We tend to skip the genealogy at the start of Matthew—all those names, so many of them people we know nothing about. In doing so we miss something that matters deeply to ordinary people like us who wonder whether God actually works through lives like theirs.
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Apollo 8 was going to be in orbit over Christmas. Well, if you’re going to be the first Americans in orbit over Christmas, well, what are you going to do? Frank Borman, as he was preparing to go up, labored over what he could say. What could he read on Christmas Eve that would be appropriate for that? And something that he and James Lovell and William Anderson, the three men in that Apollo capsule, could read together to greet Earth from space, the first Christmas greeting from space.
They scheduled live television coverage so people could see the video coming from the capsule and hear the astronauts. I don’t know if this will ever happen again, but a billion people were watching one thing at the same time. And rather than trying to describe it too much, let’s just hear it.
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise. And for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light. There was good. And divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the late day. And the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament. And divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, let the waters of the heavens be gathered together into one place. And let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land earth. And the gathering together of the waters called east sea. And God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.”
I think about a billion people watching that. Why were so many people watching it? Well, it was Christmas Eve, but there are plenty of things you can listen to. You can hear people wish you a merry Christmas in all sorts of different ways every Christmas. Why a billion people? Because as we were just starting to explore space and we were in this race to the moon, all this technology was coming together at an incredible rate to do this. There was a vast wonder out there, and a vast wonder that we imagined lots of people were imagining we would all get to at some point. It wasn’t some distant thing, but something that was bringing humanity into the next frontier that we would enter into just as it had happened in the past.
And so it was so present. And now there was that Christmas celebration. It made it even feel more real that there was this connection. We need those sorts of connections. We need that connection with a promise, this promise of hope, the promise of in a world that had so much turmoil—you had the Vietnam War brewing, you had the Cold War in general just going about, and the fear of global annihilation from these ever-increasing bombs and all this stuff that was so awful. And this beautiful Christmas wish, as these three astronauts reflected on what God had done to make this amazing world and shared it with the world. We need to know that God’s promises have a connection to people like us. And I think in that brief moment, a billion people could feel a little bit of that—the wonder of exploration and the comfort of God’s care brought together.
Last week as we’ve been going, we’ve been journeying through the four Gospels in preparation for Christmas. We thought about how God works in history. We’re going to turn to the Gospel of Matthew tonight. And as we do, what we’re going to think about is how God works, not just through history, but specifically through humanity in history. Because there’s lots of things we can tell about history, right? People can talk about Genesis 1 itself, the creation of the world, pre-human. But God works through people like you and me. That’s what we see when we turn to Matthew 1, verse 1. Let’s take a look.
“A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
Let’s pray. Fathers, we reflect on what often is the part that we kind of confess we go through quickly, the genealogies. We struggle sometimes to find inspiration in those. But there’s a reason why you start with it here at the beginning of Matthew. As we reflect on it and these people that are a part of this story of redemption, Lord, would you help us to see how you continue to work through average people, that you care for people, just average people. You care for each person that you’ve made. The praise is in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
It might sound kind of weird to say it, but if you really want to boil down what that verse 1 is about, it’s about God’s promise being a promise for humanity. God could have saved the world in lots of ways. He could have wiped out the human race and said, okay, I’m going to either create something new or take something else that I’ve made, and that’s going to be the species that has dominion on this world. Those humans, they’re too messed up. I don’t want anything to do with them.
But he didn’t do that. What did he do? He promised and then delivered on that promise to work through humanity to bring about the fix, the deeply needed fix for a deeply broken world.
What we see here in Matthew, if you study the genealogies of Jesus, you already know there’s a lot of ink spent on these genealogies. And a big part of that is because there are two different genealogies and they’re not the same. Luke’s genealogy is different than Matthew’s genealogy. I want to say that up front because I have a feeling maybe some of you, that’s in the back of your head, like what do I do with these two genealogies?
Well, it would be nice if Matthew and Luke said, and this is why I’m presenting it this particular way, but they don’t. We have to wrestle with it. But one of the best understandings, I believe, of what Matthew is outlining here is he’s giving a legal genealogy.
