Scripture Matthew 1:1-16 “A Genealogy of Jesus Christ”
Compiled by Ann Patrick Ware
A genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of Miriam, the daughter of Anna:
Sarah was the mother of Isaac,
And Rebekah was the mother of Jacob,
Leah was the mother of Judah,
Tamar was the mother of Perez.
The names of the mothers of Hezron, Ram, Aminadab,
Nahshoon, and Salmon have been lost.
Rahab was the mother of Boaz,
and Ruth was the mother of Obed.
Obed’s wife, whose name is unknown, bore Jesse.
The wife of Jesse was the mother of David.
Bathsheba was the mother of Solomon,
Naamah, the Ammonite, was the mother of Rehoboam.
Maacah was the mother of Abijam and the grandmother of Asa.
Azubah was the mother of Jehosaphat.
The name of Jehoram’s mother is unknown.
Athaliah was the mother of Ahaziah,
Zibiah of Beersheba, the mother of Joash.
Jecoliah of Jerusalem bore Uzziah,
Jerusha bore Jotham; Ahaz’s mother is unknown.
Abi was the mother of Hezekiah,
Hephzibah was the mother of Manasseh,
Meshullemeth was the mother of Amon,
Jedidah was the mother of Josiah.
Zebidah was the mother of Jehoiakim,
Nehushtah was the mother of Jehoiakin,
Hamutal was the mother of Zedekiah.
Then the deportation of Babylon took place.
After the deportation to Babylon
the names of the mothers go unrecorded.
These are their sons:
Jechoniah, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel,
Abiud, Eliakim, Azor and Zadok,
Achim, Eliud, Eleazar,
Matthan, Jacob, and Joseph, the husband of Miriam.
Of her was born Jesus who is called Christ.
The sum of generations is there: fourteen from Sarah to David’s mother;
fourteen from Bathsheba to Babylonian deportation;
and fourteen from the Babylonian deportation to Miriam, the mother of Christ.
Sermon
Why do people create genealogies? Why do we sign up for 23 and Me or Ancestry.com? What is the longing that causes us to seek out stories of our ancestors, our desire to know them? I think the answer is this: We want to know about our families, so that we can understand ourselves.
In the Old Testament genealogies, we find lists of ancestors and descendants, meant to tell the stories of entire family trees. You can find a genealogy of Adam, which concludes with the sons of Noah, and a genealogy of Abraham, which begins with Noah and ends with Jacobs children. These and others are sprawling stories meant to make order of the names found in the stories.
The New Testament genealogies in Matthew and Luke are all about Jesus—they are not sprawling, but a single trajectory, all leading up to him. We are being shown his lineage and his alone—the fact that he is a descendant of Abraham, which makes him a son of God’s covenant; and he is a descendant of David, which, for us Christians, is an indication that he is the Messiah, the one whom the prophets assure us will come to judge and to heal.
We have just read a very unusual version of the genealogy from the gospel according to Matthew. In any Bible, Matthew’s list will show you the traditional form of this same genealogy: Father to son. “Abraham was the father of Isaac; Isaac was the father of Jacob;” and so on. Unlike the Old Testament genealogies, it focuses mainly on the fathers. Scholar and Roman Catholic nun Ann Patrick Ware compiled the genealogy we have before us today. It tells of Jesus’ descent by way of the mothers.
One of the interesting things about Sister Ware’s genealogy was the fact that many of the mothers’ names have been lost, including the names of the mothers who gave birth after the Babylonian exile. There are two exceptions: they are Anna, the mother of Mary, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. (In this genealogy, Mary is called by her Hebrew name, Miriam.) There are several simple explanations for this, including the fact that the Old Testament narrative concludes with the return from exile, roughly 500 years before the stories of the New Testament begin. Also, we find far more men in scripture than women, both named and unnamed. In the ancient world, men were visible and active in community life, including leadership, while women were primarily visible and active in the home. In fact, a woman’s name being known outside the home was usually considered a bad thing: it might well have meant that she was involved in something notorious.
And one of the very interesting facts about the genealogy we find in Matthew is this: While it is overwhelmingly a list containing the names of men, there are five women mentioned. Four of these women are mentioned by name and one is cited as the “wife of” a man, Uriah. And yes, these women were remarkable in many ways—in some ways that could be considered notorious and in others that can be and are considered righteous, even noble. Our anthem recounted their stories nicely, and I can add some details to those verses.
There are two famous Tamars in scripture; ours is the daughter-in-law of Judah, son of Jacob and father of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Tamar was married to Judah’s oldest son, but he died before he and Tamar had children together. Then, Tamar was married to Judah’s next oldest son. This was because of a practice called “levirate marriage”: When a man died, his wife was married to his next-of-kin, so that his name would live on in children. Also, it provided protection to the woman by guaranteeing her a place in the family. But this second man also died. According to levirate law, Judah should have promptly married Tamar to his third son, but he did not. He had lost two sons, and was afraid that he might lose a third son, as well. So, he refused to fulfill this duty, leaving Tamar not only childless but also, potentially, destitute, and without a family.
Tamar took action. She dressed herself as a temple prostitute in the service of one of the pagan gods, covered her face with a veil, and went to wait where she knew her father-in-law Judah would be passing by. Judah saw Tamar and understood her to be a prostitute but did not recognize her as his daughter-in-law. He asked whether he could go in to be with her. After, he promised to send her payment later, in the form of a sheep. Tamar asked him for a guarantee while she waited: his signet ring, the cord from his robes, and his staff. He agreed.
