Word of Salvation – July 2024

Redeeming Our Past

Sermon by Harry Burggraaf B.D. on Matthew 1:1-17

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 53 & Matthew 1:1-17

Songs:          O Christ our hope, our heart’s desire (BoW.322)
                        Make me a channel of your peace (BoW.451)

Congregation do you remember that silly little poem that a child is supposed to have composed, about how she's inherited bits and pieces from her relatives?

My Grandma says I've daddy's nose
Before I came, he had two I suppose...
  They say I've got my mouth and chin
  From Grandma's husband, Benjamin...
I understand about my hair
For daddy's head is kinda bare.
  But what I'd like to really know
  What puzzles me and tries me so
  Is – am I just some odds and ends
  Bits from all may relatives and friends?
  Or do you think that it can be
  There's something left that's really me?

Of course there's no doubt that we inherit a lot of our physical characteristics from our families and ancestors.

But it's not only our hair and chin that we inherit.

Our nature... our psychological, emotional and even spiritual make-up are also influenced by the past.

What we are today is very much shaped by the significant people around us in the past and in the present.

We are very much 'bits-and-pieces people'.

Our belief and value system; our world view; the way we see ourselves; is very much moulded by our family, our educational background, our church and our community environments.

Our emotional make-up carries both the good experiences of the past and the bad scenes; the hurts and the healings; the scars and the stitches.  Particularly our perception of ourselves is so much influenced by the messages others give us, especially those who are closest and most significant to us.

I remember instances in the past, where in an unguarded moment of frustration I would shout at one of our kids, and could see them shrivel and die a little.  Just as I saw them grow and blossom with praise and affirmation.  We carry into adulthood both the joys and the pains of our history.

Of course I think modern psychology can sometimes make a little too much of the determining nature of the past.  Some counsellors make it sound as everything we do as adults depends on our toilet training and childhood experiences.

Charles Sherlock, one of our Melbourne theologians, has written a new book, 'On Being Human', and he suggests that Biblically speaking it is more our future, our goals and our hope, that determines what we are and what we can become, rather than our past.

However our history – both personal and collective – does shape us.  Many people suffer because of the skeletons in the cupboard of their past; the scars of irresponsible behaviour, either that of others, or their own.

I don't know if you've ever read the book 'Sophie's Choice', a deeply unsettling and dark exploration of the life of a woman whose character and behaviour has been crippled by the trauma of past events.  Sophie is a sophisticated, intelligent, beautiful Polish American.  She has everything going for her but she makes a mess of life because in the past she had to make a terrible choice.  As a Polish, Jewish young mother of two small children she was taken to a concentration camp in the Second World War and as she entered the camp the Nazi commander made her choose between her two children – one to be saved, the other to the gas ovens.  A choice which was totally beyond her control, for which she has no responsibility.  Yet it is the dark secret that scars her for life – it affects her capacity to love, to relate, to handle pressures, to live with herself.

Thankfully few of us carry those sort of scars, especially if we have come from happy, integrated families and homes.

But some of us do.  And to some degree we are all damaged.  The sin of the past, and the present, whether our own, or that of others, has left consequences:

 - favouritism or rejection as a child
 - verbal violence in the home
 - loneliness and the inability to make friends
 - marital tension and conflict.

Sin has an awful capacity to hurt and to damage us.  And there are no quick fixes.  No easy healing.  No instant remedies.

However I do believe that our readings today tell us that we are not locked into the past.  We do not have to continue to carry all the consequences and results of our mistakes and the irresponsible behaviour of others.  We are not captive to our history.

In Isaiah we read, "Surely he (Jesus) has borne our grief and carried our sorrows...!"  The good news is that God takes on the pain and hurt of our sinful humanity and our foolish actions.  He does not only not punish us for them because of the death of Christ on our behalf, but he also shares the pain.  Christ redeems and restores.

Especially Matthew 1, in its strange Jewish way is Gospel, good news.  It tells us that Jesus REDEEMS THE PAST.

We have here a record of the genealogy of Jesus.

How on earth do we find the Gospel of healing in a list of ancestral names?  Why is this laborious account of Jesus ancestors in the Bible at all?

Well basically it tells us that Jesus has visited the past.  He is part of our history, pains, hurts, warts and all.  The genealogy of Jesus is a declaration that God takes all of our sin – past, present, future, and its consequences and throws it into the ocean of his love.

 * You may know that genealogies for the Jews, established pedigree.  Genealogies proved that you were O.K.  You had a good blood line.  You were kosher.  No hanky-panky on the wrong side of the blanket.  Your genealogy established that you had an impeccable record.

If any Jew had the slightest mixture of foreign genes he might lose the right to be called a member of the chosen nation.

You remember Herod the Great, in the N.T., he had a bit of a problem in this regard.  Somewhere along the line an Edomite mother had crept into the lineage.  So what did Herod do?  You guessed it.  He destroyed all the official records so that no one could prove he wasn't true blue; no one could prove a purer pedigree than is own.

 * But the genealogy of Jesus here in Matthew is far more than a description of the fact that Jesus' ancestry was kosher and O.K.

You notice that the arrangement of the names is stylistic, not just strictly chronological.  It is selective.

There are three brackets of 14 people each.  This wasn't just to make it easy for students in the early church to learn it for Catechism.  But it symbolised something.

Three sections, a trinity, of two time seven; two times perfection.  The number seven in Judaism symbolised perfection, completeness, wholeness.

