October 22 – Matthew 1:1-17

Main Focus: Multi-ethnic inclusion is a necessary and intentional ingredient for and outcome of the gospel.

In his Gospel, Matthew sets out to prove that Jesus is the promised Messiah-King of Israel, and he starts by tracing Jesus’s lineage. But don’t be fooled, this is no boring list of old names. One trick to reading genealogies is to look for when the pattern breaks, and you’ll find four interesting interruptions to “and _____ fathered _____,” with a surprise virgin-birth ending. Interspersed between these are sinners and saints, faithful and unfaithful, outsiders and insiders, nobles and nobodies. This helps us see the diversity and inclusivity of Jesus’s earthly family to better understand his heavenly one.

Matthew introduces Jesus’s genealogy by calling him “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” In Jewish literature, a descendant of someone can be called a son or daughter. Which, if you do your homework on this list you’ll notice some gaps in the record. For instance, Josiah is listed as the father of Jechoniah (also known as Jehoiachin), but Josiah was actually his great-grandfather (2 Kings 23:28-24:9). This is not to say Matthew was irresponsible or ignorant, but to point out two things: 1. Matthew was likely referencing 1 Chronicles 3, which reflects this same tendency to skip over certain generations (likely because they were less memorable), and 2. Matthew made intentional editorial decisions in order to highlight certain things. That doesn’t undercut his dependability; it helps us know what Matthew’s trying to do here.

Also, FYI, there are a lot of opinions about verse 17 and people get real weird with all the numbers there; suffice it to say that Matthew was likely just connecting Jesus’s story to the big-picture story of God’s people. He’s not giving a stodgy account of Jesus’s lineage or a half-baked conspiracy theory—he’s making a point.

In looking for that point, you’ll notice those interruptions mentioned above. Those breaks in the pattern highlight four women, and three of them we know for sure were Gentiles: Tamar and Rahab were Canaanites, while Ruth was a Moabite. And while we’re unsure of Bathsheba’s ethnicity, her first husband, Uriah, was a Hittite. Either way, the mere presence of women in this genealogy was a rarity in Jesus’s time, and when women were included it was in order to provide further backing for one’s prestige (ex. If your great-grandma was a princess or something). So, the presence of these four women, of all the 40+ that could’ve been mentioned, shows that Matthew is making a point: the Jewish Messiah is of multi-ethnic lineage, a multi-ethnic king for a multi-ethnic kingdom.

In discussion we’ll connect this back to Genesis 12:1-3 (as we’ve done before), to see how this is a foretaste of the fulfillment of God’s promise to bless the nations of the earth through Abraham’s family. Thus Jesus is the son of David, the Messianic heir to the throne, and the son of Abraham, the promised one through which an earth-wide blessing would come: the blessing of redemption. This theme is underlined even sharper when you come to the fifth woman in the genealogy, Mary, to whom Jesus was born by no earthly father, revealing God’s cosmic purposes for this final, supernatural link in the chain.

We also get a sense for this theme of redemption through the other names in the list. Beside Tamar the Canaanite we see Judah, her father-in-law who slept with her because he thought she was a prostitute (Gen 38; the Bible is wild y’all!). Beside David’s name Matthew lists Bathsheba not by name but by David’s impropriety: “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Awful kings like Manasseh and Jechoniah stand there, too. All these sinners remind us of humanity’s desperate need for a savior.