Matthew 1:1-17

Introduction

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”

With those words, Jane Austen famously opened her novel Pride and Prejudice

George Orwell began his equally famous novel 1984 with the haunting words, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” setting the tone for his picture of the dystopian future in which nothing - not even time - is certain.

The point of these first lines is that they grab the attention of the reader and draw him into the rest of the book.

It is almost certain that there are no text books on creative writing that recommend a genealogy as a good way to grab the readers’ attention.

Of course, Matthew’s aim was not to entertain, but we may nevertheless feel tempted to say - though perhaps not out loud, and certainly not in church - that he might have made more of an effort than this.

Reading it in English (as we do), and perhaps with a sketchier grasp of the OT than we care to admit, the opening line seems drab and formulaic

‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’

And what comes next doesn’t seem to do much to breathe life into the story - a list of generations, grouped into 3 blocs of 14 for reasons he doesn’t explain, even though the final summary in verse 17 seems to want us to see it as significant.

He is also seemingly unconcerned that some generations have been missed out, telling us that this is clearly not intended to be something that is written to satisfy the Public Records Office, as the missing generations are easily found in the OT.

The problem lies, however, not with Matthew, but with us.

Our aim in reading this genealogy should not be to just get it over with as quickly as possible and on to the interesting parts, but to get the point of it.

And when we see it as Matthew surely meant us to see it, it is far more gripping than anything penned by Jane Austen or George Orwell.

Matthew is first and foremost a preacher rather than a public records civil servant, for which we should be thankful

Verse 1

The words ‘The book of the genealogy’ would take a Jewish reader, steeped in the OT, straight back to the book of Genesis

Gen 2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created

Gen 5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam

In the original language, genealogy and generations are one and the same

What is this telling us, the readers?

It’s saying that the coming of Jesus the Messiah marks a beginning - a new beginning - a beginning that is at least on a par with the beginning of everything that is spoken of in the opening chapters of Genesis

But not only is his coming a new beginning that looks forward in a wholly new and wonderful way, it’s a beginning that looks back, that is absolutely rooted in history

He is the son of David, and the son of Abraham

As the son of David, he is the one who will establish the enduring throne, the everlasting kingdom promised to David

He is great David’s greater son, the one to whom David points

In 2 Sam 7, God’s promise to David was, ‘your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me’

And it was going to be in Jesus the Messiah that this kingdom of which he then spoke would be finally made sure

As the son of Abraham, he is the one who will finally inaugurate the universal blessing that was promised

In Gen 12 God’s promise was clear: ‘in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’

God’s promises to Abraham were never limited in their scope to one particular nation, but had all the nations of the earth within their compass

So in this superficially mundane first line, Matthew has told us that Jesus the Messiah is the One in whom these twin lines of promise come rushing together

The promise of an everlasting kingdom given to David

The promise of universal blessing given to Abraham

That’s not a bad first line after all, is it?

The Genealogy as Jubilee

We can catch an important part of what Matthew is telling us in this genealogy if we go back yet again to the OT

When God brought the children of Israel into the land of promise, he laid down stipulations as to how they were to enjoy the land

We come to some of those stipulations in Lev 25

First, that chapter establishes that every 7th year was to be a Sabbath year, in which the land was not to be sown or the vineyards pruned

So overlaying the weekly Sabbath on the 7th day was this 7 yearly Sabbath of rest when the land was to be allowed to lie fallow

But there was more

Overlaying the 7 yearly Sabbath was another Super-Sabbath called the year of Jubilee

They were to count 7 weeks (or Sabbaths) of years - that is, 49 years.

Lev 25:10 ‘And you shall consecrate the 50th year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee to you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan’

And significantly, it began on the Day of Atonement

What did this mean ‘on the ground’ in daily life?

Well, in short, the final, 7th Sabbath of years led to the 50th year of Jubilee

And this 50th year meant freedom

It meant a national re-set - a new start - or a re-boot as we may say in computing language

Suppose that - whether through folly or simple misfortune - you had become the slave of someone else in the land. In the year of Jubilee everyone who was enslaved was entitled to go free, to return to his family, and without payment.

Or suppose that - again whether through folly or misfortune - you had found yourself having to sell your land to someone else. Under the Jubilee stipulations, what that person was buying was not the title to the land in perpetuity, as we can do in the UK, but a given number of harvests

If the Jubilee year had just happened, he was buying the benefit of the next 49 harvests - after which the land would revert, without payment, to its original owner or his descendants.

If it was less than 49 years to the next Jubilee, the price would be reduced proportionately to reflect that fact.

Can you imagine what it was like to be living in that final Sabbath week of 7 years, as the year of Jubilee - the moment of emancipation - drew ever closer?

These stipulations therefore served some vital purposes.

They prevented permanent poverty, by providing for the release of slaves

They prevented the excessive accumulation of wealth, by providing for the reversion of property to its original owners.

And they served as a regular reminder that the land was not theirs in any ultimate way, but God’s, who was sovereign over all.

