The Dysfunctional Family of Jesus

Matthew 1:1-17; Psalm 132:7-14

The Lord has chosen Mount Zion, the mountain of the Temple, desiring Jerusalem for a habitation. Here I will dwell, for I delight in Mount Zion and its people.

My first job after law school was with the Washington office of a large New York Wall Street law firm, which doesn’t exist any more. It was a firm tradition that all the new people had to go to New York for a big formal dinner which was something of a hazing ritual – they stopped this tradition a couple years later, after some embarrassing news articles, and within a decade the firm had gone bankrupt, but that’s a story for another day.

Well, in preparation for this dinner we had to fill out a questionnaire – with the assumption that anything we said can and would be used against us during the dinner.  And one of the questions was, “Who is your most famous relative?” This had me anxious, because I was very conscious of the fact that there were no lawyers in my family. My parents both worked in factories, I was the first in the family even to go to college, and I already felt a bit out of place at this Wall Street law firm without having to talk about it.

After thinking and worrying for a long time, I had an idea – I answered the question by writing: None of my relatives were famous; all of ‘our lives were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’” That’s a quote from Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century political theorist, describing what life would be like without civilization or government. Well, the dinner committee thought that was funny, and so they read my answer in front of all 200 or so people at the formal dinner and – for my hazing – asked me to tell them all a joke.  Humor can get you out of a lot of awkward situations.

The family history of Jesus has its awkward situations, too. As was typical of the day, his lineage is described from one generation to the next only by naming the father, with five exceptions where the mother is also indicated. And in every single case, the naming of the mother highlights a problem in the family story.

In verse 3 there is Tamar, the mother of Judah’s son Perez, and her story is a very R-rated story that isn’t suitable for Sunday morning but you can read it in Genesis 38. Then in verse 5 there is Rahab, who according to the book of Joshua had practiced the world’s oldest profession in Jericho, before she was spared because she had protected the Israelite spies. She becomes part of the ancestry of Jesus.

Also in verse 5 there is Ruth, whose story we read in detail last summer, a foreign woman whom the Law said no Israelite man should marry, yet she becomes the great-grandmother of King David. And, in another story we read last year, in verse 6 there is Bathsheba, whom Matthew doesn’t name but simply calls the “wife of Uriah.” You’ll remember that Uriah was the guy David had killed to cover up his affair. And last, in verse 16, there is Mary, whose unexplained pregnancy before her marriage to Joseph was more or less par for the course in this family tree.

Every family has its stories.  Every family has its skeletons, its awkward situations, stories that people avoid bringing up. Even the family of Jesus, as it turns out. Matthew didn’t have to mention these five women in his genealogy of Jesus – he could have just said “David was the father of Solomon” and nobody would have stopped to remember that Solomon’s mother was the wife of another man. But Matthew wants us to remember. He is not afraid to remind of us of the scandalous parts of the story of Jesus’s family. So when Jesus is called the “son of David,” Matthew wants to remind us that David is not necessarily the greatest role model.

Now why does Matthew do this? For several reasons, I think. Let me just throw out three.

One is that Matthew wants to highlight for us that Jesus is really and truly human.  He is born into a human family that like all families has their secrets and their scandals.  It’s of a piece with the rest of the Christmas story, the stable and the manger and the no room at the inn from Luke’s gospel. Jesus is not born into a ideal middle-class home with a white picket fence where everything looks perfect, at least from the outside. Jesus is born on the margins of acceptable society, into a problematic family with a problematic story. The epiphany of God does not arrive when we put on a good face for the neighbors, when we try to make people think we’re the fairy tale version of ourselves. No, God comes to be with us, the actual real people that we are, with our flaws and our failings. Pretending that we have it together better than we do is not going to get God to come closer to us – it’s going to take us farther away from God.

A second reason is found right in the first verse of the reading today: This is the story of the origin of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. God made a promise to Abraham, that he would be the father of a whole people who would be God’s own, living in the land that God would give them, and that all the world would be blessed in Abraham’s descendants. God made a promise to David, that David’s direct offspring would be king over Israel forever. And then came the exile in Babylon, where Israel was thrown out of the land that God had promised, where the descendent of David was kicked off the throne, and it seemed that all of God’s promises had come to nothing.

But Matthew divides the ancestry of Jesus into three roughly equal parts – from Abraham to David, from David to the Exile, and from the Exile to the Messiah. Because -- and this is something we'll see in weeks to come as we read through Matthew's gospel – Matthew very much wants us to see Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises. We may think that God’s promises were for a long time ago, but God finds a way to keep those promises even when we had long since thought they were over. The birth and the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus are, for Matthew, part of the story of Israel, part of the story of the God who makes promises and keeps them.  Even when we don’t keep our end of the bargain, God finds a way to make things right.

And I’ll just name one more reason Matthew begins the gospel with the story of the dysfunctional family of Jesus. God does not keep a respectful distance between the purity of divinity and the messiness of humanity. Jesus did not come primarily to give us information about God or instructions about how to get to heaven. Jesus was born so that God could be with us, fully, 100 percent, so that we could fully be with God. In Jesus all of our most real human experiences are being drawn into the life that God desires for us all. Women like Rahab and Ruth, outsiders who had more faith than the supposed insiders. They are the family of Jesus. Women like Tamar and Bathsheba, mistreated and betrayed by the men who fathered their children, they are the family of Jesus. In Jesus outsiders like the wise men and the shepherds are called into the family of God, and at this epiphany they fall to their knees in worship. In Jesus his parents fleeing into Egypt from a murderous king are drawn into the peace and the life that God promises.

You and I are being called into the family of Jesus, and it doesn’t matter whether our ancestors are famous or not, whether our family trees are straight or crooked, whether we have so far responded faithfully or not. May this Christmas be another moment of epiphany for us, as we see how amazing is the God who wants to come close to people like us.