Word of Salvation – Vol. 35 No. 43 – November 1990

 

The Pedigree Of Christ

 

Sermon by Rev. M. C. De Graaf on Matthew 1:1-17

Reading: 1Peter 3:18-4:11;  Isaiah 11:1-16

Singing:  331, 275, 335, H.207, H.210.

 

Brothers and Sister,

Many years ago, when I was still a little boy, one of my older sisters, became involved in a rather strange hobby.  She began to collect, with a friend of hers, those little dogs called ‘chihuahuas’.  If you’ve ever seen one of these dogs you’d understand why I called it a strange hobby.  They’re an incredibly ugly creature, at least that’s my opinion, with very annoying personalities.  Always yapping.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that with each one of these animals, (and she only ever had one or two at a time) she would receive a set of papers.  They’d be about so long (longer than the dog) and on them, would be carefully set out the lineage of this particular animal!  You could find out at a glance who this dog’s mother and father were.  And in turn, who theirs had been.  It went back over quite a few years, like a tree branching out.  Each generation carefully recorded.  For dog breeders this kind of thing is very important.  They want to be sure that the animal is from a pure background and preferably a background that has produced champions in the past.

Of course these things are not just important for dogs.  They can also be true for many other domesticated animals, for instance, the lineage of a racing horse is also very important.  At times this can even be true for certain people.  For example, for Queen Elizabeth it is important that her father was George VI, and his father was etc.  Her ‘pedigree’ is much more than just a ‘family tree’ (which many people are getting excited about today).  It is the reason she is where she is today.  It sets her clearly apart from us ‘mere mortals’.

In some ways the family tree which we see here in the first chapter of Matthew could be described as a ‘pedigree’ of Jesus.  As we shall see later, in many ways it isn’t one.  But for now we can see that in some ways it is.

After all, we should realise that this work has been very carefully constructed.  Matthew doesn’t strictly include everybody.  He doesn’t need to.  The Jewish readers to whom he addressed this gospel wouldn’t have expected him to.  They didn’t include everyone in their family trees.  They rather tended to choose the significant people along the way.  Those who stood out.  You know, family trees were very important in Jewish thought, for various reasons.  For one thing they clearly underlined the ‘set-apartness’ of Israel and the need for the people to be ‘pure’ and ‘holy’.  A family tree’ told everyone that there was no foreign blood in their veins.  Your lineage was also important, for instance, for priests who had to be clearly related back to Aaron.  In Ezra 2, after a rather long list of genealogies, we read about three men whose children could not become priests because: ‘they searched for their family records, but they could not find them and so they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean’.  The Jews thought a great deal of ‘pedigrees’ so it would make sense for Matthew to include one here.

So in what ways is this like a pedigree?

Well, for one thing Matthew shows that Jesus was obviously a part of the Jewish nation and the things that were important to it.  Jesus is described (and shown) as a ‘son of Abraham’, the man to whom all Israel looked as their physical and spiritual ‘father’.  The Gentile, Luke, brought his genealogy back to Adam.  But in Matthew’s gospel it is more important to clearly underline that Jesus was truly one of the chosen people.  More than that, this genealogy would have told the Jewish audience that he also had a right to be seen as the Messiah, the ‘chosen one of God’.  After all He was a clear descendant of David, the great King.  And Isaiah had clearly said that the chosen one would be ‘a shoot from the stump of Jesse’.

Likewise in the Psalms, David’s eternal kingship was underlined!  This (so-called) ‘pedigree’ shows that Jesus was obviously part of the royal line of Israel.  Notice how Matthew specifically refers to David as the ‘King’ in verse 6.  If you read on you see that many more kings are included in his list of ancestors!!  Jesus was not just any old peasant from Galilee.  He belonged to the greatest family in Israel’s history.

But of course that’s not all that we see in this genealogy of Jesus.  Because in others ways (as we look more closely we see that this is not what we would strictly refer to as a ‘pedigree’.  Most obviously, it doesn’t perfectly fit that model because some ‘non- champions’ have been included.  And even the so-called champions’ were oftentimes seriously flawed!  (Race horse pedigrees would never list failures if they had choice and yet Matthew had ‘choice’ (this is a selective family tree) and he did include the flaws.

Look at the explanatory note which Matthew adds in verse 6.  He doesn’t say: ‘David, the greatest king Israel ever had’.  No, he points at the adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah the Hittite.  Many of the kings he includes are fallen kings, ones who turned their backs on God.

Another thing which seems totally out of character, involves the inclusion of women.  Something a real Jewish genealogy would never have done.  Jewish society was extremely male-centred.

To make things worse, just look at the kinds of women the gospel writer chooses!  We’ve already mentioned the mother of Solomon.  Matthew also refers to Tamar who seduced her father-in-law by dressing up like a prostitute.  And Rahab who had also been a prostitute in Jericho.  Even Ruth (like the last two) was a foreigner, which in Jewish society made her very clearly a second-class citizen, if you could call her a ‘citizen’ at all.  Don’t forget that the law had clearly said ‘no Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation, none belonging to them shall enter the temple of God for ever!!’

When we look at these people we see this is not really a human pedigree in the strict sense at all!!  I guess in the ‘strict sense’ no human could ever claim a perfect pedigree.  The sinfulness of Adam is passed down from generation to generation.  In Romans 8:3 Paul says: ‘God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful man’.  Here we can see that fact very clearly illustrated.

Here we can also see very clearly illustrated the grace of God and the wonder of His working on this planet on our behalf!!!  Yes Abraham laughed at God, Judah slept with Tamar, David murdered Uriah, Rehoboam tore the kingdom apart, the whole people failed so miserably, they were dragged off into exile.

And yet throughout the family tree God’s grace is at work holding things together, moving things forward to the ultimate goal, to the goal He had promised Abraham thousands of years earlier, when He had said: ‘through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed’.

Now at last the answer to that promise was coming.  Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Chosen one was about to be born.  Sacred history was coming to its high point.  Matthew illustrates that with those three neat blocks of fourteen names in each.  He is saying that God’s time was right.  In the fullness of time Christ came!

You know, for many people (not all but many) human genealogies can be a rather arrogant thing.  Not unlike pedigrees.  Through them people like to say, look at where I come from etc.  (In America there’s great pride in coming on the Mayflower; we have the ‘First Fleeters’).

This genealogy is not a memorial to a great family which conquered all and succeeded in the end.  It is a history of God’s love for mankind.

I guess that point is most clearly illustrated by the fact that Matthew (like Luke) has chosen to set out the genealogy of Joseph, not Mary!!  In the next few verses he shows clearly that Joseph wasn’t (strictly speaking) the father of Jesus at all.  Luke even begins his genealogy by saying that Jesus was only ‘thought of’ as Joseph’s son.  You could argue of course, that Matthew puts down Joseph because in the eyes of all around and in the eyes of the law he was seen as the father of Jesus’.

But on the other hand in this fact we can also see that it was only God’s grace that could save mankind.  As the Dutch commentator Ridderbos says: ‘In the decisive moment, Joseph and with him the house of David and the lineage of Abraham was ignored.  The Messiah could never be born of them.  He had to be granted to Abraham and David in the full sense of the word’.

Sure, Jesus fits into this line, He is truly human.  But the reason He is here is not because of Joseph, or Abraham, or David, but because God loved us so much that He chose to put Him there!!!

AMEN