Good news for everyone

Good morning, everyone. Please have a seat. We begin today a new mini-series looking at the Christmas story from the first few chapters of Matthew’s gospel. And our first passage is the one that was read so well for us earlier - the opening lines not only of Matthew’s gospel but of the whole New Testament. I think you’ll agree we need God’s help to make sense of them (as we always do actually) so let me pray for us now.

In the hands of our greatest authors, opening lines grab your attention, set the tone for the book and give clues about what is to come. Here are some classic examples from western literature:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.[Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen]

Did you didn’t recognise it? Here’s another one:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.[Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier]

Or more seasonal:

Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.[A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens]

So, what do you make of the opening lines of the New Testament (Part two of the greatest book ever written, inspired by the Holy Spirit)? If it had been you writing this, would you have started like this? With a genealogy (a long list of Jesus’s ancestors)? I guess probably not. But whether you see it yet or not, this is a gripping a start to the New Testament, taking us straight to the heart of what this book is about (revealing to us who Jesus is). It also gives a clue to what will be a key theme – that Jesus Christ came to bring hope to the whole world. And like any good box set it links to what has come before – the promises and hopes of the whole Old Testament!

Perhaps there is a cultural element here. In general, western culture doesn’t pay much attention to genealogies and many of us may want to skip them to get to the interesting stuff – although there is a growing interest in tracing family trees. However, many around the world would be far more comfortable, even excited, by genealogies. They are an important way of knowing your roots and give you a sense of identity, of knowing your role and status in society and many cultures would be able to trace their genealogy back many generations. My genealogy – on my mother’s side I am Jordanian. And tribal structure of society is still very strong. We when I visited Jordan a few years ago I noticed the first question I was asked was what my mother’s surname was and what part of the country she came from. And that meant those I was speaking to could place me – important facts for knowing who I was. And it meant they knew those who came before me.

For the Jewish people reading the book of Matthew –genealogies were very significant and were needed to show who belonged to the Jewish community. So you read in the OT books of 1 Chronicles and Ezra (1 Chron. 1-9; Ezra 2 & 8) of those who could not demonstrate they were a part of the Jewish community and so were excluded. Herod the great (who appears in the Christmas story) resented the fact that his name was not included in the official genealogy of Israel because he was only half-Jewish. So he ordered the destruction of the official genealogy, so no one could dispute his claim to the throne. Genealogies are important and Matthew starts with a genealogy to validate who Jesus is. To show us that he has good ancestory. But there are three other aspects to pickup on:

1. God’s work reaches its climax in Jesus

You know how when you watch a box set or TV series they often begin with a recap. “Previously on…” whatever it is you’re watching? Well Matthew does something similar here using a genealogy. He is giving us a survey of what has come so far in the story of salvation – as he runs through the list of names, we get some key characters and the major turning points in the Bible’s storyline. It’s just a summary – not every name in the family tree is given. Father here is used in the sense of ‘ancestor’.

Now clearly, he wants to focus on what is new in the story of salvation – that is Jesus. But you cannot make sense of Jesus unless you understand the Old Testament, just as you cannot make sense of a TV series if you just watch the last episode. And so it begs a question, how well do you know story of the Bible? Its plotline? The main turning points? The key characters? As helpful a summary like this is (there is no shortcut to reading and understanding the whole Bible) both Old Testament and New. And learning how you can explain it to others. The recap only really makes sense if you’ve watched the previous episodes. So I’m not going to go through all those names one by one or even attempt to link them all together in a Bible overview. Time does not allow for that. Instead, let me throw in a few resources to help you with that. Perhaps they would make a good Christmas present!

1. God’s Big Picture – on Clayton.TV plus Vaughan’s Book
2. Glen Scrivener. Long story short
3. Glen Scrivener. Reading Between the Lines v 1 & 2

In the genealogy of Matthew 1, he links Jesus to two key Old Testament characters. Have a look at the first verse (Matthew 1.1):

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

That’s also reinforced in Matthew 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.

