Getting to the Root of the King's Family Tree

Date: 2021-12-19

Audience: Grass Valley Corps

Title: Getting to the Root of Jesus’ Family Tree

Text: Matthew 1:1-17

Proposition: There’s often more going on than we think

Purpose: Expect more from Matthew’s biography

Grace and peace

Happy Christmas!

Week before we celebrate birth of Jesus –

Ideal time to talk about Matthew’s examination of what came before that birth.

Matthew 1 starts with one of most unread passages of scripture.

Most read verse 1:

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: [1]

Then skip to v.18, thinking that’s where the real story starts.

Who wants to read this boring “so and so begat so and so and so and so begat so and so,” and so what, right?

But…

Matthew was a religious Jew in a society where his original profession as a tax collector led him to be VERY detail oriented.

He builds a lot of detail into his biography of Jesus

New Testament – starts with four such biographies. Probably third one written, but it’s the one that was chosen to go first.

Why?

Because it is the most Jewish in writing, style, ideas, and explanations. It is the prefect bridge from the Hebrew scriptures of what we now call the OT. It has layers and nuances that many First Century religious Jews would have picked up on and understood to be Matthew’s apologetic – his carefully constructed argument that Jesus was the long-waited-for Messiah.

Problem: We aren’t 1st C religious Jews!

People from most of the Western world, particularly Americans, usually lack education or training to understand everything that is going on in a book like Matthew, though we can certainly get a lot out of the story we do see, even if we take it at face value.

But there is MORE going on here than we may think.

The MORE is sometimes the coolest part of the story!

We need to expect MORE from Matthew and learn to see it.

Going to take us a year to get through the book, but I think I can keep each week self-contained for those who can’t make it every week, while tying everything in to the overarching narrative that Matt provided for his readers.

We need to keep our eyes open for the details he included which spoke volumes to his earliest readers, but which we might ordinarily miss.

For example, this genealogy he starts with.

Who in their right mind would start a really exciting story with a boring list of names?

Ah, that’s just it: No one.

Especially not Matt.

We may only see that he’s telling us about the family tree of Jesus, but what he’s really doing is exposing the roots of some radical ideas.

First thing noticed by most: Women listed in family tree.

Not normal for the time. Male-oriented society and all that.

Highlighting women was odd, but to highlight these particular women was more than odd.

3 Judahthe father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, [2]

To say that Tamar’s story is a little twisted is an understatement. Perez and Zerah weren’t just her sons -they were her brothers-in-law. Twice!

And you thought your family was screwed up.

There’s some crazy happening in Genesis 38, where the center of Tamar’s story is.

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, [3]

Oh, dear. These two aren’t any easier to understand.

Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute from Jericho – under Israelite law from the time of Moses, she couldn’t have been part of Jewish community. But she was. And now a part of the family tree of someone Matthew is trying to tell us is a kind of royalty?

Ruth is, believe it or not, even worse!

Ruth was a Moabite. Here’s what Moses said about Moabites in Deuteronomy 23:

3 No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation.[4]

The people of Moab, from their very beginning, worked against the people of Israel, seducing them away from the LORD, into the worship of false gods and destruction.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,[5]

This woman not even named.

Of course, that’s true every time she’s mentioned.

Called Bathsheba – a woman of Sheba.

Played a role in one of King David’s great failures. David took her and got her pregnant, then had her rightful husband killed so he could take her for himself. She may have been helpless pawn, a conniving seducer, or a co-conspirator – we aren’t told. But she is shown to be a political manipulator, convincing David to declare Solomon as heir to the throne, then, later, trying to help Solomon’s brother displace him.

Like the others, she is someone most people would avoid calling attention to in their family tree. As part of the family tree of the man you are declaring to be the King of Kings? Why highlight any of these women, let alone bring them all into clear view?

This is a theme Matthew is going to come back to frequently as he writes about Jesus: Jesus confounds the expectations of the people. They expect someone who is going to be born to lead Israel to RULE over other nations, but here Matthew is showing us that he’s going to INCLUDE other nations in himself instead. They are joined in his family history, they are joined in his teaching, they are joined in their ability to follow him and be a part of the Kingdom of God.

And in the last verses of his gospel, Matthew will remind us of these first verses by telling us how Jesus commanded his followers to go make disciples of all nations.

Jesus isn’t at all what people were expecting, so we’re starting by acknowledging that and pointing out even more ways that he is different.

Well, if he isn’t what people were expecting, maybe he wasn’t the Messiah. No, Matthew is prepared for that as well.

First, the genealogy itself traces a family line that matches that predicted for the Messiah – he was to come from the line of David who came from the line of Abraham.

Second, Matthew is going to connect him to all three sections of the scriptures.

I should explain that.

At this time, the Jewish scriptures were separated into three collections of books. There was the Torah, the first five books, also called the Law or the books of Moses. There were the Writings, which is the history, like Kings and Chronicles, the Psalms, and the wisdom literature, like Proverbs. And there was the Prophets, stuff like Daniel and Isaiah and all that.

Some of the names on this list are easy to remember from Israel’s history, even if you only have a Sunday school knowledge of events. David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jehoshaphat – these are names of kings and they stand out. But there is an oddity here too. End of verse 7 and beginning of 8 refer to Asa.

