If you had the job of writing up the story of the life of Jesus, one of the decisions you would make would be what to do with the opening paragraph. You know how important the opening is. You want something to grab people’s attention and pull them into reading the whole thing.
What would you say? You might say this is the greatest story ever told. You might say this is a story that can change your life, connect you with God’s blessings, show you how to live the best life possible. You want them to see right away that there is something for them, right?
Let’s look how the Gospel of Matthew opens. Could somebody look it up? And this is not just the opening of Matthew’s Gospel. The early church put Matthew’s gospel at the beginning of the New Testament, so it is the opening of the whole New Testament, too.
It says: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,”
Do you want to go on and read the whole thing? I didn’t think so. It doesn’t really grab the interest of most people.
We’ve been working through Luke’s gospel and Luke includes a genealogy of Jesus, too. He doesn’t open with it. He waits until chapter 3, but while Matthew goes back to Abraham, Luke goes much farther back. I believe that if the Holy Spirit guided the early church to include Jesus’ genealogy in the Bible, there must be a reason for it. So that’s what we’ll look at today.
I’ve preached this text once before, back in 1988. And when I mentioned to Kathy what I was thinking about, she said, “Don’t you dare.” And our 9-year-old son said, “Can I go to the nursery that day?”
Our culture often doesn’t think much of family histories. We live in the present, the here and now. But we lose something in that. We lose a sense of what God is doing in the big sweep of the history of salvation. We lose a sense of who we are.
One of my friends is the son of a specialist who studies the history of Christian missions. He once told me of one culture that was just not interested in the story of Jesus, until the missionary told them that the Bible listed Jesus’ genealogy. And that’s what they wanted to hear. It was the most important part for them. Once they heard his family history, they were ready to hear the rest. In their culture you just couldn’t understand someone until you knew their family background. There is a lot of wisdom in that. Luke’s presentation of Jesus’ family history tells us some important things about Jesus.
Our text for this morning is Luke 3:23-37. You can find it on page 60 of the New Testament section of your pew Bible. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.
“Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli, 24 son of Matthat, son of Levi, son of Melchi, son of Jannai, son of Joseph, 25 son of Mattathias, son of Amos, son of Nahum, son of Esli, son of Naggai, 26 son of Maath, son of Mattathias, son of Semein, son of Josech, son of Joda, 27 son of Joanan, son of Rhesa, son of Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, son of Neri, 28 son of Melchi, son of Addi, son of Cosam, son of Elmadam, son of Er, 29 son of Joshua, son of Eliezer, son of Jorim, son of Matthat, son of Levi, 30 son of Simeon, son of Judah, son of Joseph, son of Jonam, son of Eliakim, 31 son of Melea, son of Menna, son of Mattatha, son of Nathan, son of David, 32 son of Jesse, son of Obed, son of Boaz, son of Sala, son of Nahshon, 33 son of Amminadab, son of Admin, son of Arni, son of Hezron, son of Perez, son of Judah, 34 son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, son of Terah, son of Nahor, 35 son of Serug, son of Reu, son of Peleg, son of Eber, son of Shelah, 36 son of Cainan, son of Arphaxad, son of Shem, son of Noah, son of Lamech, 37 son of Methuselah, son of Enoch, son of Jared, son of Mahalaleel, son of Cainan, 38 son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.”
So, does that excite you? What in the world is that all written down for? Paper was really expensive in New Testament times. Each sheet was hand made. Every copy was made by hand. Why bother with this?
There are two main things for us to see from Jesus’ family history. First, he was a real person, from a family not that different from ours. Luke traces the genealogy all the way back to Adam. And some people have used these genealogies to calculate the exact year when Adam was born, or created. Bishop Usher said it was 4004 B.C. But that isn’t its purpose. It isn’t a complete genealogy. When you compare this genealogy with others in the Old Testament it is obvious that some generations were left out, and there are reasons to questions whether Adam was an historical figure at all, or rather someone who represents all humans in the explanation of how we fell from grace.
But Jesus came from a real family. And Luke is clear that Jesus was not the biological son of Joseph. But he still was the legal son of Joseph. Jesus was the Son of God and people only thought he was Joseph’s son. So theologians debate where this is really Joseph’s line, to which Jesus belonged legally, but not biologically, or Mary’s line, to which Jesus belonged both legally and biologically. But I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.
But Jesus was a real person. And when Matthew only traces his ancestry back to Abraham it suggests that Jesus only came for the Jews. But when Luke goes back to Adam it suggests that Jesus came for all races on earth. He connects with them all. Do you know which race God loves the most? The human race. He’s plenty big enough to look beyond the differences in culture and biology that sometimes can look so big to us, if we let them. But they mean nothing to God.
I grew up in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago, in a fairly rural subdivision, with a lot of open space nearby, but not on a farm either. As I grew up I absorbed the attitudes of people around me towards people who lived ‘downstate,’ assuming that they were all farmers, not too bright, and definitely backward. We were ‘better’ than them.
