories, backstories, and identities of people who are tied to you. The article chronicles the exploits of geneticists who are solving cold cases at a record pace. But it also highlights the search for John and Jane Does who died without being identified, and birth parents for adoptees who have no idea who their real parents are. The research isn’t just uncovering murders, but illicit affairs that produced children… children who were never aware that their conception wasn’t on the up and up. Not only are there those who aren’t happy with what has been discovered, they’re not happy that others know of the discovery. “I’d rather not know” no longer hides the sordid details.

Questions about Jesus

Matthew is the best friend of Jesus who begins his story with the family tree. And boy, is it sordid. We have murderers, we have ruthless dictators, we have affairs, we have prostitutes, we have incest. Jesus’ line has it all. And Matthew puts it all out there for the rest of us. His original audience is a church much like this one, and they want to know if Jesus is the real deal. They want to know if Jesus really is the one who had been Promised in the Old Testament, the One who would come to save Israel. And Matthew writes his account, his letter, to answer that question. So Matthew begins by tapping into Ancestry.com:

Christian Standard Bible (Chapter 1)

An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. (Matthew 1:1)

Everything that follows in Matthews account of the life of Jesus is a defense of Jesus as THE descendent of the royal line of David and THE descendent of Abraham. All the promises given to David regarding his throne and his posterity and Abraham and his descendents are fulfilled in this One who is known as Jesus. And if you’re Matthew, and you’re going to be making those unbelievable claims about Jesus and David and Jesus and Abraham, well, you start off with a genealogy. Matthew wants to show that Jesus is related to David, just as the Old Testament writers had claimed the Messiah would be.

Let’s start with genealogy

A genealogy! Isn’t that an exciting way to start the story? If you one day just started reading your Bible and you started with Matthew which is the first letter in what we call the New Testament because you wanted to know something about Jesus, and you then you read the first paragraphs in his letter you might be thinking, umm.. where’s the action? Where’s the drama? Where’s the intrigue? Where’s the car chase? You see all these names, many of them unrecognizable, some stories lost to history.

Do you have anyone in your family tree that you can just name drop? Like my great-great-uncle’s cousin’s twice removed by marriage used to be king of France? (I have no idea, btw) I do share a surname with a world-famous photographer from France, but I have no clue if he’s in my tree. Jewish genealogies trace the names through male descendants. And Matthew, here, starts off with some big names, although, if you have Jewish descendants you have these names.

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 1

Abraham fathered Isaac,

Isaac fathered Jacob,

Jacob fathered Judah and his brothers

So far, so good. Those are big names. Doesn’t get much bigger in Jewish family history. Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Judah. The patriarchs. All of Jewish history starts with these guys. And all of the great promises of the Old Testament regarding God’s blessing on his people were given to these four. Judah is the one through whom God would send a King who would reign over His people and all the earth forever and ever. Not a bad start to the family tree. But then that’s where things get dicey.

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 1

Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar,

Oh boy. Here we go. Really? Did we have to go there Mattthew? Matthew isn’t sticking to the script. Jewish genealogies don’t mention women. But Matthew does. Tamar. What is she doing here? Tamar doesn’t belong here, and not just because she’s a she. Do you know the story of Tamar? Do you know what she did and who she did it with? Probably not, because it’s R-rated R even though it’s in the Bible. Genesis 38 is where we find the story of Judah and Tamar. We will be telling her story next week. What we need to know now is that this is a story you’d rather not tell when reciting your family history.

Matthew doesn’t stop there, though. We get to verse 5:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 1

Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab,

Boaz we know. He’s a good guy. But his mother? Why is she here? She’s a prostitute. And she’s not even Jewish. Tamar is involved in sexual scandal. Rahab is a prostitute. Matthew’s genealogy is not progressing in the way we’d expect, and sure enough in the very next sentence...

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 1

Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab,

Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth,

Oh boy, here we go. Another woman in the Jewish genealogy. And more scandal. Ruth. We tend to think of Ruth as one of those nice Christmas Hallmark Movie, young widow moves home with mother-in-law and wouldn’t you know it, one of mom-in-law’s relatives is rich and single. But even that story is PG-rated and Ruth is not Jewish, but belongs to the hated enemies of Israel, the Moabites, people whose own history involved terrible sexual scandal in the Bible. What is going on, Matthew? This is not the pristine genealogy we would write of ourselves. And Jesus?

Matthew continues:

Christian Standard Bible (Chapter 1)

Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth,

Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered King David.

David fathered Solomon by Uriah’s wife,

Solomon fathered Rehoboam

Wait. What? Uriah’s wife? Wow. I was not expecting that. Matthew really went there. Doesn’t name the woman. But Matthew’s audience knows the woman, knows the story. David, the king after God’s own heart, the one who killed Goliath, the one who wrote a lot of the Psalms in the Bible, that David was the father of Solomon through Uriah’s wife. Not his own. Uriah’s wife. The one David had an affair with, or more like took advantage of, and then killed Uriah to cover up his own adultery. More scandal, quite possibly the most scandalous story in the Old Testament.