Well, what would that mean? Well, we kind of at least faintly know this from movies about the British monarchy, because that’s the monarchy that we spend time as Americans thinking about, right? We still have an incredible fascination for it, it seems. And so there’s all those movies out there. I know I’ve, I can’t even remember their titles, but I’ve seen multiple ones over the years, and I don’t even watch that many movies that are about somehow some obscure person becoming the next king or queen because you have these genealogies being traced and you know that if something disastrous happens, well, there’s the 14th cousin on this side that is now the next in line to the throne, right?
There’s a plan of succession. In the United States, we have something similar where you can go through and see the order of succession if some disaster were to befall our capital. And there’s always the famous part where one cabinet member who’s in that order of succession won’t go to the State of the Union, so that if something happened to the capital building, there’d still be someone to run the country. So we kind of know these things.
And it would seem that that is the sort of genealogy that Matthew is working on here. What’s his interest? Showing the line from David to David, but then from David to Jesus that gives legal right to the throne. And notably in a legal succession, the concern is who inherits that line, not necessarily who is biologically descended. Now, to be clear, someone who is going to inherit the throne had to be a descendant of David. But, and again, you see this in the history of monarchy, sometimes one part of that, one branch of the family tree dies out, and then it swings over to whomever is next in line to the throne.
And so if you’re trying to understand why is Luke different than Matthew, and again, I don’t mean to get into the weeds at the beginning, but I don’t want us to kind of be focused too much on that as we go along beyond this. I think that’s why there’s a difference. Matthew’s point, as he’s writing to Jewish believers, is to say, I’m talking about the person who has the right to the throne. And so let’s trace whom it was at different points in time over history that could have been king had there been a king sitting on the throne at that time. And let me show you how that arrives at Jesus.
Now we say, but we’re not here a bunch of Jewish believers, followers of the Lord, who are anxiously awaiting an earthly king on the throne. So why do we dwell on this? Well, God didn’t put that in there so that it could become immediately irrelevant. He put it in there for a reason, and it comes back to his faithfulness, to his promise.
If you look at the way that Matthew divides up, he divides up these names. Some genealogy just run on. Matthew divides up into groups of 14, 14 names each time. Why does he do that? Well, because if you add up the letters in David’s name, and David’s, like many ancient alphabets, the letters had numerical value. If you add those up, the number’s 14.
And so as you’re reading all these names, what Matthew wants you to hear over and over is David, David, David, David. I’m talking about the line of David, and if you didn’t understand that, let me just say it again. I’m talking about David.
Why? Because God had made a promise to David. God was going to be faithful to that promise. And Matthew wanted to remind us that God’s faithfulness is a faithfulness to his people, to humanity over time. He doesn’t say, you insignificant human beings that always get everything wrong, that are always messing up, that are always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, you people who can’t do what I ask you to do even for an hour, I don’t really need to be faithful to you. God doesn’t, but he is. He’s faithful over time.
And so as we look at the genealogy, one of the amazing things about it is that we see over time God’s faithfulness again and again and again and again—from Abraham who messes up a bunch, right? When we actually know the stories of the people, we don’t know the stories of all of them in depth, but for the ones we do, we know they mess up a bunch.
But God’s faithful to Abraham. And in Abraham’s line, you get David, the king after God’s own heart, even though he was a sinner. And what do you know? Matthew actually chooses to stop here for a moment.
“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”
I want to say right up front, remember that whole murder and unfaithfulness, adultery thing that David had going? Let’s just put it right here in the genealogy of the person I’m trying to tell you about. But he’s still a hero. He’s still a hero.
And so it keeps going and going and going as he builds this case that God is faithful through these sets of 14. And we recognize the names. It’s sort of like we recognize, many of us at least, if you have any passing interest in American history or the space program, we recognize some of those early astronaut names, right? And you might have a favorite that you’ve read about or as the case may be.
Why? Because here were just this select few people that represented all of us in exploring the vast wonder out there. Well, let me throw out some names and see if you recognize them. Does anyone know Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Polk? Anyone recognize those names? It’s interesting. When I named off the Apollo 8 crew, I saw some nods of recognition that there were some of you that actually knew their names.
