Genealogy

▶ 1:12:46

“I do want to preach from the genealogy of Jesus. It's not a joke.” Matt called it a privilege to dust off and polish the parts of scripture people find confusing, offensive or boring, and show them for the beautiful part of God's overarching story that they are. The point of doing that, he said, is not literary appreciation. It is that people would read the Bible for themselves — and behind that, that they would know Jesus firsthand rather than secondhand.

Start at the pivot: Abraham

▶ 1:14:38

Before opening Matthew, Matt went back to the man the genealogy turns on.

Abram responded in faith while still in Ur of the Chaldeans, called out of his father's household, carrying no covenants and no circumcision yet. He is, as Matt put it, a father to both the circumcised and the uncircumcised. The promise came again after the near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:15–18): offspring like the stars and the sand, and “in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” Matt read that as singular — one particular descendant — and pointed to Paul's argument in Galatians for anyone who wanted to check him.

▶ 1:17:35

Then to Matthew 1:1–2 — and the structure gives itself away immediately. The opening line runs backward: Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham. Then it turns around and runs forward from Abraham down. “It pivots at Abraham,” Matt said, “which to me shows that Abraham is an important figure in Jesus's genealogy.”

The lion out of Judah

▶ 1:18:49

The line to David runs through Judah, and Judah got a promise of his own — Jacob's deathbed blessing over his sons.

Matt noted the timing problem that makes it obviously forward-looking: at that moment the powerful brother is Joseph, running Egypt, not Judah. So the blessing is aimed somewhere down the line. And the imagery that follows — a donkey's colt bound to the vine, garments washed in wine, “his vesture in the blood of grapes” (Genesis 49:11–12) — gets picked up again in Isaiah 63, where a figure comes from Edom in red apparel, mighty to save, having trodden the winepress alone because there was no one to help, and again in Revelation 19. The Lion of Judah is not a worship-song flourish. It goes back a long way.

Tamar, and a story nobody would invent

▶ 1:22:46

Matthew did not have to write “Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar.” Luke's genealogy names no women at all. Matthew names her — so Matt told the story from Genesis 38, promising to church it up a little, then apologizing to the Lord for the offer.

Judah's eldest son married Tamar and died. The second refused to raise up an heir for her and died too. Judah told her to go live with her father until the youngest was old enough — and then never made good on it. Her own father was providing for her; Judah's family was not. So when Judah traveled to shear sheep, she sat by the road dressed as a prostitute and intercepted him, taking his personal effects as collateral. Months later, told she was pregnant, Judah wanted her burned — until she produced his own seal and staff. His answer was as close to repentance as the chapter gets: she is more righteous than I. The twins from that night are Jesus' ancestors.

Rahab and Ruth

▶ 1:27:40

Two more women cluster around Boaz. Matt allowed that scholars split on whether the Rahab named in Matthew 1:5 is the Rahab of Jericho or a different woman, and said the likelier reading is that Matthew is skipping generations here just as he did in verse one — and means the Rahab we know.

She was a prostitute living in the city wall who hid Israel's spies, lied to her own people to protect them, and asked for mercy for her whole household (Joshua 2:8–13). Her confession was better theology than most of Israel's at the time: “the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.” She let them out her window and tied a scarlet cord in it.

Ruth is the other — a Moabite widow who refused to go back to her people when released to (Ruth 1:16). Matt recommended reading the whole book; it is short.

“By the wife of Uriah”

▶ 1:30:36

The fourth flag is the strangest, because Matthew declines to use her name. Not “by Bathsheba.” Not even “David the king and Solomon the king.” Instead: “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Matt's read is that Matthew is deliberately leaving stories sticking out like a sore thumb, and this one points at David, not at her.

David saw, desired and took — the same three verbs as the garden, with the same fruit: death and chaos. Uriah was too honorable to sleep in his own house while his brothers were in the field, which made him inconvenient, so David had him killed to cover his tracks and then took his widow. That is Solomon's mother. And it is to this same David that God says:

Solomon builds the temple. But “forever” outruns Solomon, and the man being promised it here is Jesus' ancestor many times over.

Manasseh, and the rest of the list

▶ 1:34:24

Matthew keeps going, and Matt let the names carry their own weight: Hezekiah, who led quite a renewal movement, fathering Manasseh, who led quite a counter-movement. Fifty-five years of religious terror in Jerusalem — pagan altars inside the house of God, Baal, Asherah, the host of heaven, fortune tellers and mediums, and his own son burned as an offering (2 Kings 21:1–6). The line runs on through the deportation to Babylon “because of their unfaithfulness,” through Zerubbabel the governor, down to Joseph the husband of Mary (Matthew 1:11–16).

“If God had like this ew, yuck disgust response to humans,” Matt said, “you would have expected him to have gone through a different lineage.”

What the four women actually mark

▶ 1:40:06

Matt worked through the usual explanations and found them wanting. That the women represent our sinfulness? Manasseh does that far more efficiently, and with Uriah's wife the blame plainly lies with David. That they were assertive women who sought Israel's God when they did not have to? True of Ruth and Rahab, not of her. That they were all Gentiles? Possibly not all of them. And there are five women, not four, once you count Mary.

His answer was to look at where the flags land rather than at what the women have in common. Tamar marks Judah. Rahab and Ruth cluster around Boaz, David's great-grandfather. Mary marks Jesus. Judah and David are the two men in this list who were handed an unearned, everlasting promise — the scepter that would not depart, the throne established forever. The flags are Matthew nudging the reader: check this out. Remember Judah. Remember David.

And Abraham is the pivot for the same reason, one size larger. This was never Israel first with the nations tacked on later; Abraham inherited the promise long before any of these men were born, and it was always about all the families of the earth.

Why we needed a plan that big

▶ 1:41:53

Matt reached for an odd illustration and it landed. In December 1986, and again in 1987, groups gathered at what they considered special sites — tens of thousands of people — convinced that if enough of them released enough positive energy and performed the right rituals, war and ethnic strife and national boundaries would give way to humanity's true loving nature. “I guess it didn't work,” he said.

“There's something more wrong with us than they were mean to me and that made me mean. There is something more deeply wrong with us than I didn't have quite all the advantages I needed growing up.” Sin is not a deficit you can scrub out, discipline away, or wall off behind good habits. Which is why the answer had to come from outside us — and did, in a genealogy full of people exactly like us.

So run to the rock

▶ 1:43:13

Matt's invitation used Jesus' own image: the one who falls on this stone will be broken, but better that than to have it fall on him (Matthew 21:44). Fall on the rock. Take refuge in him the way Rahab ran to the God of Israel from inside the wall of a doomed city.

Three things he said this genealogy taught him. No person, family or family line is too far gone or too disgusting for Jesus to involve himself in. Jesus' perfection is not established by a perfect human lineage but by the fact that he is eternally God the Son. And God's timing is long and multigenerational, which is precisely why we should have hope for the lost, the broken and the supposedly too-far-gone.

▶ 1:45:14

He closed with the objection he has heard from people more than once — this is for my kids, my relatives, the good people; I'm already too far gone. “No. This is for you. This is for you.” Especially, he said, when you are feeling confused, insecure, broken, creepy — let me introduce you to some people in Jesus' lineage. By faith in the God of Israel you qualify for an inheritance with the saints, and the love of God is shed abroad in your heart. Don't think of him as somebody else's Lord. Go to him yourself.