Christmas morning introduced a completely new narrative

We all know how evil is meant to be defeated. A hero rises up and overpowers the bad in favour of the good. The world is made safe by good tough guys.

It’s not a new story. It is a story that is re-enforced by our favourite fairy tales, Marvel movies and by politicians seeking our votes by claiming they alone have the power to defeat the enemy.

The first Christmas morning introduced a completely new narrative.

Evil wasn’t going to be defeated by a tough guy but by a baby born into poverty in the tiny rural town of Bethlehem.

For four hundred years people had been waiting for the tough guy. They knew what was needed to finally defeat the oppression. It is little wonder that many of them missed the importance of the little baby.

I have been struck as I have been preparing at a new series of messages on the book of Matthew at how revolutionary the book’s account of Christmas is, and yet how easily modern people miss the significance of what Matthew is saying.

It starts with a simple sentence, but a sentence that announces the new story and the revolution of Christmas in a way that is easily misunderstood.

The sentence is translated from the original Greek in my bible as:

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:

What the NIV misses is that the word it translates as “genealogy” is actually “genesis” and it is an almost identical expression to two other verses at the beginning of the Old Testament: Genesis 2:4 and 5:1.

From his very first words, Matthew is making it clear that the whole of creation is being renewed. As one commentator says:

Just as Genesis gave the story of one beginning — God’s creation and covenant relations with Israel — so the Gospel of Matthew gives the story of a new beginning — the arrival of Jesus the Messiah and the kingdom of God

Michael J. Wilkins – NIV Application Commentary

After starting with this revolutionary expression, Matthew then announces that Jesus is the Son of David and the Son of Abraham. Again modern readers would easily overlook the weight of this claim.

By claiming Jesus was the Son of David, Matthew is saying that Jesus is King. He would have been clearly alluding to passages from the Old Testament like 2 Samuel 7:12-16.

“When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me ; your throne will be established forever. ‘”

By claiming that Jesus was the son of Abraham, Matthew is saying that baby born in Bethlehem fulfilled the most precious promise in the Old Testament:

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”*

Genesis 12:1-3

Matthew then goes on to outline a family tree to back his claim, but it is no ordinary family tree.

For a start, Matthew lists women at a time when women were not taken seriously, and the women he chooses to highlight don’t in any way fit the normally accepted religious picture.

Tamar conceived a child out of marriage by convincing her brother in law she was a prostitute.

Rahab actually was a prostitute and a gentile.

Ruth was not only a gentile but a Moabite who according to Deuteronomy 23:3 should not be allowed anywhere near anything holy for at least ten generations.

Finally, Bathsheba was the woman who had an affair with King David, and whose husband was murdered in order to facilitate her illicit relationship after she discovered she was pregnant and her husband was too loyal to the King to have sex with her while there was still a war raging.

It is tempting to skip over bits of the bible like the genealogies in the first chapter of Matthew, but if you did you would miss an important foretaste of the radically new story that Matthew is telling. This is not the story of the strong man, but the story of grace in which ordinary broken people now find a place.

There is one other aspect of the family tree that might not be immediately obvious for a modern reader. Matthew does his best to point it out in verse 17:

Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.

Matthew actually leaves out names in the family tree (which was a normal thing in genealogies from this period) so that each of the three phases has fourteen generations.

The number fourteen seems important to him and would have been important for his Jewish readers for two reasons:

Commentator Craig Bloomberg points out that:

“Jesus’ genealogy selects just enough ancestors (“begat” can mean “was the ancestor of”) to create three series of fourteen names, probably employing gematria (the numerical value of the sum of the Hebrew consonants of a given word) on the name  (“David”), which equaled fourteen.”

Commentary on the New Testament use of the Old Testament

Another commentator, Leon Morris, also points out that:

“The number, ‘fourteen’, is not accidental. It corresponds to the number of high priests from Aaron to the establishment of Solomon’s Temple; the number of high priests from the establishment of the Temple until Jaddua, the last high priest mentioned in Scripture. It is clear that a mystic significance attached to this number, in both the Sadducean and the Pharisaic traditions.”

Pillar New Testament Commentary

So by choosing the number fourteen, Matthew is claiming that Jesus is both a priest and a king, someone who would stand in the gap between God and Man, and someone who would rule in a new kind of Kingdom that is not based on strong men but on grace.

The Baby Born in Bethlehem launched a revolution that is still counter-cultural 2000 years later.

I love that Christmas is a gentle reminder each year that the human longings for joy, peace, love and hope will not be delivered by a strong man but by a baby who shows up into the mess of real life and demonstrates a fundamentally different answer to the problem of evil than the tough guy we might think we need.

I love that for those who take the time, the Bible is a startling and revolutionary document that points us towards new ways of seeing the world.