(Perhaps they contain principles that modern governments would do well to reflect upon, in a world where there is both grinding and enduring poverty often combined with oppressive debt, but also a handful who become eye-wateringly and increasingly rich)

Now, with that in mind we can turn to Matthew’s genealogy

And when we do, we immediately see that he has deliberately shaped it to echo the Jubilee stipulations

The birth of Jesus the Messiah is depicted as ushering in the final and ultimate Sabbath week of 7 years and the Jubilee to which all the others merely point

The theologian James Bezon puts it like this: ‘Matthew sees Jesus as the culmination of six weeks’ worth of generations (6 x 7), which he groups into three sets of 14 (double-Sabbaticals) to emphasise the centrality of David in Jesus’ ancestry’

(The name ‘David’ has a gematrial value of 14 - the Jewish practice of giving numerical values to consonants, D-V-D being 4-6-4)

Bezon goes on, ‘Like Daniel, then, Matthew sets Jesus’ ministry within the context of a 7th week, and sees Jesus’ ministry as a precursor to a Jubilee year’

At its simplest, Jubilee meant two things:

It meant liberation from slavery

And it meant the restoration of the original ownership of land, a new start, a re-booting of the land

And that points to a wider, universal reality that the mission of Jesus has achieved

He came to deliver men and women from bondage to Satan, and without any payment being required of them

He also came to reclaim this earth from a usurper, the ‘prince of the power of the air’ - that shadowy Satan figure of whom Jesus declared, ‘now will the ruler of this world be cast out’ (John 12:31)

As James Bezon again puts it, ‘Jesus’ Jubilee is inextricably bound up with the defeat of Satan and the release of Israel and the nations from Satan’s dominion. It is set against the backdrop of a chaotic wilderness, a worldwide day of atonement, and a cosmic showdown with the world’s powers and principalities’

The Genealogy and Females

A striking feature of this genealogy is that on 4 occasions it refers to the females in the line

Not only were they female and appearing in a genealogy in distinctly patriarchal society, but there was more

First, it’s highly likely that they were all Gentiles

Tamar (Gen 38, the tawdry story of Judah) was a local woman so Canaanite

Bathsheba (described here as ‘the wife of Uriah’) was likely a Hittite like her husband

Ruth was a Moabitess

And Rahab was, it may be presumed, the harlot of Jericho

Furthermore, in each case, as one commentator tactfully puts it, ‘there were at least suspicions of some form of marital irregularity, though all four were in fact vindicated by God’s subsequent blessing’

What they collectively do is emphasize the fact that the freedom that Jesus came to bring, the ultimate Jubilee that he came to accomplish by his death and resurrection, was not some local, national, limited thing but one that embraced all - male and female, all levels of society, all nations of the earth, all whose lives need to be delivered from bondage to sin, death and hell.

The Genealogy and Failure

It is a striking thing that as Matthew counts off the marker posts to the birth of Jesus the Messiah, one of them is the exile to Babylon

The inital promise comes to Abraham

In David the project reaches its pinnacle - could this be the final success of the project?

No - the glory days of David & Solomon were clearly not the ultimate goal of God’s purposes

Despite the solemn warnings given by Moses in Deuteronomy as they entered the land of promise, the cracks quickly began to appear and in the end, the threatened judgment of exile came upon them in 586BC when the few who survived the earlier exile succombed to the Babylonian empire.

In short, all seemed lost

God’s plan of redemption appeared to any objective observer to have been defeated

Even when their return from exile was permitted, they still felt as though they were still in exile, because they were very much under foreign rule, of one empire after another

But if the history of God’s plan of redemption tells us anything, it tells us that these failures are temporary, not final

Here, at the beginning of Matthew’s telling of the gospel story, we may reflect that another apparent calamity looms large over the narrative

The time will come when the religious authorities and their Roman overlords combine to operate as the visible manifestation of those unseen principalities and powers who had opposed him tooth and nail all the way, and who seem to have succeeded as they achieved what they thought would end it all - his death by crucifixion.

What they did not know, nor could have known, was that by their wicked actions they were accomplishing the purposes of God

Christ crucified seemed to be a display of abject weakness and utter folly, but was actually ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24)

What those hostile powers could never have foreseen was that in going into death, he would not be overcome by it (as they expected - as that is what death always did, did it not?) but would burst out on the other side of it, utterly beyond their reach, and able to save all those who come to God by him.

And through his death and resurrection, he would liberate his people and his whole creation and defeat those evil powers that had tried to do away with him for good.

They did not know that by their actions, they were signing their own death warrant. As Paul puts it in 1 Cor 2, ‘None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’

Conclusion

We do well not to dismiss this as ‘a mere genealogy’

There is gospel in this ‘mere genealogy’

It operates like a drum-roll to say that in Jesus Christ history is coming towards its fulfilment - it was all about him, decreed by him, and it all heads up in him

It operates like a drum-roll to say to everyone that there is freedom and forgiveness to be found in Jesus Christ

No matter what your past, in Christ there is a fresh start, a Jubilee, a wiping of the slate clean, freedom from bondage to sin and Satan

No matter what your position, high or low, rich or poor, in Christ there is a welcome into his everlasting kingdom

Jesus was Matthew’s hero, the centre and sun of Matthew’s worldview, the hope of all the world

Is he all those things for you?