Jesus is linked to Abraham and David – those two names are highlighted. Jesus is the son (a descendant from) of David and the son of Abraham.
How do these connections help us understand who Jesus is? The Son of David is a favourite name for Jesus in Matthew. It helps us to see that Jesus is traced through the royal line of the kings of Judah. That means Jesus has a rightful claim to the title King of the Jews. Jesus is the true Son of David. The one promised by God in 2 Samuel 7 who would come from the line of David and rule on a throne of his kingdom for ever and ever.

Now that King Jesus is here, God’s kingdom has been established with it comes freedom and peace for all who are citizens of the kingdom. The Kingdom of heaven will be a big theme in this gospel. Jesus is also the Son of Abraham. Luke takes his genealogy all the way back to Adam. But Matthew’s highlights Abraham (taking us to the promise God made to him in Genesis 12) where God promised that all nations will find the blessing they need through the seed of Abraham – from his family line. By that stage in Genesis, God had created the whole world, which had turned their back on him and so lost the blessings of living in God’s place under his rule. The whole world was scattered and lost the blessings of being God’s people. But God had a plan that would mean they could recover the blessings they had lost. Abraham’s descendant’s (his children) who became known as the Jewish people were part of that plan. But God’s promises were yet to be fulfilled. Matthew’s tells us that Jesus is the true Son of Abraham. Jesus is the one who would fix all that was broken and restore all that was lost. In him, God was bringing a new people into being.

So the first aspect of the genealogy is that it shows us that God’s work reached its climax in Jesus. All that has come before in God’s plan of salvation finds fulfilment in Jesus. In Jesus God’s radical Kingdom rule has come (he is the Son of David. And in Jesus, all nations will be blessed) he is the son of Abraham. The second aspect this genealogy shows us is that:

2. God is at work in history

The Bible is not an abstract book full of theory, and rules and regulations. But there is a danger that we see it or talking about it in an abstract or theoretical way. No wonder then that it becomes very detached, removed from realities of everyday life and people. The Bible is not an abstract book.It is not just a book about God – it’s a book that is all about God and his relationship with people. It is theology clothed with flesh; demonstrated and worked out in the lives of real people, men and women. Genealogies help us to understand that God is at work in history – in real places, in real people. This is one of the wonderful realities of biblical faith – it has unique real historical foundations. Something sadly often denied by liberal Christian theologians who want to maintain that the Bible story has a symbolic message without being historically true. It also makes it very different from Eastern religions and philosophies such as Hinduism or Buddhism. What they describe happens outside of history (take for example the legends of the Hindu epics), historical context is not important and in any case history goes in cycles. The Christian worldview (the biblical worldview) is that history goes in a straight purposeful direction governed and watched over by the God who created it all, the God of history who is moving it to a climax, to an end point.

So don’t skim over those names. Take note that the creator God works in history – he reveals himself and works out his salvation plan in history. That gives meaning and purpose and direction to history. And Matthew wants us to see that at the centre of history and at the centre of God’s purposes for his whole creation stands Jesus. In his birth, death and resurrections lies the hope of all the nations. But he is also the hope of individuals – of real people. So genealogies are reassuring on big scale - he is lord of history. He is working his purposes out. But it’s also reassuring on a personal level. You may feel insignificant (that no one is interested in you or your story), well God is interested and involved in people. He created us, and he has chosen to involve himself in our own personal histories. He sent his son Jesus to transform lives. Genealogies remind us of that. So this is not just the start of the New Testament. It is a fantastic reminder that the God of the Bible specialises in new beginnings. Fresh starts. There is now for everyone the possibility of a new beginning. Lord of history has broken into our history and he offers a fresh beginning. Our past with all its brokenness and failure does not need to determine our future. We can trust our lives to him, knowing that we are in the secure hands of the lord of history.