Three months later, Judah heard through the grapevine that his daughter-in-law Tamar was pregnant, because she had prostituted herself. He immediately called for her to be brought out of her home and burned to death as punishment. As she was being brought out, she sent the signet, the cord and the staff to Judah with the message: “It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.” Judah realized at once that he had not obeyed the law, while Tamar, even in her unusual and desperate approach, had. “She is more righteous than me,” he said. Tamar gave birth to twins, Perez and Zerah.
All of the women’s stories have points of contact with one another. One is the fact that several of the women are not married at the time they conceive. Another is the fact that all but Mary are believed to be Gentiles—outsiders, not members of God’s covenant people. Rahab was a prostitute who helped Joshua and his spies carry out their taking of the city of Jericho. She was also, if the genealogy is accurate, the mother-in-law of Ruth. We know little about Rahab’s story.
Ruth’s story, on the other hand, takes up four entire chapters, a book in itself. On your bulletins you can see John August Swanson’s lovely art, depicting the main scenes from the book.
It begins with Ruth and Orpah, daughters of Naomi, watching as they bury the last of their men. All three women have lost their husbands. Next, we see Ruth and Naomi part ways, returning to Naomi’s home city of Bethlehem. Then we have an image of what must be Ruth’s declaration to Naomi of her intention to remain with her, always:
“Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die,
and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!” ~Ruth 1:16-17
The last panel on the right-hand side of the image shows Ruth and Naomi arriving in Bethlehem, and being welcomed by Naomi’s friends.
The second row of images shows Naomi encouraging Ruth to work the fields owned by Boaz. Scripture encouraged land-owners to allow the poor to glean from their fields, gathering up leftover grain that could save them from starving. Ruth works in the fields, and another worker tells Boaz that Ruth is a good, hard worker. Boaz, it turns out, is a relative of Naomi, which means that he is eligible to marry Ruth. We see Ruth bowing before Boas, in thanksgiving for his generosity, and then bringing grain home to Naomi.
The bottom row of images shows Naomi hatching a plan. She has Ruth spruce up just a bit, and then go to the party celebrating the harvest. She tells Ruth to make a daring move on Boaz on the threshing floor, and she does: she lies down at his feet during the post-celebration naptime, and when he is startled awake, says, “Spread your cloak over [me], for you are next-of-kin.” Boaz is both a good man and eligible to marry Ruth by levirate laws we’ve already heard about. In the last two images, we see Boaz negotiating with the man who is a closer relative, and has the right to marry Ruth, but declines. In the final image, we see that Ruth and Boaz have handed their baby to Naomi, who celebrates the abundance that life has provided her in the end. None of them can imagine it, but Ruth the Moabite will be the grandmother of King David.
In many ways the story of Bathsheba—the wife of Uriah—is the most painful of these ancestors. She is taken by David, who sees her bathing on the roof of her home and decides he must have her. David does not ask her consent, but simply takes her. This, while her husband Uriah, a Hittite, and not a Jew, is off fighting a war in David’s name. Bathsheba becomes pregnant and sends David a message telling him. David sends a message to the front, telling his commanders to put Uriah in the line of fire, and back away from him. Uriah is killed in battle, but, practically speaking, David has murdered him to cover up the illegal pregnancy.
David takes Bathsheba as his wife after Uriah’s death, but God is unhappy with him. The child is stillborn. Bathsheba gives birth to four sons as David’s wife. Solomon was the youngest, and David named him as heir to the throne.
All four of these women have a cloud of some kind hanging over their reputations. For Tamar and Rahab it’s the fact of their being (or pretending to be) sex workers. For Ruth, it’s the bold threshing floor approach. For Bathsheba, it’s adultery with David, though the beginning of their connection looks more like sexual assault or rape than anything consensual. For Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, it’s also the fact that none of them is an Israelite—two Canaanites, a Moabite, and a Hittite, all known to be enemies of the God’s covenant people.
And all these things are, I believe, exactly Matthew tags these women in Jesus’ genealogy, makes them visible. Mary, too, has a cloud hanging over her. Joseph (in Matthew’s gospel) and Mary (in Luke’s) have angel-dreams or appearances that tell them the child will be fathered by the Holy Spirit. But what might the neighbors have been thinking? Did Joseph seem like a fool to those who knew about the pre-marital pregnancy? Did the neighbors believe that Mary had stepped out on him? Just like the four women who precede her in the genealogy, Mary is somehow suspect.
After the resurrection appearances, stories began to circulate about Jesus’ mother, attempting to debunk the miraculous conception of Jesus by divine means. (This is not in the Bible; it’s in writings contemporary to that time.) One theory alleges was made that Mary’s pregnancy was the result of rape by a Roman soldier named Panthera. And even if that were the case… we can look to the four women, who endured terrible losses, and hardships, and sexual assault, were woven into God’s plans anyway, just as Mary was. That Jesus’ lineage includes these five remarkably resilient and brave women is a reminder that God sows hope into the most difficult of situations. Women across these generations carried that hope to term and watched as it blossomed into joy—into a King, into a Messiah, into God’s plan unfolding as it should.
We create family trees and genealogies to learn more about the people who made us who we are. God’s hand was surely in the birth of Jesus, no matter the circumstances, but so were the lives and choices and humiliations and hardships of these women, Mary included. In the history of biblical interpretation, four of these women were, at times, seen as unfortunate entries in Jesus’ genealogy—embarrassments, sinners, harlots. But today, we can see them as heroines, as righteous women who made their way and left their mark on the story of salvation even though the odds were against them.
And their stories speak to our stories. As the choir sang,
If God could find a use for them
Despite their human plight,
Then we can dare to hope we too
Have value in God’s sight.
If God could find a use for them,
Their faithfulness ignite,
Then surely God can use us too,
As bearers of the light.
Thanks be to God. Amen.