This is part 1 of my journey through the Bible, as I seek out passages that can encourage us in our collective efforts toward Christlikeness, highlighting the idea that God is less interested in our behavior and our talk and is far more interested in our hearts and our maturity. Read the thesis statement here.
THE FIRST 17 VERSES of the New Testament, detailing the ancestral lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, sound much different to our ears today than they did to the original readers of the book.
To us, it seems like appendix material, an interesting footnote, not something you’d start off with when introducing a person. But at the time, one’s place in the world was almost exclusively inherited, and one’s pedigree was the place you had to begin. The statement here is that, as a direct male descendent of Abraham and David, Jesus is the inheritor of both God’s promises and Godly authority. Matthew’s audience was a Jewish one, and he wanted to set the stage of Jesus’ arrival by showcasing his legitimacy in Jewish eyes.
By the end of the gospels, and the New Testament, of course, we will discover that the transformational life of Christ has rendered such claims to legitimacy through lineage to be unsubstantial. Jesus could tout these rights, but sets them down and chooses not to. What God cares about is not status or family or pedigree, but the heart — our character. We are told to abandon our families if they keep us from following Christ, for together in Christ we have a new family. In Jesus, the apostle Paul writes, there is no male or female, no Jew or Greek, no slave or free. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and we must each, on our own, examine our beliefs and actions rather than simply inherit them. This is good news for humanity.
So if the beginning of Matthew 1 comes across as patriarchal, or pretentious, or dull, it is simply setting the stage for its own reversal of importance. Matthew is working to change minds, reaching out to skeptical inquisitors through arguments that they would understand before revealing how Jesus transcended his qualifications.
So while there is no verse here we can point to that says God is specifically interested in our hearts, or our maturity, the passage is important in understanding the mindset of the time in which God will be working. The context in which they lived was one where your interior self was of little concern, compared with your heritage and your upholding of your role. God does not merely dismiss this concept, he fulfills it to the highest degree, gaining the authority from which to say there is something more important.
The simple fact that as modern readers we are kind of bored by this passage, taking it for granted that anyone from anywhere has value and whose viewpoint should be heard out, shows how deeply the message of Jesus has penetrated the world.
