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, exile, and
bitter disappointment. 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) As
we read in the Psalms, “Do not put your trust in princes…in whom there
is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; In that very
day his plans perish.” (Ps. 146:3-4)
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 was part of being a powerful ruler, but
wallowing in the blood of those who bear God’s image remains 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, which is a reminder that our salvation does not come
through the rule of any earthly kingdom or nation.
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 some arrangement of earthly power inevitably fall into the idolatry
of placing their hope in the false gods of this world and demonizing those who
stand in their way. If we are truly
entrusting ourselves to Christ, then we must follow the example of Abraham, who
“looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is
God.” “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” (Heb.
13:14) No nation, agenda, or geographical area should ever become an idol for
us or an excuse not to obey the Lord’s teaching to love our neighbors as
ourselves.
The shock of bitter
exile for the Hebrews was so profound 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 power that these and other prophets foreshadowed and foretold
the coming of Christ. They entrusted
themselves to God, regardless of whether things seemed to be going well or
poorly for them according to conventional standards. Far
from making political calculations or seeking vengeance against anyone, they 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.”
They remained faithful because they lived in expectation, not merely of a
certain course of events for themselves and their nation, 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.”
No one forces us
to choose today between idolatry and faithfulness, but we so often freely worship
false gods 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 those who seem to stand in our way. Even without being taken away into exile, we typically
hope 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. 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 as we know
it, not only to those who appear respectable or who are members of this or that
favored group.
When the Son of
God became a human person, He did not do so by being 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 brutal 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
animals’ 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. Like those who had foretold the coming of the
Messiah, they repudiated the idolatry of serving themselves or any earthly
agenda as they came to hope only in the Lord.
As we prepare for Christmas, let us embrace
the 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 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 who is excluded 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.
