Day 1: Matthew 1:1-16

In the Gospel of Matthew the story of Jesus starts with a list of his ancestors. Not very exciting. Mark starts with the fiery preaching of John the Baptist, Luke begins with an angel appearing to John’s father Zechariah, and John’s Gospel, ever the oddball, opens with a commentary on the Eternal Word before the beginning of time.

But Matthew, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, first lists the ancestors of Jesus going back through King David and then on to the Patriarch Abraham. But there is something very interesting in Matthew’s list; it’s the inclusion of five women. And not just any five women, but women who all were social outcasts in their own time. All, save Mary the mother of Jesus, were also Gentiles, non-Jews. Why would Matthew include these less than stellar examples of women in his genealogy?

Each of these five women were put in desperate situations through no fault of their own. Tamar was a Canaanite woman who married into the family of Judah and was widowed twice and then abandoned by her father-in-law(Genesis 38). Rahab was most likely a child prostitute in the city of Jericho when the Israelites came to attack(Joshua 2 &6). Ruth was from Moab, married into an Israelite family, widowed, and then made the decision to go with and care for her widowed mother-in-law back to Israel where she was an outcast(the book of Ruth). Bathsheba was either a Hittite herself or at least married to a Hittite man who was a general in David’s army that was forced to sleep with King David, got pregnant, and then David had her husband killed(2 Samuel 11).

And then we have Mary, the unwed teenage mother of Jesus. Whispers and questions about whether this pregnancy was the result of her cheating on her fiance or proof that her and Joseph had not remained pure during their engagement had been fueling Nazareth’s gossip for months. Their reputation in their hometown was shot. 

Not the greatest examples of womanhood that the Bible has to offer. Why would these women be included here alongside Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Hezekiah, and Zerubbabel? Well, first, none of those men were without their own flaws. But, secondly, I believe that God wanted to show us that it doesn’t matter how your story begins. It doesn’t matter what has happened to you in your past. Each of these women were put in impossibly hard situations. They all made choices that we can look at and critique from the comfort of our air conditioned homes, but God redeemed each of their stories. He took those whom the world would have rejected and despised and cast aside, and he wove their stories in with his own. 

What a beautiful picture of why Jesus was born. That he came to earth to bring beauty from the ashes, to give life to the dying, and to redeem each one of us no matter what our past holds. These “mothers of Jesus” are representative of all of us. And they are listed here to remind us that the love of God is for all of us, and that he can redeem your story!