But five years later, Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Polk formed the Skylab 4 team that went up. I don’t see any recognition. Some of you might be saying, what’s Skylab? It was only the first American space station, right? I mean, it should have been a big deal. But by that point, something had changed. And you can make a case for all kinds of different things changing.
But I think part of it was when we think about those early astronauts, Neil Armstrong, for example, what do we think? We think of people who represented us and were the heroes of the day going out and doing something for us, accomplishing something. Sort of like if you were anticipating the Messiah, you’d think fondly back to David. And even though, yes, he was a sinful man, well, that gives you a bit of a connection with him, right? Yeah, because we’re sinful too. And on top of that, what? He actually led the people towards the Lord, towards the wonder of God’s promise. He was a man after God’s own heart who did what was good and pleasing to the Lord, and so there’s that connection.
But then we start to drift off when it feels like there isn’t a connection. And I think by the time Skylab 4 rolled around, something became clear. We weren’t getting any closer to average human beings spending time in space. We had those champions that went for us, but I don’t think people thought, well, and I’m going to go up to Skylab or I’m going to go on an Apollo mission or that, you know, I’m going to go to Mars or I’m going to go to Skylab or I’m going to go on an Apollo mission or that thing that was coming, that amazing, allegedly revolutionary technology of the space shuttle, I’m going to go up in this thing. You know, it was just special people going and doing something.
It’s kind of a shame that we don’t know Carr, Gibson, and Polk because they did something special in space. Well, even my computer has forgotten what they did special in space. They didn’t annihilate themselves into a flash of a supernova or something there. Had that worked, you would have seen the first ever space Christmas tree. Yeah, I’ll send it out. It’s a cute little tree. And so they found scraps around the space station and made a Christmas tree because they were the first space station crew to celebrate Christmas. And they set up a really neat tree out of the spare things around the station.
Did a billion people watch as they decorated the first space Christmas tree? No. Did a billion people care that they decorated this first space Christmas tree? No. Do a billion people alive today even know that they decorated the first space Christmas tree? I doubt it. Very strong. Because it wasn’t something that we could connect with.
And I think sometimes that’s what we run into when we’re reading these genealogies because as we’ve gotten further along, we look at our world, and it’s been a really long time since a descendant of David was on the throne on Earth, and we say, and what does it matter to me? Even if Jesus is in the line of David, why do I care? Okay, so God worked through David’s line, but what does that do for me? Even the story of salvation starts to feel this. It seems like it’s a story that involves heroes. Great people of old. David and Solomon. Maybe a Hezekiah. What does God have to do with me? Does he care about me? And if he even cares about me enough to save me, to actually use me for anything? Because it’s always about those select few that get sent off to space. What do I have to do with helping anyone encounter God’s wonder?
But God is clear. His vast wonder of salvation isn’t distant from us. It’s not a distant space station that we will never set foot on. It’s something very present. The greatest frontier, the frontier of God’s love, is a frontier that is right here with you and me, not just the special select few. It’s a history of humanity for people just like us. Because we have promises. They’re not just for heroes. They’re for average people.
Take a look at verse 16.
“And Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ.”
Well, in their day, they would have been viewed as incredibly average. People were not following Joseph and Mary around saying, I wonder when they will become great in the history of God’s plan for this world. No one was. Yet outside of their neighborhood, no one would have even known who they were.
Jump over to Luke just for a moment. Now Jesus, this is the beginning of Luke’s genealogy. Now Jesus himself was about 30 years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, son of Heli.
Now if we go to the end of Luke’s genealogy, he does it a little differently than Matthew. He says the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.
And in that little bit at the end when you get to the insignificant Joseph and Mary in Matthew’s genealogy, and then you go over to Luke’s and you see some of what he’s doing, we start to get the hint, this isn’t about highlighting heroes of the faith and celebrating them. It’s about so much more than that.
Now, as I mentioned, there’s controversy and people speculate a lot about whom it was, whose line it was that Luke was interested in. And there’s an old, old theory that whom Luke’s talking about is Mary’s line. Because he kind of hints that there’s a problem here that he’s already talked about because the beginning of chapter 2 gets right into it, chapter 1 does. Joseph isn’t Jesus’s father. Miracle that we celebrate on Christmas, right? We know that. And so he says, so it was supposed the father was Joseph. He was the stepfather, but he wasn’t Jesus’s father.
