Christmas through female lenses (2)

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham… 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 1:1-17

Last time we focussed on the genealogy of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 1. I pointed out that this list of names includes four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and “Uriah’s wife”, who of course we know as Bathsheba. Each had a particular role in the story of the coming of Israel’s Messiah, and so they are part of the introduction to the Christmas narrative. I pointed out some lessons this suggests to us, but didn’t have time for other, broader things that we can glean. I want to highlight these now…

First, it is striking that these women’s names are there at all.

Luke has a similar list in Luke 3. It contains some twenty more names than Matthew’s – yet not one is female. This makes it clear that Matthew didn’t have to include the four; it was an unusual thing to do – an unusual leading of the Holy Spirit.

The options open to women in biblical times were, of course, extremely limited; for most, not much more than marriage and motherhood. Three of Matthew’s four – Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba – do indeed fit that pattern. But Matthew obviously recognises that women can have other significance as well, and he wants to draw attention to this.

At a time when we have learned the horrible, barbaric news from Afghanistan that women and girls have been banned from education, it makes you stop and think.

Do some of us need to face up to the fact that even in our modern churches we have failed to value and make use of women as we should? True, even in Jesus’ time women’s roles were very limited, but they do also figure in various significant ways – not least, in being the first witnesses of the resurrection, before any of the all-male twelve. (It’s quite instructive, too, to take a look at Paul’s list of names in Romans 16 – people who clearly played an important part in church life - and count up the number of female names; it comes to over a third.)

Second, it is striking that at least two of the four women, possibly all four, were gentiles, not Israelites.

Jesus, of course, was the “King of the Jews”. He came to minister “first to the Jew, than to the Gentile” (Romans 1:16). In his own words, he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24).

The turn of the gentiles would come, of course, but that would be after Pentecost. Yet here in these references back to the Old Testament there is a clear fore-shadowing of the welcome of the gentiles: how much more welcome could anyone be made than by being included in Jesus’ very family tree!

The Book of Acts makes it clear that for many of the first followers of Jesus (all of them Jews) the coming of gentiles into the kingdom of God was a bit of a shock, and not an entirely welcome one. (You can follow the controversy through in Acts 10-11 and 15, plus Galatians 2.) This reminds us that even today, when we feel comfortable and secure in what we think of as “our” church, we can be blinkered and prejudiced when newcomers who seem “different” in various ways come to join us.

A healthy church will encompass people of various races, colours and backgrounds. Thank God that the days of the white, western (and predominantly middle-class) church are passing; but is there still a way for some of us to go?

Third, it is striking that the four women came from varying parts of the social spectrum.

They certainly weren’t queens or princesses! True, Bathsheba may have “married well”, by becoming the wife of a leading soldier in David’s army. But Tamar? We have no way of knowing. Rahab? Well, whether she was a prostitute or, as some people would prefer to think, simply an inn-keeper, she certainly didn’t belong to high society. And as for Ruth, she was a widow and a migrant, a “foreigner”, travelling by faith to an unknown country, and in effect reduced to begging when she got there.

Jesus, the King of Kings, came from pretty humble stock!

And this is only confirmed by the one woman in Matthew’s list I haven’t mentioned: “Mary… the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah”.

In social terms Mary was pretty much a nobody. Once Gabriel had delivered to her – probably still a teenage girl – the staggering news that she was to give birth to a child, all she can say is the beautiful, humble statement of faith: “I am the Lord’s servant… May your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38).

As Paul puts it, addressing the Christians of Corinth: “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things…” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28).

Our sheer ordinariness is something to glory in! And isn’t this truth right there in the genealogy of Matthew 1? Thanks be to God!

Thank you, Father, for the distinction between male and female, Jew and gentile, weak and strong. Thank you still more that such distinctions are broken down in Christ, and that each person has a vital role to play in the outworking of your purposes. May this rich variety be reflected in the life of the church to which I belong. Amen.

 

Credit where it’s due… these last two blogs were triggered by a book called Jesus through middle eastern eyes by a scholar called Kenneth E Bailey. An ordained minister, Bailey spent some 40 years living and teaching in the middle east. He was proficient in the original languages of the Bible - Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek – as well as Arabic. The book sets Jesus fairly and squarely in the context of his natural human habitat, and is both enlightening and challenging. It starts with the birth stories of Matthew and Luke, and does a fascinating job of stripping the modern, sentimental narrative of Christmas of all the bits that have been added on over the centuries. (Be prepared for a rude awakening over parts which it has never occurred to you to question but which have nothing to do with the Bible!) If you’re particularly adventurous you might also be interested in a companion book called Paul through Mediterranean eyes.