Sermon Video: The Ancestors of the Messiah - Matthew 1:1-17

When you are someone as important to history as Jesus of Nazareth, the long-awaited Messiah, curiosity about your ancestry is only natural.  Matthew begins his Gospel by addressing this desire and does so in unexpected and interesting ways: (1) He starts with the titles of "Messiah," "son of David," and "son of Abraham."  Each of these carries weight and adds to the claims about Jesus that Matthew's Gospel will be making. (2) The inclusion of four mothers with strong Gentile connections in a list that otherwise only contains fathers.  In so doing Matthew points toward God's concern for the whole world as well as his willingness to utilize people who would otherwise be overlooked, two key themes in the Gospel narratives.  (3)  Matthew leaves in the list (while some have been left out to form thy symbolic 14,14,14 symmetry) men both good and bad, heroes and villains, making what Jesus will prove himself to be even more remarkable.

Sermon Video, The Genealogy of Jesus Part1 - Matthew 1:1-5

I know what you're thinking, there can't be anything worth learning about a list of names.  The Genealogy of Jesus is just a list of names isn't it?  For Matthew, the inclusion of a genealogy at the start of his biography isn't unusual for the world he lived in, but a simple list of names this isn't.  Matthew tells a story through his list of names by including five women in the list.  It was unusual in such list to include any mothers, let alone five, but what strikes us as we look at the list is which mothers Matthew chose to highlight.  It wasn't the most respectable of the ancestors of the Messiah, but rather a trio (in the first half of this 2 part message) of women with foreign roots, two of whom had a checkered past.
The first woman listed in Matthew's account is Tamar.  Tamar isn't very familiar to us because her story is left out of every Sunday School material packet on Genesis.  Tamar was married to a dishonorable man, taken advantage of sexually by a greedy brother-in-law, and backed into a corner where she resorted to prostitution at the hands of a lustful father-in-law.  The twins boys who resulted from this union were included in the line of David, and hence the Messiah, rather than any of the other sons of Judah.
The second woman in the list is the prostitute and Canaanite, Rahab.  Now, Rahab is included in our telling of the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho, although her profession prior to the arrival of the spies is often left out.  How did this woman, renowned for her faith in a God she didn't know about (see Hebrews chapter 11) end up marrying into the line of Judah after the Israelites entered into the Promised Land?
The last woman in the list is actually one that we have no problems with but that would have been considered suspect in her day because of being a Moabite.  Ruth is remembered for her loyalty and faith, and for finding a good and faithful man in Boaz, but she would have been an unlikely grandmother for Israel's greatest king had not God provided for her in response to her faith.
In the end, Matthew didn't have to include any of these women, but he chose to, that means something.  Is he trying to tell us that the Messiah came from an imperfect line as we all did, but was perfect himself?  Is he trying to tell us to judge these women with fresh eyes and see their true value by including these three in particular?  Regardless of what conclusion we come to about Matthew purpose, it seems clear that this isn't just a list of names.

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Sermon Video