And so maybe Luke is following Mary’s line. It’s possible. It’s also possible that here what Luke is interested in, I’m not gonna solve this for us, but either way it gets to the same point. It’s quite possible what Luke was doing was following Jesus’s actual biological genealogy. That as Matthew is following the succession of the throne, Luke is simply interested in who is actually Jesus’s family? At least his adoptive family, since again Joseph isn’t Jesus’s father.
We can’t solve that. I can’t solve that for you today. They’ve been debating this for thousands of years. We’ll continue to debate it until we’re in Jesus’s presence and we can ask him. By the way, Jesus, tell us about these genealogies, if that’s something that we really want to know about.
But either way it comes across a really important point because both in Jesus’s adoptive father’s line and in Mary’s line we know this, they were not significant. And there are a lot of names in Luke’s genealogy in particular that we know absolutely nothing about. Their names will be anonymous. Their claim to fame, their only claim to fame as far as we’re concerned is the fact that they’re included in the genealogy. That’s a pretty special thing. We don’t even know what they did or where they lived or anything about them other than they were in the line of David. That’s all we know about them.
It’s not about being stars in other words. Luke says, Luke’s writing to a broader audience, a more Gentile audience. So if we go along with the idea that Matthew was interested in who was going to be king and who was continuing that promise of David, what Luke’s really interested in is just telling us, hey, Jesus is a human being.
And yes, this amazing spectacular thing, the inheritance of the throne, the promise to David is an amazing thing, but there are a lot of ordinary people who have no special claim in life who are part of this story. So it is as we look at this genealogy, we find the dark moments in the story. Judah and Tamar, David and Bathsheba. We find these places that things aren’t as they ought to have been. But God was faithful.
And it wasn’t because we knew every one of them. We see sinners and forgotten people. They’re all part of the same story. And in case we’re not getting it yet, Luke goes a step further and he says, by the way, let’s go back to, oh, I don’t know, how about Adam? We’ll go all the way back to the beginning. If you think that you’re not part of this story because you’re not in the genealogy at any level, well, let me solve that for you. If you’re here, you’re a descendant of Adam. So we’re talking about all of our family, right? Every single human being ever’s family. So it’s for all humans.
And it’s interesting if you’re thinking about, well, this genealogy that Luke gives, Matthew starts out with it. Okay, I get the point of that. But Luke doesn’t get to it until chapter three, and not even the beginning of chapter three. It’s at the end of chapter three. If you go looking for it, you probably will flip to the wrong spot at first unless you remembered where it is.
Why there? Well, the very next thing, beginning of chapter four, is the temptation of Jesus. I don’t think that’s a mistake. Because Luke says, let me place Jesus in the line for you. He’s a human being. And then let me tell you what Jesus did as a human being. He encountered Satan. Satan tempted him. And you know what? Jesus didn’t fall to the temptation. You know who did? Adam.
Finally, someone from the line of Adam didn’t. Romans 5:15 says, “But the gift is not like the trespass. If many died by the trespass of one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many?”
The key is that in the human line, God brings in the wonder and he brings it in using average everyday people, and he finally does the spectacular with the ordinary. He involves ordinary people in the story. And so the promised one, the one that was anticipated and grand and wonderful, isn’t just linked to those who are already grand and wonderful. He’s linked to the people that if he weren’t linked to them, we wouldn’t know at all.
And he faces our struggles. And he overcomes them. So that the others in his family, the others in the family of Adam, can actually encounter the wonder. It’s not distant off in space. It’s here and present and reachable and knowable for you and for me.
Genealogies aren’t just so that we can get bogged down in names. They’re there to remind us that as God comes into the world, incarnate in the flesh, that he doesn’t come in and create a new human that has no link to what has been, but rather comes into the very line that God has shown promises to, even when they’ve been unfaithful, even when they’re insignificant. And that he brings something that everybody can experience.
