Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him. In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us. [Colossians 3:10-11 (NLT)]
It’s tempting to speed-read through the long genealogies found in the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the nine chapters of names in 1 Chronicles. Just when we thought we were done with them, we get to the New Testament and Matthew begins with a lengthy genealogy. His abbreviated genealogy, however, is more than a list of often unpronounceable names. Because it was prophesized that the Messiah would be a descendant of Abraham and from the line of David, Matthew takes us through Jesus’ family tree to firmly establish His royal lineage and legal right to be the king of the Jews. There are three notable omissions in the line of ancestors—the vile kings Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah, all of whom Scripture says “did evil in the eyes of the Lord”—but there are five remarkable additions. While highly unusual to mention women in a genealogy, Matthew mentions five women, all of whom had what we might call “colorful” pasts.
We start with Tamar who was married to Judah’s son Er. When Er died, Judah had his second son, Onan, marry Tamar to provide offspring so Er’s line would continue. Onan prevented that from happening, died, and Tamar remained childless. Although Judah promised his next son to the widow, that never happened. Taking matters into her hands, Tamar pretended to be a prostitute and duped Judah into having sex with her. Twin boys, Perez and Zerah, were the result of that union. Her unconventional behavior is a blemish on the family tree, but it’s nothing when compared to the next woman mentioned: Rahab.
When Rahab first appears in Scripture, she’s a Canaanite prostitute in Jericho. Even though she helped Israel’s spies, joined the Israelites after Jericho’s fall, and gave birth to Boaz, this Canaanite woman of ill repute is another blot on the pedigree of the Prince of Peace. The next unlikely name in this Jewish genealogy is Ruth, the Gentile widow who accompanied her widowed mother-in-law Naomi back to Bethlehem. Ruth may have been a devoted daughter-in-law but she was from Moab. Because Moab had opposed the Israelites and tried to curse them, her people were cursed and could not enter into the assembly. Nevertheless, she ended up marrying Boaz and was the grandmother to King David. A hated foreigner is hardly the ancestor you’d expect of the man who came to save the Jews.
Then we come to Bathsheba who was married to Uriah the Hittite. One of David’s mighty men, He was off fighting battles when she was impregnated with David’s child. Whether she was the innocent victim of rape or a seductive adulteress, her husband was murdered by King David and the child conceived in adultery died. While we know little more of Bathsheba, we’ve got the plot line of a soap opera now! The genealogy finishes with Mary, the mother of Jesus: a peasant girl from Nazareth who became pregnant before marriage!
These are hardly the kind of women about whom a good Jew would boast: a woman who used sex to trick a man, a prostitute from Canaan, a cursed Moabite, an adulteress, and an unwed mother! After neglecting to mention three kings, why did Matthew include these women? If women were to be mentioned at all, there must have been a few upstanding ones whose reputations were without blemish. Yet, in Tamar, we have a woman who sought justice on her own terms; in Rahab, a courageous woman with enough faith in the Israelites’ God to commit treason; in Ruth, a woman who abandoned her pagan gods for Yahweh and became a sacrificial servant to Naomi; in Bathsheba, a woman resilient in the face of the loss of both husband and child; and in Mary, a girl with a servant’s heart whose decision meant she faced scorn and shame because of other peoples’ assumptions. Despite the difficult circumstances each woman faced, God brought about much good. Damaged and vulnerable, these are the kind of people to whom we all can relate.
Matthew’s list is as much a theological statement as it is a genealogical record. It makes clear that both Jews and Gentiles had a role in the Messiah’s ancestry and that both should benefit from His sacrificial death. Jesus came for all people: men and women, rich and poor, native and foreigner, accepted and unwelcome, king and laborer, famous and infamous, strong and weak, honored and scorned, Jews and Gentiles—sinners all. He came to save each and every one of us and to make us members of the same family! Thank you, God, for the Christmas gift of salvation for all who believe.
For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you. [Galatians 3:26-29 (NLT)]
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Angels taking on bodily form and appearing to people certainly wasn’t an everyday occurrence. Although they are God’s messengers, the message angels bring can be good news or bad. While they may help God’s people as they did for Elijah and Daniel, angels also execute God’s judgment as they did when striking down the firstborn males in Egypt. I suspect Gabriel looked fiercer and more powerful than the elegant sweet angels hanging on our Christmas trees. When he arrived unannounced in the empty Temple sanctuary, Zechariah was overwhelmed with fear and, when he suddenly appeared in an empty room in Nazareth, Mary was troubled and perplexed. Not knowing whether he was on a mission of judgment or mercy, it’s no wonder both Zechariah and Mary were fearful. Gabriel began his visits by telling them both not to be afraid.
After being asked, “How different would the world look if everyone got what they deserved?” I started wondering. Even as a child, I knew people didn’t get what they deserved. When I was ten, I watched on television as nine black students tried to enroll in an all-white school in Little Rock, Arkansas; they were blocked by the National Guard and an angry mob of 400 angry whites. Two years earlier, on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman. I grew up in Detroit and, while discrimination and segregation were more subtle than in the South, it existed. I lived in a large home with a big yard on a tree-lined street but any bus trip “downtown” told me that the people of color didn’t live in neighborhoods like mine. There may not have been “colored” drinking fountains or “white only” bathrooms but there was a six-foot high, one-foot wide, and half-mile long wall segregating one black community from a neighboring white one. Many other invisible and more impenetrable walls existed within our divided city.
Back in 1957 (long before PETA existed), Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins, conducted a series of cruel and inhumane experiments to demonstrate the power of hope and resilience in overcoming difficult situations. In this case, the difficult situation was rats being put in a bucket of water with no means of escape and timing how long it took them to drown. After two preliminary experiments, Richter hypothesized that introducing hope to the rats would increase their survival times.
Devotions of the Heart 