Editor’s Note: The way CKB operates most of the time to give a sense of the context of this or that text is what he calls “painting a picture,” an imaginative recreation of the context often with dialogue or vivid description. The purpose of course is to help the congregation understand the original meaning of the text, and also to make the text come alive.
“DOUBTFUL ANCESTRY”—Matthew 1.3–6
[Preached nineteen times between 12/5/76 at Chester-le-Street to 12/26/04 at Gilesgate]
Let me get in one word, before you exclaim in disgust “that is the stupidest text I ever heard, and it leads to the worst sermon. Get up and walk out.” The sermon, I dare say, will be bad enough, but I must say a word in defense of the text. I agree that appearances are against it. As we read the New Testament through at home and got to the end of Revelation, and then back again to Matthew 1, my wife Margaret says “Do we really have to read all the list of names again?” We do, but I can see her point. And I did not venture to read you the genealogical table as our second lesson. But before you dismiss it, notice that there is something very odd here. People in the first century drew up their family tree and produced lists of ancestors and the lists were the names of men—grandfather, father, son and so on.
Of course women in those days wouldn’t stand for being left out and even then people knew that no man stood much chance of being a father if there was no woman available to be a mother, but so it was, right or wrong. Only—not here. Here in the most significant genealogy of all, stands no fewer than four women, cutting right across the formal structures of the list, for it is formal and Matthew underlines the fact. “All the generations from Abraham unto David are fourteen generations, and from David unto the carrying away to Babylon, fourteen generations, and from the carrying away to Babylon unto Christ, fourteen generations.” The crossing of the two lines, the formal and the informal, the expected and the unexpected, remind us at once of what the coming of Jesus was. He was what people expected. They expected a Messiah a deliverer, one who would fulfill the hopes and dreams that prophets had entertained through the centuries and he was all that. The fulfillment of what God had led people to believe in and hope for.
But this did not mean there was a ready-made set of categories by which he could be described, a neat set of pigeonholes into which he could be neatly filed away . . . and forgotten. There was in him also that which suppressed all such expectations and confounded all their plans. Things that no one had ever thought of before. You can see it in the story of his baptism. The voice declares from heaven “you are my Son, the Beloved” that is he fulfills the messianic hope of his people. But immediately the Holy Spirit descends on him; that is, he will go out to fulfill God’s promises and his people’s hopes in all the freedom and spontaneity of the Spirit. So it is here; the formal and the expected is cut across by the informal and the unexpected. But there is more to say. Look at the four women individually.
TAMAR
I did not read you her story from the Old Testament nor am I going to tell it to you now. It is in substance a rather unpleasant and even dirty story. If you wish to look it up, you will find it in Genesis 38. It is enough to say that you will find there the story of a frustrated woman, robbed by death, by selfishness, by carelessness of the husband and children that she wanted. There is no need to describe the particular circumstances. There are others that can lead to frustration and frustration itself is something we know well enough. In some ways our modern mechanized, automated age knows it better than others. Not long ago my son said to me “You know father you are one of the lucky ones. You are doing a job you want to do.” I think the observation was just, and I wonder how many people work day after day feeling all the time frustrated because they can never get past their work and on to things they really care about.
Even more important perhaps are the frustrations of personal life. The sort of frustration that Tamar knew. The frustration of unrequited love and friendship. I love my children, and all I want from them is that they love me. But too often it does not work out like that. I offer my friendship and the offer is turned down or isn’t even noticed. We put all we can into the work of the Church but it doesn’t move on much, or it moves backwards. We can understand Tamar and what she stands for, even though this is something more subtle than our next name evokes.
RAHAB
The Old Testament describes her bluntly as a harlot. If we consider the circumstances of the time, 3,000 years ago, we shall not want to pass too severe a moral judgment. But prostitution is not what God made sex for, and Rahab will serve as a label for sin—another theme introduced into the genealogy of Jesus. And another that we can understand. Of course we do not bear the label that society attaches to Rahab, but do you remember Paul’s saying? “What! Shall I take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot?” Or shall I take the gifts that God has given me, myself, my powers of body, mind, and will and devote them to something other than God? How often have we prostituted ourselves, not in the interest of some human client, but of some goal we would not bring before God and try to justify in his sight? Preferred some sort of profit, financial or social, to the service of God? It can all be done most respectably. It can even be done in the aura of religion. But whenever we consult ourselves first, and other people’s interest and God’s only inadequately we put ourselves in Rahab’s company. But the next woman is different.
RUTH
There are things to note about Ruth, this time at least, that she was a stranger, a foreigner, a Moabitess, no Jew at all. She lived outside the framework of the true religion. What were Abraham and Moses, the law and the covenants to her? Not for her to take part in the sacrifices in the Temple. She stood outside this world of religious activities. Well there are plenty of Ruths about us today, they constitute the huge majority of our national society. What are we who meet here today in comparison to the population as whole? They are a mixed lot, many of them very nice as Ruth was—kind, affectionate, appreciative. But if they were suddenly dumped here in Church, if by some mistake they walked in here instead of into a public house, they would feel strange, awkward, embarrassed, perhaps we should too. This very embarrassment is one of our problems today. People feel they don’t belong even if they would rather like to, and we do not do as much as we might to heal the embarrassment and bring them in. And people live out in the dark and the cold because though we unbolt the door, we don’t go out to bring them in. We move to the wife of Uriah.
THE WIFE OF URIAH
She is not hard to understand, and you know her story. At first you might classify her under the label of sin, like Rahab, but that would be wrong. Of course there is sin in the story—David’s sin, which evoked the most famous denunciation in the whole Old Testament— Nathan’s parable of the ewe lamb and his “you are the man!” But you can’t blame Bathsheba again given the circumstances of the time. When the king sent for her, she had to go. The word here is sorrow. There is sorrow first for Uriah, her husband, that good loyal faithful man and about his death in so dastardly a way. And then there was sorrow for her baby. We hear much of David’s sorrow. He fasted and lay all night upon the earth. The elders of his house arose, and stood beside him to raise him up from the earth but he would not, neither did he eat bread with them.
But what of the mother’s sorrow? Here the sound of sorrow weaves itself into the story that leads up to the story of Jesus, and as long as human life is lived in this harried world of mortality and death we shall know its meaning. Bit by bit as the story of life goes by you learn the meaning of these things—of loneliness, of separation, of death.
Now let us begin to add up these things, observing as we do that this is no compulsive mathematical logic but just a way of setting out truth that we have learned elsewhere. You can have a dozen Rahabs as your ancestors and care nothing for the sinful. Jesus was not what he was because he had such and such great grandmothers. But we can see, as I believe Matthew wished us to do, how these unexpected names cohere with the truth about Jesus.
FRUSTRATION
