Passing Strange

Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25

December 18, 2016

The gospel of Matthew begins in the beginning.
We, however, are going to begin with the footnotes.Let’s stipulate a couple of things for starters:First, Matthew was written for an audience that would have known the texts that we call the Hebrew scriptures or Old Testament, so they would have gotten the references.Second, most of those who heard the text would not have been literate. That only matters to the extent that a translation error revealed in this morning’s passage would not have been much noted nor, given the historical context of pre-scientific first-century Palestine, much considered. Nevertheless, given how a certain received tradition came to carry considerable weight in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – weight beneath which the church too often continues to struggle – it’s worth a moment to remember that verse 23 – “Look the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,” is a quote from the Septuagint, the translation into Koine Greek of the Hebrew scriptures.
(Here’s your second “fun historical fact” of the morning: septuagint comes from the Latin word for 70, and refers to the number of Jewish scholars (actually 72) commissioned by the King of Egypt to do the translation at some point in the third century BCE.)In any case, the Hebrew word in the relevant citation from the prophet Isaiah is “almah,” which actually means “young woman.” The Greek parthenos carries a more specific meaning – virgin – not present in almah. Thus an entire history of Mary has its own genesis, at least in part, in a mistranslation.
However the first hearers of the gospel understood this, it is crucial for us to understand that the gospel is not experience reported as history but rather memory expressed as theology. In other words, we take the text seriously, but not necessarly literally.
If it helps your faith to take this passage literally then go ahead; if a literal reading is a stumbling block then let it go. All I’d add to that is this: the distinction between literal and figurative is, itself, a modern concern arising only in response to fundamentalism, which is a reaction against modernity.“So what?” you may fairly ask.Well, two things at least: first, sometimes reading the footnotes first helps folks get past stumbling blocks; and, second, while this may sound like nothing more than dull literay criticism, it actually has profound political implications for our present moment is part of the same fundamentalist backlash.The politics of this moment rest on certain notions of purity, of who is in and who is out, of who can save us and restore us to some imagined glorious and pure past.

To understand our calling in this moment it helps to go back to the beginning, or, literally, to genesis. The author of Matthew uses the Greek word, genesis, to name the birth of Jesus. It’s a curious and, thus, significant decision. Other Greek words for birth or even other forms of the Greek word genesis could have been used, but it seems that Matthew wanted his readers to think back to the beginning, to the creation of the world and the creation of a people.

I believe he chose that word as a way of getting readers and listeners to stop, at the very beginning, and pay attention to the beginning. To pay attention to the beginning of Matthew’s gospel is to defy the lectionary – which skips past the first 17 verses of Matthew – and, also, to against the standard teaching to generations of preachers who are cautioned against “preaching the lists.” In other words, steer clear of the genealogies. Don’t read them in public worship because it is deadly dull to do so. Don’t preach from them because most of the time we really don’t know anything about those who begat others who begat still others who begat the character that matters.

Matthew seems to be saying, right at the very beginning, this list matters. The genealogy of Jesus matters.

As the kids reminded us in their wonderful pageant last week, the genealogy of Jesus matters because it is passing strange.

Matthew’s gospel begins like this: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Then it goes through the list, beginning with “Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah” and so on through three sets of 14 generations down to “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.”

It is a long, strange list with which to begin an account of the life of the Messiah. Indeed, it is passing strange. The list begins with the one known as father Abraham, which has always struck me as an amusing and somewhat disturbing way to refer to a man perhaps best known for his willingness to kill his first-born child. When that’s where the lineage begins it should come as no great surprise to find another man who may be best known for slaying a giant but who is also famous for – how shall we put this -- having arranged the death of the husband of the mother of his future son. Add in a prostitute or two along the way, and you have a family tree that bore some strange fruit, indeed.

What are we to make of this?

The key, I believe, can be found in the name. “The young woman shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel, which means God is with us.”

God is with us. That is the heart of the good news, and it comes to all of us. That’s the key to understanding why Matthew begins with a list.

Let’s be honest, there would have been no records going back 42 generations in Joseph’s family. Not even the Mormons do that! The author of Matthew invents this history, and does so with both clear and implicit purpose.

The long-expected messiah, the one who is to restore the glory of Israel, will come from the lineage of King David and will assume his thrown. That is what messianic Jews firmly believed. Thus the inclusion of the storied king and his great and wise son, Solomon makes perfect sense. But this is not merely genealogy as hagiography – it is not some idealized version of a story that whitewashes out the ugly parts. No, even in noting David and Solomon, Matthew goes out of his way to remind readers that David’s own story included the murder of Uriah the Hittite, husband of Bathsheba the mother of Solomon.

Matthew wants us to understand that when God is with us the “us” includes thieves and sinners, adulterers, murderers, and those of less than sterling repute. God is with us whether or not we read the footnotes. God is with us whether or not we share the same understanding of almah and parthenos and Mary’s sex life, because the gospel is about love not about purity. God is with the impure. In other words, God is with all of us.

That is the great good news of the incarnation – that is, the grace of God made flesh in a human life.

But if my only response to this news is to say, “God loves me,” then this is cheap grace, indeed. For the good news comes with an invitation that we only begin to discern through the one human life that lived out this embodied grace.

When we sing joyously about “love coming down at Christmas,” it’s nothing but a saccharine song if we don’t understand that deeper truth. If the love of God is incarnate in our world it is only so if it is made flesh in our flesh. Mary understood this as she pondered these things in her heart. Christmas is just a nostalgic story full of sweetness and light and miracle if it does not compel us to make real in our lives the love of God for all of us.

So this season, where does the love of God most need to be made real, and how can we become the flesh through which that love becomes incarnate once more? This is not miracle, this is history and it is ours to make, and in this particular moment nothing is more urgent.

So look around to places like Aleppo or Standing Rock or Baltimore, to deep concern about the climate, to seemingly daily challenges to the fundamental institutions of our own government, or, so much closer to us, the day laborers’ sites or women’s shelters or an immigration workshop right here, and ask, “how can we make the love of God incarnate in these places today?”

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The incarnation only matters if the love of God is made flesh in our flesh – in our own mixed up lineages and our own strange time. The times are passing strange, and they are ours to fill with surpassing love. May it be so.