Abijah the father of Asa,

8 Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, [6]

Well, it kind of does. We’ve talked before about the difficulty in translating. Sometimes things get translated in ways that obscure what is being said instead of clarifying it. This is one of those. Matthew didn’t write about Asa – in Greek, the language he wrote this book in, he referred to Asaph.

Asaph was well-known to people of the time as a psalmist, meaning that if you know the book of Psalms, you know that he wrote a bunch of them.

Jeffrey Kranz, author of The Beginner’s Guide to the Bible, said, “This is almost like a wink to the audience, because we’re going to see Jesus as the fulfillment of all Scripture. […] Matthew was bringing in the Psalms and the wisdom literature that the Hebrews already had in Scripture and saying this points to Jesus as the Messiah too.”

He does the same thing to make sure we know that the Prophets will connect us to Jesus the Messiah.

Manasseh the father of Amon,

Amon the father of Josiah, [7]

Again – the Greek here doesn’t say Amon, it says AMOS.

Who was Amos?

Well, he’s got a book in the Old Testament named after him. He’s one of the prophets.

The things we miss when we only read in English…

The name shows up in the middle of a bunch of kings’ names and there is no king named Amos. To someone who was familiar with the way the Hebrew scriptures were put together, this would have stood out.

These things are hints only at this stage – ideas laid down without much to support them yet, but this is just an introduction to the story Matthew is telling. He’s going to give us more later – lots more. For now, he is content to make the informed reader stop and think, “Wait, is he really suggesting this?”

You may have noticed I skipped one of the thirds of the scriptures. I mentioned the writings and the prophets. Did Matthew connect this list of names and Jesus back into the Torah as well?

He did.

In a couple of ways.

One is that he put some names together.

Jacob was a man who would have twelve sons. His name would eventually be changed to call him Israel and his family became known as the Children of Israel, and eventually as the nation of Israel.

One of Jacob’s sons was named Judah.

At the end of his life, when Jacob gives a blessing to his sons, he says this: (Gen 49:10)

10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,

nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,

until he to whom it belongs shall come

and the obedience of the nations shall be his. [8]

This, right after he says that Judah will rule over his brothers. And the line of Judah would go on to eventually produce King David, the greatest king of Israel, and the father of the family line from which the Messiah was to come.

But Jacob’s prophecy also said this about another one of his sons:

26 Your father’s blessings are greater

than the blessings of the ancient mountains,

than the bounty of the age-old hills.

Let all these rest on the head of Joseph,

on the brow of the prince among his brothers. [9]

So we have the royal line of Judah, which is to continue until the King of Kings arrives.

And we have Jacob, father of Joseph, who is the father of this royal line.

So look back at Matthew’s list of names that you thought was so boring. Look at verse 16.

16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah. [10]

The Old Testament Joseph?

His brothers called him a dreamer.

God spoke to him in dreams.

The New Testament Joseph?

We’ll see, as we go through the next weeks that God spoke to him in dreams too.

Matthew is using some very Jewish thinking and interpretation to back up the assertion he made in verse 1 that Jesus is the Messiah the people had been waiting for.

He’s not done yet. There is one more thing you probably missed if you read this passage. It’s mostly laid out in verse 17:

17 Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.[11]

This is tied to Jewish numerology. I’m not saying that numbers have any particular power in and of themselves, but in the literary traditions of the Bible, they are powerful symbols which have important messages in them which the original readers and hearers would have understood.

Here we have three 14s.

The number seven is one we see a lot in scripture. It is usually said to signify wholeness or completeness.

There were six days of creation, then on the seventh day, God rested. This is the pattern we follow even now, week after week.

And in this genealogy, we actually have three pairs of seven generations. Seven plus seven is fourteen generations during the first Era from Abraham to David. Then seven plus seven is fourteen generations from David to the Exile in Babylon which ended the second era of God’s people. And then, from Exile to Jesus, two more sets of seven names, reaching the age of the Messiah – the appearance of the Kingdom of God.

There are a couple of different ways of thinking about what exactly Matthew is trying to say with this, but there is no doubting that he’s making a point.

Because he altered the genealogies to make it.

In order to make his list of names fit the pattern he is using, Matt cut a few folks off the list. Five kings who should be named aren’t included at all.

Now, before you get all cranky about that, this was a completely acceptable literary technique in his day.

He’s not trying to give us a precise history – he’s trying to tell us that Jesus is the Messiah and that this Messiah has come to bring the nations together and bring about an era of wholeness and rest, even if he wasn’t going to do so in the way they expected.

To start telling the story of Jesus, Matthew starts by using this little piece of names to tie together all of the Hebrew Bible into a message that says the same thing:

The Messiah was born. His name was Jesus.

He was long awaited and yet completely unexpected.

And now you need to decide what to do with that.

So there’s something to carry with you into your Christmas celebrations this week.

Let’s close in prayer.

[1] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:1). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [2] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:2–3). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [3] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:5). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [4] The New International Version. (2011). (Dt 23:3). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [5] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:6). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [6] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:7–8). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [7] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:10). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [8] The New International Version. (2011). (Ge 49:10). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [9] The New International Version. (2011). (Ge 49:26). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [10] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:15–16). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [11] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 1:17). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.