01/01 - God, the Social Engineer

Matthew 1:1-17

My family had a reunion picnic last summer, and afterward I sat enthralled as aunts, uncles, and cousins told stories about my ancestors. Imagine attending a family reunion picnic with young Jesus and listening as the young boy heard the stories about his ancestors, many of them listed in this genealogy.

The genealogy is actually for Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus (Matthew called him “the husband of Mary”). Mary’s ancestry connects to the genealogy, and because she and Joseph were likely of the same Jewish tribe, her connection to it was probably just a few generations back.

Matthew started by calling Jesus “the son of David, the son of Abraham,” emphasizing his Jewish heritage. The genealogy contains a Who’s Who of Jewish notables: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ruth, David, Solomon, and Hezekiah. Of the ancestors we know about, some were good, such as Ruth, some were shady, such as Jacob, but most were very complex with strikingly great flaws and strengths. For example, God said of David, “[He] is a man after my own heart,” (Acts 13:22), but David was also a murderer.

In listing the ancestors of Jesus, including the large number lost to obscurity, Matthew showed Jesus was part of a family with rich traditions and culture accumulated over many generations. Those traditions and that culture would form Jesus, just as you and I are formed by our family traditions and culture.

It was not an accident Jesus came into this particular family at this exact time. God had been preparing for his coming even before choosing Abraham to start a great nation, the starting point of Matthew’s genealogy. Generation by generation, God had been doing social engineering on the grandest scale.