I think we lose hope when we see something beautiful and hopeful. Something like that beautiful message on Christmas Eve 1968 that then doesn’t turn into something we can touch and feel and know. We wonder if we can measure up.
Maybe it’s one of the memes you see going around of the beautiful Christmas decorations. I wish I had a picture of this. I was telling someone about this the other week. I wish I had a picture of it. A few years ago, right after Christmas, I was driving around and driving by a nearby apartment building and there was this ornately decorated apartment. I mean, they’d taken the outside of the apartment and everything about it was perfect. If you wanted, you could put it on a magazine cover. It was beautiful. Martha Stewart herself couldn’t have outdone it. It was absolutely beautiful how the lights were perfectly straight. There were just the right tasteful amount of them. It looked like Christmas. It felt like Christmas.
And then you looked across the parking lot at the neighbor that looked out onto this. And I think I know what went through that neighbor’s head. Wow, that’s beautiful. I’d like to do that, too. And so I imagine this person, he or she went to the store, gets the cart, and starts loading lights into the cart and garlands and decorations, drives home all excited, and goes out to the back deck and starts decorating.
And you look at that other apartment straight across the parking lot and the lights are falling down. Some of them are out. The garland had fallen off. There were too many lights in one spot and not enough in another. And I thought, that’s us. We see the beauty of the heroes of the faith and we kind of polish away the errors and sins they make. And so we see these beautiful actions where people are following the Lord and we struggle. We talked about Zechariah earlier. We struggle maybe to do what God’s calling us to do in a moment and we’re putting up the lights and knocking the bulbs out as we do and we’re creating this mess and it’s tangled and it doesn’t work right, it doesn’t turn on at the right time.
And we think, there’s no way I can ever get to that beautiful magazine cover. No way I can have an ultimate Christmas tree. And we start to wonder, well, okay. Just like some astronauts, there’s some astronauts, people that actually got to go up to space. But more than likely, none of us ever will. Maybe some people get to be used by God and get to experience the wonder of his salvation, see it, but maybe most of us never get off the ground. Maybe we never get to make the decorations look beautiful and our life never shines and brings blessing.
I’m taking the average people that we see in these genealogies, Mary and Joseph, and taking the names, especially that we see in the Gospel of Luke where we can’t even figure out anything about their history because we know nothing about them. They were too insignificant. We don’t—yeah, there’s a legal promise, but let’s talk about the reality that God also works through his care, through the normal, the people with the lights out, the people like you and me.
So when we talk about the wonder of Christmas, it isn’t just getting to witness something we will never experience, but something that you and you and you and I can all be a part of.
And you know, in truth about that apartment, it was not well done. But I’ve seen a lot of well done decorations. I’ve thought about a lot less than that one. But it was lit, and I knew the person who lit it really wanted to do something beautiful. And it’s God is using you as you’re praying, how can God use me right now? Here’s the thing that you need to hear: it might be a tangled mess, the path that your life’s on, and it might be that you can’t see exactly how God’s going to use it for anything beautiful. But someone’s going to see it, and even if they say, yeah, your life is a tangled mess, if Jesus is working in your life, it’s a tangled mess that has a beauty to it.
You never know that someone sees your tangled mess as you’re seeking the Lord, and God’s working in you. And that person says, okay, maybe I won’t ever be Martha Stewart either, but I’d sure like to try to decorate.
Jesus, decorate me. Because Jesus is the one that ultimately decorates us, and he’s got to straighten all those tangled wires out. Jesus isn’t going to leave us just listening to something distant that we can never actually get to. Jesus came to bridge the space between human promise and human reality, for you and for me.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for the goodness of your love. Lord, we fall short an awful lot of the time. It doesn’t take very long if we think we have everything together to be reminded that we don’t. And we know that we aren’t going to be those who get the picture-perfect decorations and everything looks absolutely stunning. But we know that you are the one who will ultimately decorate us. And that you’re inviting us to recognize, even as average, normal people, that you work through the stories of average, normal people.
And so as we encounter what your story of this miracle of Christmas is, it’s rooted in average people. We pray, Lord, that you’d help us to understand more how you’re using us and then to use us and to help us to trust in you that you are using us even when we can’t. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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