Date: 25 December 2024
Speaker: Rev Quek Zhi Min
Sermon Text: Matthew 1:1:17
CLICK HERE to join in our Livestream service on Youtube
TRANSCRIPT
Matt. 1:1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Matt. 1:2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, 4 and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, 6 and Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, 7 and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, 8 and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, 9 and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, 10 and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, 11 and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon. Matt. 1:12 And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, 13 and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, 14 and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, 15 and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, 16 and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. Matt. 1:17 So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.
A List of Names? Seriously?
This seems to be an odd way to start the story.
For those of us brought up on action movies
– like James Bond or the Marvel superhero movies –
Movies that start with breakneck action sequences even before title credits,
This seems to be an odd way to start the story.
A list of names? More than half of them belonging to people I’ve never heard of?
Right on the very first page?
Seriously?
Isn’t this a waste of time?
What’s this got to do with hopes and dreams?
Shouldn’t we just skip over to the action parts?
But let’s try to get into the sensibilities of those who first recounted the events about Jesus, and those who first heard these accounts.
The point is, of course, that tracing one’s family line is enormously important.
Actually, even for many of us living in the modern Singapore,
We can still understand how family histories provide a sense of who you are.
Some Chinese families that have a “family book” that records the names of each generation, with the book being passed down from one generation to the next.
If you were in such a book, one quick check can tell you which generation you belong too,
and where you stand in relation to everyone else.
In other words, your identity – or at least, a part of it.
My wife Sharon’s extended family – Ps Quek’s family – has such a book.
A few years ago I was amused to find out that
in a break from tradition, and a striking move in favour of gender equality,
females were finally included in the book from Sharon’s generation onwards.
So we can kind of understand how telling the story of a family line can be important to establish identity.
It certainly was so in the first century-Jewish world at the time of Matthew the author.
A first-century Jew, on hearing this “book of genealogy” recited,
Would be perhaps be a little bit like us
Watching a parade or a procession coming down the street.
We crane our necks to see the figures at the front,
And then the ones in the middle,
But really, everyone is waiting for,
hoping to see the one who comes at the end,
In the position of greatest honour.
A Bunch of Men
saints and sinners
But let’s not run ahead of ourselves to the end of the line.
It’s not a random list of a bunch of men.
Our author Matthew has arranged this book of genealogy, this parade of names, carefully to make some points.
Matt. 1:1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Most Jewish folks, telling the story of Israel’s ancestry, would begin with Father Abraham.
The church has been studying the book of Genesis, the story of Abraham.
Abraham is the founding father, to whom God made great promises.
God promised him the land of Canaan, and the nations would be blessed through his family.
His family or clan is the one that eventually multiplies into the nation of Israel.
But only a select few, by the time of the first century, can trace their family line through Abraham’s descendant, King David.
David was the great King of Israel, to whom, again, God made promises of future lordship over the whole world.
And even fewer would be able to trace their line by going on through David’s son Solomon and the other kings of Judah all the way to the time of exile, and beyond.
The exile was when the leading society of the Jewish nation was deported far away to present day Iraq, because they had been conquered by great superpower Babylon.
Why were God’s people in exile?
Because they didn’t worship God properly, like God deserved.
They didn’t treat their neighbours properly, like people made in God’s image.
The first we call Idolatry, the second we call Injustice.
And so God in his judgment threw the people of Israel out of the land into deportation.
The exile was the time when it seemed that all the promises to Abraham and David were lost for ever, drowned in the sea of Israel’s sins and God’s judgment.
But actually, of you think about it, isn’t this also a picture of the universal human condition?
Not just the nation of Israel back in those days, but
we all have not worshipped God properly as he deserves,
(Like some of our friends earlier in our play – we keep chasing things such as popularity, and significance, and achievement, and money. We worship these instead of God).
Also, we all have not treated our neighbours properly as they deserve.
So everyone is under judgment.
But there is hope.
There is a hint of good news.
God, through his spokesman called prophets, promised that God would again restore Abraham’s people and David’s royal line.
Now, eventually, the Jewish people were allowed to return to their land.
