Begats

One of the most often neglected texts during the Advent season is Matthew 1:1-17, the seventeen verse genealogy of Jesus.  Filled with four syllable names (verse 12 alone contains "Johoiachin, Shealtiel, and Zerubbabel") and back stories that would make most of us blush, these verses are more than often skipped during Advent sermon series...

However, as we prepare our Christmas Eve musical (Andrew Peterson's "Behold the Lamb of God"), believe it or not there is a song that goes through the entire genealogy.  That got me started looking back through the list.  Then, in the Advent devotional I'm reading this year ("Watch for the Light," referenced in Advent Meditations) today's reading was based on Matthew's genealogy.  Reading through this dense list of names once a year is enough of a chore--twice is an incredible oddity!

The list is remarkable for a number of reasons.  Some of the most righteous and faith-filled men in history can be found on the list--men like Abraham, Boaz, and Josiah.  There are also some dudes in there that, at best, have a checkered past... men like David the murderer, Solomon and his hundreds of wives, and Jacob the schemer and deceiver.  And there are lots of folks that we know next to nothing about--in fact, the last third of the list is effectively full of the names of the "no-names" in the line of the great King David.

However, most remarkable to me are the women.  In a list like this, particularly at the time, there would be no need to list women.  Mothers were unimportant in the telling of the family history (having only carried the children, birthed them, and raised them--you know, no big deal), so the presence of women on the list is already odd.  But the ones that Matthew chooses to include... even more odd...

• Tamar.  She was the daughter-in-law who posed as a prostitute in order to get her dead husband's father Judah to get her pregnant.  Classy on all sides.
• Rahab.  She actually was a full-fledged prostitute. "Nuff said.
• Ruth.  A poor and helpless Moabite widow, who became a symbol for grace as she was mercifully invited into the family line by the much older Boaz.
• Bathsheba.  The wife of Uriah, one of King David's best friends, whom he had murdered after Bathsheba became pregnant with David's child and Uriah was too righteous, even after the king had gotten him drunk, to sleep with his own wife while his fellow warriors were in battle.  This is so wrong on so many levels that it's hard to even figure out how to comment on it...
• And Mary.  The righteous virgin that no one in her whole town except her future husband believed was either.  Despite that fact that she actually was both righteous and a virgin, her life was certainly shrouded in controversy.

So Matthew didn't just name a few women--he brought the skeletons out of the closet.  These folks put the "fun" in dysfunctional!  Why in the world would he pull out these women?  What about righteous Sarah or beautiful Rebekah?  Certainly Mary, who was Jesus' only human parent anyway, is a natural for the list, but the other four?  Wouldn't their husbands, who have enough issues of their own (reference Judah and David above), suffice?

Then I remembered the obvious reality: Matthew wrote this gospel several years after the ascension of Jesus.  While it's the beginning of the gospel to us as readers, he's looking back on the life of Jesus as he begins to recount the story.  Could it be that as Matthew lists these women, he also thinks of the woman caught in adultery, the Samaritan woman at the well at noon, and Mary Magdelene and all of her demons, and he sees some incredible similarities?  Could it be that Matthew is writing about Jesus while he thinks of Isaiah's prophecy: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows"?  Jesus didn't come into a sterilized world and didn't live a sterilized life--perfect, for sure, but not sterile.  And so, Matthew finds no need to sterilize his family tree.  In fact, he goes out of his way to remind us just how messed up Jesus' ancestors were... so we will be readily reminded of how messed up those who Jesus ministered to were... so we will realize just how messed up we are.

It's hard for me to realize that all of these messed up people are listed, in part, so that I would feel right at home in Jesus' family.  He didn't come to avoid the suffering of this world--He came to engage it.  

Maybe Matthew 1 calls for yet another reading this Christmas after all...