At Christmas time, for followers after Jesus, and believers in who he was and is and what he did, the stories surrounding his conception and birth are loved and beautiful and mysterious and powerful. We really do love to hear Matthew 1: 18-25, and the story of the magi in chapter 2. We revel in the conception announcements of Luke 1 to barren Elizabeth and virgin Mary. And we are specially taken with the vivid yet simple description of all that surrounds Jesus’ birth in Luke 2.
But when Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ birth, he doesn’t begin with the angel’s visit to Joseph. Rather, he begins, in a most Jewish, Chronicles-like way, with a genealogy. With a family tree. With a select (because it is not complete) list of names. Some are familiar; many are not. But why?
As we have been going through The Story over the past few months as a church – from Creation to where we are now, on the precipice of a divided kingdom – every few weeks in Sunday worship we watch a re-cap video. A way of summing up the story so far, quickly.
That’s what the genealogy in Matthew is. It is not our first way of doing a recap. But it’s an effective one, especially when we know the story behind the names. The genealogy of Jesus is, in many ways, shorthand for the whole Old Testament.
Christopher Wright is an Old Testament scholar and missionary leader, who serves as the International Director of the Langham Partnership (known as John Stott Ministries in the US), and is a key leader in the international missions world, particularly through his involvement with the Cape Town 2010 Lausanne meetings. Chris visited with us at First Covenant several years ago, and preached on Sunday morning. In his book Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament, Chris reacts to Matthew’s genealogy with this question: “Why can’t we just get on with the story?” He answers it like this:
Because, says Matthew, you won’t understand that story -- the one I am about to tell you -- unless you see it in the light of a much longer story which goes back for many centuries but leads up to the Jesus you want to know about. And that longer story is the history of the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians came to call the Old Testament…The Old Testament tells the story which Jesus completes.”
Just the fact that Matthew starts the story of Jesus, and introduces his words about his coming and his birth with the genealogy, is a reminder of why we are working through the big story-line of the Bible this year – because you won’t understand the story of Jesus unless you see it in the light of this much longer one.
Dr. Chris Wright, Langham Partnership’s International Director, is an Irishman who lives in London, with his heart firmly planted in the Majority World! Chris, with his wonderful wife Liz alongside, has pastored a local parish church, taught at a top seminary in India, served as President of a key Christian college, and authored 20 books. Chris was Chair of the Lausanne Theology Working Group from 2005 – 2011, and Chair of the Statement Working Group at the Third Lausanne Congress, 2010, which produced The Cape Town Commitment. He is also Chair