But for most of the time after the deportation, Israel did not have a functioning kingdom.
Any kings and queens they had in the last 200 years before the birth of Jesus were not from David’s family.
Not from this list that we read.
Herod the Great, the king that appears as the villain in Christmas stories
He was called king at that time.
But Herod wasn’t from David’s family, he had no royal blood.
He wasn’t even fully Jewish.
Herod was an opportunist military commander whom the Romans made into a king to further their own Middle Eastern political interests.
But back in those days, memories were long, and family books were kept.
There were those who knew people who descended from the line of true and ancient kings.
There were those who were longing and waiting for someone from that line to finally come.
Someone who – having been anointed and approved by God just like David had been –
Would be the true King and bring about God’s kingdom and rule according to God’s ways.
This someone they were waiting for?
They called him “the Messiah” in Hebrew, or “the Christ” in Greek.
The anointed one.
But to tell this story, even just to list those names in that family tree, is quite a dangerous thing to do in the politics of the time.
Herod’s spies were everywhere.
What if they overheard you listing who was part of the true royal family?
But that’s what our author Matthew does, on Jesus’ behalf.
He even arranges the family book to tell us:
Yes Jesus is part of this royal family.
But, not only that, Jesus is the goal of this whole list.
Matt. 1:17 So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.
The book of genealogy is divided into three groups of 14 names—or, perhaps we should say, into six groups of seven names.
The number seven is a powerful symbolic number to the Jewish readers of the bible.
It symbolizes completeness – God made the world in 7 days.
And so, for this Jesus the Christ,
to be born at the beginning of the seventh seven in the sequence
is clearly to mark him out as the climax of the whole list.
This birth, Matthew is saying, is what Israel has been waiting for two thousand years.
Here is your King, the one anointed and approved by God.
Here is the One God’s spokesmen have said is coming.
Here is the One who would bring about God’s kingdom and rule according to God’s ways, and put all the wrongs in the world right.
Here is the One who would bring all of us who are far from God, far from his promises,
Back home from our exile and deportation.
But Matthew also knows that the way this is happening will be very strange.
If you were to list your ancestors, write a book of your genealogy,
who would you include? Who would you highlight?
Significant and important people, right?
If you had, somewhere in your past,
the community leader and philanthropist Tan Tock Seng as your ancestor
I’m sure you’d be highlighting how you were 5 or 6 generations from this guy.
Conversely, if you had some great-great granduncle who was a traitor during a war,
Or treated the common people badly when he was in government,
I think you’d try to forget about mentioning him.
So, we might have expected more of the "right" sort of great and respectable people to feature in the bloodline of Jesus Christ, the great Messiah.
But what do we get?
A stunning collection of saints, and sinners, and everything in-between.
We find good kings, bad kings, heroes, adulterers, Jews and and even some non-Jews.
There is no pattern of righteousness or respectability.
Wicked king Rehoboam fathers wicked king Abijah,
who fathers good king Asaph,
who fathers good king Jehoshaphat,
who fathers wicked king Joram. (1 Kings 14 onwards)
A collection of saints and sinners and everything in-between.
But actually, isn’t that the truth for everyone’s family? Aren’t we all like that?
And here we see it in the family line of Jesus Christ.
It looks to me like this Jesus, this anointed one that everyone has been waiting for,
He is going to bring about God’s kingdom, put all the wrongs in the world right,
bring all of us back to God,
Not by being aloof and far off.
He is going to rescue the world by being one of us.
And therein lies our hope.
An Assortment of Women
unexpected and embarrassing
I said earlier that we expect books of genealogies to include and highlight significant and important people.
My wife’s family book didn’t include female names in previous generations because in the past women were insignificant and unimportant to the family line.
Sorry ladies!
All this to bring to your attention that this book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ has some surprising inclusions.
It contains some women – that is already striking since listing women is very very rare.
But more importantly, why these, of all women?
I mean – ok if you want to include women,
Wouldn’t Sarah or Rebekah or Rachel be more appropriate to mention?
They are, after all, the matriarchs of the people of Israel,
wives of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob respectively.
