Matthew doesn’t mean to be simple or completely clear. He prefers to show us puzzles and tie together things we wouldn’t have thought belonged together. He starts off sounding like a traditionalist—and he is. But of a very unusual sort. He knows the tradition itself is messy. Hre are some problems he raises—and some thoughts about what they point us toward:
Why does Matthew begin with something as boring as a genealogy? The first thing Matthew does here is to anchor his narrative securely in the Scriptures that he and his first readers knew and revered (what Christians now call the “Old Testament”). He wants us to understand that his is not a new or independent story, but continues a very old one. And so he starts out with a traditional sort of Israelite genealogy (1:1-17) like the ones you can find in Genesis. The point of such a genealogy is to tell you something about the person whose name concludes it: Who is he? Who are his family? Why is he significant to us?
Okay. We see Abraham, David and a few other famous names. But why the whole list? And why does he divide it into three equal parts?
He wants every link securely in place, But, yes, he also makes a big point of identifying three eras of equal length, covering the ups and downs of ancient Israel’s history. The first era (1:2-6a) runs from the earliest beginnings of the people of Israel through slavery in Egypt and the Exodus to the time that they emerged into the world as a significant regional power. The second era (1:6b-11) begins with the triumphant reign of King David and traces the ups and (more often) downs of his descendants as kings. The third era (1:12-16) begins with the fall of the kingdom and covers the exile in Babylon and the long era of imperial subjection down to Jesus’ birth. Three ages: rise, glory, after-the-fall. Jesus is connected to them all. And being a descendant of Abraham and of David, he is identified as the continuation of their story.
But why are the exact numbers of generations important to him?
Fourteen may not seem meaningful to us. But think of three fourteens as equalling six sevens and you’ll see that Matthew is playing on the six days of creation in Genesis and the six workdays of the Israelite week while seven recalls God’s rest after creating the world and the Sabbath rest that follows the work week. With Jesus, we enter the seventh seven, an era of sabbath. This gives us a hint that Matthew, for all his deep respect for the tradition and his insistence on continuity, also sees change arriving in the figure of Jesus.
And why do these particular women crop up here? More famous women like Sarah and Rebecca get left out.
Yes, this is quite odd. Genealogies were basically father-to-son lists because this is what the ancient Israelite idea of descent focused on. But Matthew has searched out precisely those women in the family history that are most problematic for the whole business of genealogies.
Matthew’s contemporaries were very concerned about purity of Israelite descent, and one strand of thought, which eventually won out, held that only the child of an Israelite mother could be considered an Israelite. Yet, Matthew points out the presence of two Canaanite women in Jesus’ ancestry—Tamar (1:3; cf. Gen. 38) and Rahab (1:5; cf. Josh. 2 and 6:22-25), one Moabite woman—Ruth (1:5; cf. the Book of Ruth), and one woman whose ancestry is unknown but who had been married to a Hittite—Bathsheba (1:1:6; cf. 2 Sam. 11). What’s more, these women were not only non-Israelites, but each had at least some shadow of sexual impropriety attached to her story. Tamar seduced her father-in-law in a way that led to her being accused of prostitution, though she vindicated herself of that charge. Rahab is said to have had a house of prostitution. Ruth actively initiated sexual relations with Boaz in the field. And Bathsheba was forced into adultery by David himself.
Then, when we look at vs. 16, we see that Matthew doesn’t close the crucial final link of the genealogy. Where tradition expects him to say that Joseph was the father of Jesus, he only says that Joseph was “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.” (This is quite deliberate, as we’ll see further on in Matthew 1.)
But why would Matthew construct a traditional genealogy only to underline the problems in it?
Matthew’s traditionalism, it seems, is of a different sort from what we usually mean by the term. We tend to mean a perspective that conceives the tradition as clear, perfect, faultless, and essentially closed. Every thing that’s important is already there in the tradition, and no one is to to question it.. Matthew, however, doesn’t work this way. He doesn’t owe allegiance to a single, organized, sanitized version of the scriptural story. He brings the whole story with all its messiness into play. Traditionalism was becoming a smooth-running machine of religion and life in his time, and he throws a monkey wrench into the works. But his monkey wrench is also traditional—forged out of the most traditional of materials. In Matthew we have a traditionalist who, to use modern terms, is both conservative and liberal: conservative in that he believes the tradition is necessary to knowing who we are, liberal in that he knows the tradition is actually very diverse and has always been open to question and interpretation and even development.
So we can’t expect Matthew to write a comfortable sort of story, one that we can cling to without having to question our presuppositions. Whether you think of yourself as liberal or conservative, there will be things you won’t like. If you insist on things being one way or the other, Matthew will say to you, “No, you’re going to have take both together. You can’t find your way in the presence of God without taking account of the experience and insights of your forebears. But you’ll be just as certain to go astray if you think a pre-packaged tradition will settle all your questions and problems.”
So, is Mary following in the steps of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba?
It seems like a shocking notion, especially given later Christians’ veneration of Mary as a more or less perfect person. But, yes, she is indeed in their company. Nor is it bad company in the genealogical sense. They were all ancestors of greatness. Judah himself had to admit that Tamar was more righteous than he. Rahab saved Israelite lives. Ruth is a supreme model of love and faithfulness. Bathsheba, for all her misfortunes, was the mother of the wise Solomon.
Matthew, remember, doesn’t make Joseph Jesus’ father, and he tells an interesting story about that (1:18-25). Joseph realizes Mary is already pregnant and thinks he should break off their engagement. It goes against his grain, since he’s a kindly person, but the tradition expects it. It takes a special revelation to persuade him that God’s work has never fit securely inside narrow definitions of tradition. The angel that appears to him in a dream knows what’s bothering him and doesn’t so much relieve his anxiety as point him toward a broader perspective on God’s work in the world. Mary’s pregnancy is a gift of the Holy Spirit for the redemption of Israel and a fulfillment of prophecy. However unsettling it is, it, too, is part of the tradition, foretold long before by Isaiah. Joseph obeys the angel. And just to make his non-paternity completely clear, Matthew assures us that he didn’t have intercourse with Mary until she had delivered the child that was not his own biological offspring but was nonetheless being entrusted to him as his son.
Wait a minute! Wasn’t Mary a virgin? Luke’s Gospel says that she was. Matthew says nothing directly on the topic, though we can see it as an implication of the angel’s message. But Matthew’s main point seems to be that we have a genealogy here with a number of irregularities, Jesus’ own birth being the climactic instance.
So what is the spiritual point of all this? Or is Matthew just playing games?
From the perspective of Christian faith and life, Matthew’s message thus far is both liberating and alarming. He takes a fairly tidy version of tradition and breaks it open by insisting that we look at the untidy side of that same tradition. God’s work goes forward not in some ideal world, but in the one we actually inhabit.
Happily, what comes next is in the more accessible mode of narrative. Next up: FAMILY WITH NEW BABY VISITED BY PAGAN PRIESTS, HAS TO FLEE.