A fifth scandal

Four women. Four scandals. All part of the family tree. But as Matthew is writing this, there is a fifth scandal coming. There is a fifth woman in this story. Matthew has included four unlikely, four unexpected, four unworthy, four undeserving, four unforgettable women. Because there is a fifth unlikely, unexpected, unworthy, undeserving, unforgettable woman with her own scandal in Jesus’s story. And Matthew wants you and I and his audience to see that this fifth woman and her scandal is as much storyline as these other women:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 1

The birth of Jesus Christ came about this way: After his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, it was discovered before they came together that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit. 19 So her husband, Joseph, being a righteous man, and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly

We know how this story ends. We will celebrate the birth of Jesus in just a few weeks. We’ve already got the music and the lights. So it’s really easy to skip over THE most difficult part of this birth, the one that doesn’t make it into the Hallmark movies. For most of Mary’s life, for most of Jesus’s life, they had to live with this. Joseph’s take on what he thinks is going on with Mary is everything that sordid idea is cracked up to be for those living in Jesus’ hometown. His family. His friends. Jesus is an illegit, as far as they are concerned. That accusation shows up during Jesus’ ministry, at least once it is recorded for us.

And Matthew is not running from the scandal. Before Matthew gives the real reason that Mary is pregnant with no help from Joseph, he has already firmly grounded this story in scandal. This stuff with Mary and Joseph? That’s all par for the course. That’s been going on all along. His entire history is littered with sordid, sexual scandal. If you’re looking for a king with a pristine, perfect pedigree, go make one up. It’s not to be found in Jesus’s storyline.

A shady family tree with shady characters

Matthew begins the Jesus story with a shady family tree filled with shady characters, because he knows, because he spent 3 years with Jesus, that shady people and shady women are not just a part of the story of Jesus, but are the point of the story. In fact, Matthew knows this. Matthew himself was an outcast, a rich one. A tax collector. An extortionist. Yet Jesus made him part of his own story.

Sinners aren’t just a part of the story, they are the point of the story. These women, all five of them, immersed in sordid scandal are sinners. Jesus came for sinners. All five have been rescued by his grace. And that’s what Matthew wants us to see in the shady family tree. Grace. Unbelievable grace for women and sinners who are unlikely, unworthy, unexpected, and undeserving. Matthew is not going to mask over the flaws and the sin in Jesus’ background. It’s why Jesus came. The scandal that surrounds Mary and Joseph and Jesus is why Jesus came… to save His people from their sin.

Years later, when Jesus is a grown man, his mother will watch him die the death of a common criminal, even though he didn’t deserve it. Scandal followed Jesus all the way to the cross. And the most scandalous thing of all is that he didn’t deserve any of it. We did. Sinners did. Sinners deserve what Jesus got. Jesus takes the scandal, he takes the sin, and he tells the sinner… you’re free as if you never did anything wrong. That’s scandalous. That’s grace.

The great missionary Paul talks about this grace this way:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 2

you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—9 not from works, so that no one can boast.

Do you deserve presents or coal this year? When you give gifts to your kids this year, will it be because they earned it? Of course not. I’ve always found it interesting, in the mythology of Santa.. that Santa doesn’t give presents to kids on the naughty list, but in most presentations of his story, he ends up throwing out that naughty list. Everybody gets a present, nobody left out. Now, most of the time, Santa says “I guess they were good enough.” But the reality is that none of us give gifts to our kids based on whether or not they earned it. We give them gifts because they are our children, not because they blew it again. It’s who they are. That’s grace.

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Grace is God for us. When you unwrap the story of Christmas, you begin to see what it really is all about. It’s all about grace. The unlikely. The unexpected. The unworthy. The undeserving. That’s us. We aren’t just part of the story. We’re the point of the story. The story of Christmas is grace. Completely unbelievable and unstoppable grace. The grace that Jesus has for those women in our story is the same grace he gives to us.

Scandal never wins in Jesus’ economy. Grace has the last word. Do you think those women, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, and Mary, didn’t wonder if scandal would be the last word for them? It’s never the last word where Jesus is involved. Matthew is pointing out that this baby that is coming into a world full of scandal will have the last word. What goes through Mary’s mind years later when her firstborn is dying for her? Grace. Scandal never wins. You cannot out-scandal Jesus. There’s always more grace where that comes from.

Which means if you are struggling today, if there is a burden you are dealing with, if there is a past you just can’t move past, and you think that somehow you got to get your life together in order to be acceptable to God, you can stop. Bad kids, sinful people get presents too! In fact, that is what makes the story so unforgettable. You don’t get what you deserve. You get better than you deserve. And you didn’t earn it. You can’t pay it back. It is just pure, grace. And grace is greatest gift you’ll receive today. Jesus family tree is nothing but shady. Because you and I are part of that family tree.

Let’s pray.

We get better than we deserve. That’s the story of this Table. This Table is soaked in scandal because it is for sinners. It is for those who know they need Jesus to save them from their sins. This table is the opposite of coal. We deserve the worst. He gives us the best. He gives us Himself. Right here. It’s here he forgives us, and gives us life, and reminds us that we are part of his shady family tree.