Matthew 1: God With Us in Covenant and Crisis

On January 2, 2023, Quentin Colon Roosevelt became one of the youngest ever people elected to office in Washington, D.C. at 18 years old. His office? Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Single-Member District 3D03. You can be forgiven if you have not heard of Mr. Colon Roosevelt or his elected office and if you do not particularly care about his youth in relation to that office. But it might intrigue you to know that Colon Roosevelt is the great-great-great grandson of Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. At least this incredibly specific piece of information will be helpful if it is ever a question at your local bar’s trivia night! For Colon Roosevelt, being related to the 26^th president of the United States was a helpful talking point in his campaign to capture his office. (He ran unopposed).

Many of us relate to our ancestry in precisely this way—as a bit of trivia, vaguely interesting to those who care and entirely unremarkable (even when it’s cool!) to people who do not. For that reason, whenever we run across an ancestry list within the pages of the Bible, we allow our eyes to glaze over until we reach a more interesting passage. They teach you as a writer not to start with boring but to start with a hook.

And yet, Matthew’s gospel kicks off its Christmas story with 18 verses of genealogy. We are tempted to think that Matthew is trying to do for Jesus what Colon Roosevelt did for himself: make an otherwise unremarkable person at least vaguely interesting because of who his great-great-great grandfather was. After all, this Jesus that Christians worship was born to a poor carpenter and his wife who had mysteriously gotten pregnant before their wedding. He was born in a place much less interesting than Washington D.C.—in Bethlehem, a place often forgotten—and then grew up in Nazareth, about which people often declared, “Can anything good come from there?”

Not very impressive, but at least he’s got the cool trivia fact of being distantly related to a king. Glen Scrivener writes about this passage, “We could compare the family of Jesus to the last derelict descendant of a once-great family. They were Roosevelts, Lincolns, or Jeffersons, but had fallen far over the years.”[1]

And yet, Matthew knows exactly what he is doing (as Scrivener would agree). First, this genealogy bolsters Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah; he is in the right family at least. But second, Matthew deliberately opens his gospel with this genealogy to show something profound, something that would shock his first readers and something that should still shock us today in this Christmas season: that God is with us. In covenant and through crisis, God is with us in Christ.

Matthew 1 reestablishes what the entire Old Testament has declared: God’s covenant faithfulness. Verse 1 lists three names: Jesus—we will get to him soon enough—and David and Abraham. For a first century Jewish reader, the covenantal radar lights up at the mention of these two men. For moderns to understand this genealogy, we must learn why these two names are highlighted.

First, Abraham. Way back in Genesis, God had initiated a covenant with Abraham, a committed relationship of blessing and obligation. Genesis 12 records its beginning. After commanding Abraham to leave his country and go to a new land, God tells him, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Later Genesis 15 reveals that it will be through Abraham’s descendant that all the families of the earth will be blessed. Abraham does indeed have a child, and God makes a nation out of this child, but blessing to all the families of the world? Remains to be seen.

David is the other headliner name of the genealogy. God also made a covenant with David. After David ascended to the throne, God promised him in 2 Samuel 7 to raise up his offspring after him, who shall be from his body, that God will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. We often today miss the enormity of this promise, but when Matthew was written, this promise was still a lifeline for the Jewish people. They were waiting, not really with bated breath anymore, but the name of David would rouse the whisper of a hope that things could get better.

Simultaneously, Matthew 1 hearkens back to the crisis of the Old Testament, the broken covenant and the resulting disaster. The people who would come from Abraham and the kings who would come from David were unfaithful to their covenant, leading to the crisis, three words twice repeated in verses 11 and 12: “Deportation to Babylon.” Those three words contain a multitude of violence, grief, death, and destruction. Psalm 137 describes what this was like, opening with haunting words: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.”

This genealogy doesn’t sanitize the problems in front of us. Instead, it practically shouts at us that God is with us and God is working even in crisis. It does not minimize the pain or grief of the crisis, nor does it add a neat theological bow and dismiss any wrestling—but it does say that God’s faithfulness extends in, through, and beyond whatever crisis confronts his people.

