Hebrews 11:9-10, 32-40; Matthew 1:1-25
Christ is born
to fulfill the ancient promises to Abraham, who “looked forward to the city
which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” The many generations of preparation for the
Savior’s birth did not occur through the unbroken progress of any earthly city,
kingdom, or culture, but through a history characterized by corruption, idolatry,
slavery, and exile. The prophet Samuel
was the last of the judges of Israel over a thousand years before Christ was
born. When his sons ruled unjustly, the
people asked for a king so that they could be like the other nations. God told Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you;
for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not
reign over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7)
We do not have
to know much about the Old Testament to know that wanting to be like the other nations is the exact opposite of what God intended for His people. Their kings abused their authority like the
rich and powerful of any period with David, the greatest of them, infamously taking
Bathsheeba, the wife of his soldier Uriah, and then having him killed. Far from shying away from recalling these
horrific events, Matthew highlights them, for he writes in the genealogy that
“David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” When he wanted to build
a Temple for the Lord, God told David, “You shall not build a house for My name, because you have been a man of war and have
shed blood.” (1 Chron. 28:3) Doing so surely went with the territory of being a
powerful ruler, but wallowing in the blood of those who bear God’s image is a
paradigmatic sign of the slavery to the fear of death that sin has brought to
the world. It inevitably threatens grave
damage to the soul.
Even David’s son
the wise Solomon, who did build the Temple, later fell into the worship of
false gods. Because of Israel’s ongoing
unfaithfulness, the kingdom divided into two, with both eventually going into
exile after being defeated at the hands of their enemies. Those who returned
from Babylon were then dispersed yet again by the Romans. Those who distort biblical faith today in the
service of earthly kingdoms and political ideologies inevitably fall into the
idolatry of worshiping their own lust for power and demonizing their earthly
opponents. In contrast, we must follow
the example of Abraham, who “looked forward to the city which has foundations,
whose builder and maker is God.” “For here we have no continuing city, but we
seek one to come.” (Heb. 13:14) No nation or piece of land must ever become an idol
for us or an excuse not to love our neighbors as ourselves.
The shock of
exile for the Hebrews was so important that Matthew describes the Lord’s
genealogy accordingly: “So all the
generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to
the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to
Babylon to the Christ were fourteen generations.” The prophet Daniel and the three holy youths Ananias,
Azarias and Misael all went into captivity in Babylon, where they refused to
worship other gods and were miraculously delivered from death, respectively, in
the lions’ den and the fiery furnace. Christ,
before His Incarnation, was with the youths in the flames. Being unconsumed by the fire, they also provided
an image of the Theotokos, who contained the Son of God within her womb without
being consumed by the divine glory.
It was not by seeking
earthly glory or self-interest that these and other prophets foreshadowed and foretold
the coming of Christ. Far from making
political calculations or seeking vengeance against anyone, they simply refused
to abandon hope in God and to worship idols, even when their refusal seemed
certain to lead to their deaths. Consequently,
they are among those who “suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and
imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with
the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted,
ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and
mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”
These holy people did so because they lived in expectation, not merely of
more tolerable earthly circumstances for themselves, but of the fulfillment of
a promise that would not come in their lifetimes and transcended all conventional
boundaries, “since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us
they should not be made perfect.”
Though no one
forces us to choose today between idolatry and faithfulness, we so often freely
worship idols when we ground the meaning and purpose of our lives in some vision
of cultural success or personal fulfillment that serves only to inflame our
passions and blind us to the humanity of our neighbors. Even without being forced into exile, we have
become accustomed to hoping for nothing more than a somewhat better life in
Babylon, however we may define that. We
face the same temptations that our Lord’s ancestors did, and we regularly fall
into some version of the sins they committed. On the one hand, it is reassuring
to know that the Savior’s genealogy included people whose lives were far from
perfect. In addition to recalling
David’s grave sins, Matthew lists Judah, who fathered children with his
daughter-in-law Tamar. He also mentions Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute, and Ruth,
a Gentile. The presence of these
particular women in the genealogy foreshadows the scandalous, but also
perfectly innocent, conception of the Lord by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin
Mary. By including their names among the
ancestors of Christ, Matthew reminds us that He is born to bring healing to all
the broken, scandalous people of the world, not only to those who appear respectable according to any set of
conventional expectations. No one is
excluded from the possibility of sharing in His salvation.
The checkered past of the Savior’s family tree
should also remind us of how easy it is to entrust ourselves to false hopes
that extend no further than the grave. When
the Son of God became a human person, He did not do so with all the trappings
of the false hopes we typically embrace.
He was not born into a family of great wealth, power, or fame. There was certainly no sin involved in the
virginal conception of our Lord, but the circumstances were hardly
conventional. Joseph, the older man to
whom the Theotokos was betrothed as her guardian, would have divorced her
quietly, had not an angel told him the truth about the situation in a
dream. Living under the military
occupation of the Roman Empire, they had to go to Bethlehem for a census at the
time of His birth, where He came into the world in the lowly circumstance of
being born in a cave used for a barn with an animal's feeding trough as His
crib.
Despite the temptation throughout Christ’s
ministry to overthrow the Romans by force and set up an earthly reign as a new
King David, He refused to be distracted from His vocation to conquer death
itself, which required that He submit to execution on a Roman cross and wear a
crown of thorns, being mocked as the king of the Jews. Though the false hopes of His disciples had
been crushed and He appeared to fail by all conventional standards, the Savior
rose in victory on the third day. His
disciples then learned to hope anew for the fulfillment of God’s promises in
ways that required a complete change of mind and heart, for they took up their
crosses as they learned to serve a kingdom not of this world. Along with countless generations of martyrs
and confessors, they repudiated the idolatry of serving themselves or any
earthly agenda as they came to hope only in the Lord.
Our
responsibility is even greater than that of those who came before us, for we
have received the fullness of the promise.
Time and again, however, we live as though the promise had not been
fulfilled, as though a Savior had not been born. Sometimes we even distort Christ into an
inspiration for responding in kind to our enemies with the conventional means
of this world, as though King David had fulfilled, rather than dimly foreshadowed,
the fullness of the promise. We must
remember that our Savior rejected the temptation to use religion as a means to
the end of gaining power, praise, or success in this world. We must focus on welcoming Him into our lives
in humble obedience as did the Theotokos, not on trying to dominate others, for
doing so will only fuel our passions and distract us from entrusting ourselves to
our Lord and His kingdom.
As we prepare for Christmas, let us embrace
the scandalous calling to hope in nothing and no one other than the God-Man Who
is born to heal and fulfill all who bear the divine image and likeness. His human lineage shows that He came for
people as conflicted, confused, and compromised as we are. They wanted to be like the other nations and endured
exile in foreign lands as a result. We wander as aliens from the everlasting
joy of His Kingdom whenever we put serving ourselves or any worldly kingdom or goal
before obedience to Him. We exile
ourselves from His blessed reign whenever we view or treat anyone as anything less
than His living icon or as a foreigner or stranger from His love. Like Daniel and the three holy youths, it is
time for us to refuse to worship false gods and to trust that the Savior is
with us and with all who endure the lions’ dens and fiery furnaces of life in a
world still enslaved to the fear of death.
Having been prepared by prayer, fasting, generosity, confession, and
repentance, let us receive the God-Man born for our salvation at Christmas, for
He alone is our hope and the hope of the entire world.
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