So here we have three stages of Jewish history, of covenantal history.  A covenant timetable and chronology.

a)  vs.2-6 - The first section takes us from the beginning of God's covenant people, Abraham, the father of believers, to David.  This represents the pinnacle, the glory of the theocratic nation of Israel.  Here is the calling of a special people, the formation of God's nation, the building of a glorious kingdom.

b)  vs.6-11 - The second section takes us from David to Jeconiah; the deterioration and disintegration of a nation; sin and rebellion; national shame, tragedy, disaster, destruction, exile.

c)  vs.12-16 - The third section from Jeconiah to Joseph and finally Jesus is the restoration; the return from exile, the rebuilding of the temple and the city of Jerusalem; tragedy turned to triumph; freedom and redemption.

So we have here a grand drama of...
             - Kingship gained; freedom lost; liberty restored; the drama of...
             - Beginnings; sin; salvation; or the story of...
             - Formation; rebellion; restoration.

This is not just Jewish history; it is covenant history; it is the spiritual history of mankind; God's story.

It is Jesus story... but it is also your story and my story.

             - You... made in the image of God, servant and steward of creation;
             - You... rebellious in your sin
             - You... restored to splendour in Christ.

But it is not just cold, impersonal history.  It's the story of individuals, of people – Abraham, Judah, Boaz, Ahaz, Zadok, Joseph...!

And there are some very unlikely people!

Remember that genealogies are supposed to establish pedigree, purity of lineage, genuine blue blood-line.

Well it would seem then that Jesus too has some skeletons in the cupboard.
All is not kosher.

 * What is Jacob doing here?  Isn't he a cheat and a liar?
 * What is David doing in this lineage?  Isn't he a murderer and adulterer?
 * And what about Ahaz, an idolator.  Or Amon, the rebel?

But even more particularly what are the women doing in this pedigree?

The fact that there are women here at all is of course remarkable.  A woman had no legal rights in Israel.  She was the possession of her father and husband.

In morning prayers a Jew would thank God that he hadn't made him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman.

But notice... that out of all the women that could have been recorded as Jesus great grandmothers, Matthew, under the guidance of the Spirit, chooses only four:
            vs.3 Tamar
            vs.5 Ruth
            vs.5 Rahab
            vs.6 Bathsheba.

Remember this is Jesus' pedigree.

What do you notice about these women?

What is significant about these women?

I'll tell you what; if you had a family photo album they wouldn't be there.  You'd leave them out in embarrassment.

Well there's the space for grandmother Tamar.
She seduced her father-in- law and tricked him into sleeping with her by pretending to be a prostitute.  We don't really want to explain that to the children, so we've left a gap.  Read all about it in Genesis 38.

And this page...  another gap.
Well that's for grandmother Rahab.  She was the local Jericho prostitute... and a Gentile to boot.  She was jolly brave and did a tremendous service for the spies, but you wouldn't want to press her history too far.

And Ruth?  A Moabite!
Someone from a godless culture.  Idol worshippers.  An ethnic, at a time when multiculturalism was definitely not the flavour of the month.  She belonged to an enemy people.  Yet here she is – one of Jesus ancestors.

Finally Bathsheba.
Well the less said the better.  She was terribly wronged, but did she have no fault?  What self-respecting woman goes bathing in the nude on the rooftop.

Solomon, the product of the lechery of a murderous king.

This is Jesus' ancestry in all its inglorious, sordid, sinful, mixed up, painful detail.

Jesus identifies with it all.  He takes it up in his experience and nails it to a cross.

This is what Matthew is saying – all that sordid history, all that pain and hurt, all those broken, misguided, deformed lives, all those conflicts, that incest, abuse, the loneliness, the trauma... he takes it upon himself, and he deals with it, he bears it in his own person to a city garbage dump, the place of a skull, Golgotha.

In verse 18 we read that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, by the Holy Spirit.  Fully human.  Human ancestry to the core!  Fully divine.  God himself.  And the cycle is broken.  God deals with our sin and its consequences.  He liberates us from its tenacious power.

I think that's what the apostle Paul meant when he said in 2Corinthians, those horrific, awful words:
            “God made him, who had no sin, to be sin for us,
             so that in him we might become the righteousness of Christ."

That is an incredible statement.  Jesus became sin for us – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and all the others; put your own name there; so that we might become the righteousness of God.

Jesus pedigree is sullied so that ours might be purified and restored.

Way back, in the 1960s, The Beatles sang,
            'Ah look at all the lonely people,
             all the lonely people; where do they all come from?
             All the lonely people; where do they all belong?’

Add to the loneliness all the pain and hurt of broken relationships, of abused and crushed spirits, of disappointed hopes, of sin-scarred backgrounds.

Our daughter was sharing in shock the other day how a close school-friend of hers was found dead in a bath from a heroin overdose.  Someone who had gone to her school.  a friend.  What history had she been carrying?

All the damaged people... where do they belong?

Add your own history, or that of a friend you know well.  Where does the pain of their past belong?

In the experience of Jesus, in the grand story of his past, and now nailed to a cross.  Not just the curse of sin... but also its painful consequence.

God longs to touch our lives and free us from anything past or present that cripples and diminishes us.

Remember Tamar, remember Rahab, remember Ruth and Bathsheba.  Remember Jesus born of the virgin Mary who starts a whole new chapter in covenant history, where your and my name also belong, and the names of all those who find it difficult to live with the past and present.