As we look around the world we are confronted by crisis and grief in Gaza and Israel and Lebanon, in Ukraine, the civil war in Myanmar, and many more places. How do we make sense of these? Notice that there are generations of God’s people represented in this genealogy who would have asked “What on earth is God doing now?” and the answer could only have been a faith-filled, “I don’t know.” And as we look around our own lives, we are confronted by crisis and grief of our own. Maybe these are things much “smaller” on the world scale, but they loom impossibly large in our own lives. A diagnosis, a divorce, a death.

It is here where we see Christ, the ultimate proof of God with us. Through covenant, God has been announcing his plans to bless all the world through Abraham and to set up a king better than David forever. In crisis, God is comforting, guiding, and protecting his people.

This leads to the puzzle at the heart of Christianity. “God with us” is more than a nice Christmasy slogan; it is a shocking metaphysical claim. God—infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth—with us—creatures who are definitively not infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in our being (We get old.), wisdom (Are we all wise?), power (We get weak.), holiness (Do I really even need to ask about this one?), justice, goodness, and truth.

How is that God with people like us?

For the first people to read Matthew’s genealogy the conclusion of the Old Testament had left the covenant and the crisis unresolved. The covenant with Abraham still stood—every Jew at the time of Jesus knew that God had covenanted to bless Abraham’s descendants, and through them all the families of the world. Yet the Davidic covenant seemed defunct. Every Jew at the time of Jesus knew that God had covenanted with David to establish a king forever. But the covenant had collapsed into crisis. The sins of the kings and the people led to the exile, to a scattering of the people of God. Although the Temple had been rebuilt, they were living under Roman occupation.

God with us? Sounds like a fanciful pipe dream. After all, what kind of God would want to be with the people on this list. Read Matthew 1 again. Sure, there are some heroes, but often those heroes come with significant flaws of their own. Abraham? When two different men asked him about his wife, he pretended she was his sister so they could have her instead. Judah? He fathered Perez and Zerah with his widowed daughter-in-law after he defrauded her and she deceived him by pretending to be a prostitute. David? The genealogy captures his scandal too—he had a son in the context of adultery, that is, leveraging his position and power to solicit sex from the wife of a soldier in his army.

What about some of the other kings? Some were just not very popular: 2 Chronicles 21:5 tells us that Joram died, and I quote, “to no one’s regret.” Others were evil. Ahaz burned his own son as an offering to false gods and encouraged others to do likewise (2 Kings 16:3). Other kings, like Manasseh, perverted God’s Temple in Jerusalem with altars to other gods.

How could God be with them? Closer to home, how could God be with us?

When the old Oxford professor C.S. Lewis recounted his conversion to Christianity, he described coming to the realization that it was impossible for him to stumble across God—a wholly other, eternal, perfect being who has no body. He understood the difference between humans and God to be the difference between Hamlet and Shakespeare.

Hamlet lives in a world created by Shakespeare; Hamlet himself was created by Shakespeare. But, Hamlet cannot know Shakespeare. Shakespeare is wholly other to Hamlet. As he put it,“If Hamlet and Shakespeare could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare’s doing. Hamlet himself could initiate nothing.” If Hamlet ever had any hope of meeting Shakespeare, Shakespeare would have to write himself into the play.

Because of God’s covenant, and amid crisis, Jesus Christ has come. Out of love for his creation, God wrote himself into the play.  The crisis is the reason for Christ’s coming. As author Wendell Berry puts it: “It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.”

When we look at this genealogy that way, that God was writing himself into our play, suddenly it is no longer just a list of names. It becomes a mirror and an invitation. Matthew 1 is a mirror into our own hearts—adultery and other sexual sin, deception and vicious words, idolatry and false worship. Those characteristics hardly stop at Jewish kings before the time of Christ. The bad news about Christmas Eve is that all of us are hopelessly lost. But the best news about Christmas Eve on this side of the first Christmas is that God is with us and that he will come again.

We live on the other side of this genealogy. Jesus has come and Jesus will come again. And the knowledge that Jesus will return, just as surely as he was once born, makes this genealogy an invitation, an invitation for us to see our own sin, to see our desperate need for a rescuer and to count ourselves in this family. We all live in crisis, whether we know it or not—the crisis of our sin. And God came to be with us, to deliver us, so that we can be with him.

Jesus is Immanuel—God with us, our Savior with us.

[1] Glenn Scrivener, Reading Between the Lines: New Testament Daily Readings.