I first began to read the Bible as a doubting, skeptical teenager determined to show my Evangelical friends what fools they were. I knew enough about the Bible to know that the New Testament was where the talk about Jesus began, but didn’t know enough to know that I didn’t need to start at the beginning. So I started at the beginning of the New Testament, which is, of course, Matthew 1:1. The first passage of Scripture I ever read was 17 verses of names I couldn’t read. What a snooze-fest. Stereotype confirmed.
But I was also brought up to read thoroughly and closely so I didn’t dismiss it, but I could not derive any meaning from it. It took me decades of Christianity to come up with any reason why the writers of the Gospel would waste such precious parchment space on this. It wasn’t until I took a class on Matthew in seminary that I realized that if you look at who those names are, you see that each one of them has a story, and those stories aren’t always so pretty, the most striking example to me being “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah…” (1:6). The writer goes out of their way to remind us that David raped another man’s wife and then killed the man, and that’s part of Jesus’ history.
Except that it’s also not part of Jesus’ history, which leads to another reason these verses are so important that they are included in and even open the Gospel: They are not part of Jesus’ history because Jesus does not fall into the messianic bloodline. According to the story, Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, but Joseph is the one from the “line of David”, not Mary. If we are trying to establish that Jesus is the Messiah (which Matthew is), we have a very serious problem from the very beginning. Jesus doesn’t meet the qualifications.
But I suppose, then, one could make an argument that neither does David. Because you see, David’s great-grandmother Ruth was a gentile. That doesn’t quite work either. In fact, the genealogy is fraught with problematic stuff. But yet it gets to “Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born.” If Matthew wants to convince people that Jesus is the Messiah, why does he not only open with this but even point out the problems?
Perhaps it’s this: The story all along has been flawed. It’s imperfect. The need by much of traditional Christianity to make Jesus and the circumstances around his “messiahship” perfect actually hurt the story. For all its “ugly”, one of the places where I find beauty in the Biblical narrative is in its humanity. Things don’t always work out. Just like life. God comes to us in the flesh and it’s messy and confusing, and though the prophecies are “fulfilled” they are not fulfilled so perfectly that it’s the end (nor the beginning) of their fulfillment. The idea that God is with us is an idea that has existed and will continue to exist throughout human history and humanity’s future.
Matthew opens up the Gospel exposing just how messy all of it has been all along so that we can enter into the mess more fully rather than try to resist it and clean it up. This is a theme that we will see throughout the Gospel: Who belongs, who counts, who matters is one big beautiful mess. There are not clean lines, praise God. Matthew opens the Gospel with a mess and it is that mess that Jesus will step into, and even expand, throughout the Gospel. The Kingdom of God is at hand. And it’s messy.
Moving Through Matthew 