Then I started studying my own family history and learned about a whole lot of farmers in my family history, and I thought about my grandfather, who had to drop out of school at 8th grade to work in the fields to help support his family, and the amazing things he still accomplished, even with so little education. I realized how foolish I was to despise people who were often so resourceful and hard working. Learning my family history taught me something about myself, something that I needed to let go of. I needed to let myself identify with people who were different from me.
Jesus came from a real family, with real problems. The line had barely started when Cain killed Abel. Did that ruin God’s plan? No, he just continued with plan B, another son, named Seth. Probably we all have some tragedies or scandals in our families, skeletons in the closet.
Do you want to know the reason that my grandfather had to drop out of school at 8th grade to go to work? It was because his father was an alcoholic, who would just disappear and abandon his family for long periods. And he really left them in a hole. My parents never talk about that, but I learned it through an uncle. And when my grandfather started a family it was really ragged for a while, as he had to jump from one menial job to another, taking the jobs nobody else wanted, a hired hand on a small farm, feeding heavy bricks into a kiln for baking. He was always scrambling to put food on the table for his family. It all left some scars on him. The stress got to him sometimes. And they never had nice clothes or much money, but they did everything they could to give their 7 kids a better start. Many of them went to college. They all became respectable, productive citizens. But it took a full generation to undo the damage of my great grandfather. And some scars still remain. But can God undo the damage in your family today? Yes he can. Have hope. Advent is the season for hope.
They say that any family tree produces some lemons, some nuts and some bad apples. Are there skeletons in the closet in Jesus’ family history?
Jacob, who is mentioned in verse 34, was a cheat and a liar for years. You can read his story in Genesis. But God reformed him in the end and used him as an important part of salvation history.
Judah is in verse 33. He had a very embarrassing incident with a prostitute. Could God still work through him? Yes, he’s part of the line from which Jesus was born.
And Boaz is in verse 32. He married a Moabite woman, named Ruth. And good Jews just weren’t supposed to marry Moabites. They were the wrong race. They were the wrong religion. But even though Ruth didn’t grow up going to Sunday School and she had to learn all the stories of the Bible as an adult, she came to love the God of Israel and her story took it’s place with all the other stories as somebody wrote it down and the Book of Ruth became part of the Old Testament. Could God work through someone of a different race? Yes
David goes down as the greatest king of Israel, but there was a time, before he became king, when King Saul was chasing him and he gathered a band of stragglers and misfits around him who supported themselves sometimes by plundering Philistine villages. That was nasty. And he committed one of the biggest scandals of the Old Testament when he had an affair with Bathsheba and had her husband killed to cover it up. Could God still work through David?
God can work through families that don’t have everything together? Yes, he can. All these people paid a price for their sins. But God’s work went on in spite of them. He can work in families like ours. Don’t give up hope. Keep praying, keeping patiently instructing. Who knows what God can do?
But there is another reason, a bigger reason, for including Jesus’ family history here. It shows that what God was doing in Jesus was a fulfillment of promises he had made throughout the Old Testament. It shows God’s faithfulness.
God had promised Abraham that he would become the father of a great nation and that through him all families of the earth would be blessed. And it took a long time for Abraham to have even one child of his own and it took centuries before his descendants really had a land of their own. But Abraham trusted in God’s promise and Jesus was born, a descendant of Abraham, and every nation on earth has been blessed by people who have met him as their Lord and Savior. God was faithful to his promise to Abraham. Jesus was a son of Abraham.
David was far from perfect, but he did have a sincere and zealous love for God and God promised him that his descendants would rule Israel forever if they continued to obey. Well, after some generations they became profoundly disobedient. But one of the main themes of the gospels is that Jesus was a descendant of David. When Emperor Augustus ordered everyone to go to their ancestral home, where did Joseph go? He went to Bethlehem, the city of David. When the crowds welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, they called him “Son of David.” In Jesus God’s promise of a king who will rule forever was fulfilled. God was faithful to his promise to David.
And none of the Old Testament prophets are listed in Jesus’ ancestry, but again and again they repeated and filled in God’s promise that he would come for his people again some day and bless them. God gave them all sorts of little hints. When the Messiah comes he will be born in Bethlehem. Someone will prepare the way for his ministry by turning the people to repent of their sins. He’ll enter Jerusalem triumphantly, riding on a colt. But he’ll be despised and rejected, too. And the list of ancestors of Jesus who lived in the period of the prophets are a bunch of nobodies as far as we can tell, poor schmucks who worked themselves to exhaustion trying to keep food on their table for their children and prayed for their nation and their children and saw very little come of it. But I suspect their hearts were encouraged by the words of the prophets. And even if they didn’t realize it at the time, they became links in the line of God’s blessing. They were ancestors of the Son of God. God was working much bigger things through their lives than they realized.
I hope that the genealogy of Jesus will help us see God’s faithfulness in a new light, not asking whether he will be faithful to give me some petty thing I want in the next ten minutes, but to celebrate that he is faithful in the most important things and we can see it in the sweep of history. He really has worked through families like ours. AMEN