3. God’s work reaches everyone

One of the unusual features is that Matthew includes women in the genealogy. Jewish genealogies didn’t include them normally. If you compare this to Luke 3 there are 67 men, but no women. But here Matthew’s does. And very unusual choices:

• Tamar (Matthew 1.3) committed incest with her father-in-law (Genesis 38).
• Rahab (Matthew 1.5) was a prostitute in Jericoh (Joshua 2).
• Ruth (Matthew 1.5) from Moab
• Bathsheba (Matthew 1.6) wife of Uriah (the Hittite) seduced into adultery by no one less than Israel’s greatest king. And her unfaithfulness led to the murder of her husband (2 Samuel).
• Mary (Matthew 1.16) suspect background.

Maybe by choosing women with rather unusual, dodgy, even scandalous histories, he had in mind the circumstances of Jesus’s own upbringing, with suspicions that he was what they would have called an illegitimate child, born to an unmarried mother from an obscure, humble background. They’re not even the only women who could have been included. Why not Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, Deborah or Hannah? I find the most convincing explanation is that Matthew wanted to show that God’s love in Jesus is all-embracing, that Jesus is for everyone. You see the women in (Matthew 1.3-6 are mostly foreigners - Canaanites and Moabites and Hittites. That would have been a shock to the Jews who thought they were the only ones God was interested in. The Jewish messiah has gentile (non-Jewish) blood! King Herod may have tried to delete such facts from his genealogy. But Matthew’s digs out and displays the non-Jewish blood in Jesus’s genealogy. All the men in the family tree were Jewish. Despite their checkered past – all four of these women went on to demonstrate faith in God and to receive God’s blessing. That’s intentional. His genealogy points forward to the inclusion of foreigners to the people of God. Jesus is not just the Christ for the Jew. He is the Saviour of the world. He is the hope of all the nations. That theme runs right through Matthew’s gospel and he includes the whole world in his genealogy in Matthew 1 and will end the book in Matthew 28 with Jesus sending his disciples out to make disciples of all the nations. These lists of names draw our attention to the fact that God has always worked out his mission and purposes through unlikely people. Men and women; Jews and Gentiles; people of all backgrounds.

Who do you expect God will use to work out his purposes? Affluent, middle class, respectable, academic? Yes of course. Jesus is for everyone. But that also means the socially marginalised, the displaced, refugees. Those we are tempted to look down on are often those being used most powerfully by God in his mission. As we see those names (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba) and the name of the men in the list with similarly dodgy backgrounds (such as the evil king Manasseh in Matthew 1.10) we know that Jesus says , “I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what you’ve done, I don’t care what your background is, I don’t care what deep, dark secrets are in your past. I don’t care how badly you’ve messed up”. If you come to God through Jesus, not only will God except you and work in your life – but he delights to work through people like you. He’s been doing it through all of history.

Every church is a bunch of sinners saved by grace, and the mission of the church is to reach out to the lost and the last and the least of society. Matthew and this genealogy says to us all: there is no space for snobbery, for elitism in this church. God is building a diverse, multi-racial community. Jesus welcomes all, and so should we. It also shows us that God isn’t looking for extraordinary, perfect people as his disciples. He is looking for those who submit their lives to him, live in obedience to him, responsive to him and live out Kingdom lives wherever he puts us. Jesus takes people as they are so he can make them what they ought to be. Takes us where we are and transforms us by his wonderful grace. So we become more and more like the Lord Jesus. Jesus is for everyone – doesn’t belong to the Jews, or the west. The gospel is for everyone, all nations. It is a global faith. When we become a disciple of Jesus we belonging to the great global family of God. Have we taken that on board? How much do we really believe that the gospel is for everyone? And how willing are we to let God work through us to welcome everyone? What part can you play in getting the good news to everyone, everywhere? What boundaries could cross with that message? What opportunities are on your doorstep?