Wouldn’t they be more respectable inclusions in this book of genealogy?
Because the life stories of the first 4 of 5 women mentioned are startling.
Tamar (v. 3)
Rahab (v. 5)
Ruth (v. 5)
Bathsheba – “the wife of Uriah” (v. 6)
Tamar was treated as a roadside prostitute by her respectable father-in-law Judah (Gen 38).
Rahab was a prostitute from Jericho who ended up as mother to Boaz (Joshua 2).
Ruth herself marries the aforesaid Boaz, but after she daringly lies down at his uncovered feet, an act which might be seen as a scandalous proposition (Ruth 2).
And then we have Bathsheba, or more accurately referred to in our genealogy as “the wife of Uriah”, as if to remind us she was a married woman who was taken by a rapacious King David as his adulterous partner (2 Sam 11).
All of them had a whiff of sexual scandal about them.
Isn’t it unexpected and embarrassing to include them in a book of genealogy?
But actually that’s kind of the point.
Because God still worked his ways in and through their lives.
If God can work through these bizarre ways, watch what he’s going to do now.
Matt. 1:12 And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, 13 and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, 14 and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, 15 and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, 16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, and Joseph the father of Jesus, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.
Did you notice something interesting at the end of v. 16?
All through from the start of chapter, we have the repeated phrase “and X the father of Y”.
But the right at the end …
What we don’t have is “and Jacob the father of Joseph, and Joseph the father of Jesus.”
Instead … what we have is:
16 and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.
Here is the mention of the fifth woman in our book of genealogy – Mary.
And in these stumbling words – out of pattern words – our author Matthew is going out of his way to tell us:
Joseph is the husband of Mary, yes.
Mary gave birth to Jesus, yes.
But Joseph is NOT the father of Jesus.
Or at least, not the natural, biological father.
You see, our author Matthew is about to tell us how this fifth woman in genealogy,
Mary, is found pregnant while unmarried, and claiming she is still a virgin.
And her fiancé Joseph, instead of divorcing her, marries her instead.
The baby Jesus is delivered soon after. Probably too soon after the marriage.
Hmmmm.
A whiff of sexual scandal.
Embarrassing, no?
But that seems to be how God works.
Through unexpected and surprising people,
Through messy and scandalous situations,
God works out his great project to rescue the broken world,
And bring back to all the people who are far from him,
Through this Jesus Christ, Messiah.
This Jesus is going to do all this, by being one of us,
By getting down and dirty into the messy and scandalous situations of our lives.
That is our hope.
A Strange Beginning for Jesus (and Us)
So yes, this is a strange beginning for the story of Jesus Christ, the most important person in history.
But once we understand what the author Matthew is saying through the strangeness, we can proceed with the rest of the story of Jesus.
These few verses are at once:
the fulfilment of thousands of years of God’s promises to make the broken world aright;
and also something quite new and different.
God is going to restore the broken world – your broken lives –
By being one of us. By entering into our messy scandalous lives.
That’s the surprising thing. That’s new and different.
Jesus will live our lives.
Walk our roads.
Do what we should have done.
And, as you shall find out later on in the story of Jesus, take on the punishment we should have suffered.
Surprised at this strange beginning?
Whether you’ve been in this church for a long time,
Or you’ve just been invited by your friend or relative,
Perhaps you feel that like all those people waiting for Christ.
You know deep down that you have not treated God as he deserves to be treated.
You have forgotten about him or ignored or perhaps you’ve even run away.
And you look at your relationships and you know that you have not treated people as they should be treated.
And you know that’s wrong.
If people only knew how messy and scandalous your life was.
And because you haven’t loved God and haven’t loved your neighbour,
You feel that you are far from God, far from how you think your life should be.
If these are your thoughts this Christmas.
It’s a good time for us to remember:
That God still keeps his promises to those who wait.
And how God still surprises all those who learn to trust him.
If you – like those ancestors longing for him –
Ask this long expected long promised Jesus to Come.
Come and live in you - and change you from the inside out.
And you can have a fresh and strange beginning too.
That is the sure hope we have in Christ.
Prayer
Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.
Israel's strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart
Comments