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In this third commentary leading up to Christmas, I want to follow up on a point I made yesterday alluding to the fact that Matthew in his infancy story chooses some of the more dark characters to put in his list of forty two generations leading up to Christ. Lest we allow patrology run amuck, there are five names in that list that are not male! And they aren’t the names you’d expect either.

Instead of great female names like Sarah and Rebekah, the first name on the list of five women is TAMAR! She was a Canaanite outsider left childless by the death of her first two husbands. But it only gets worse. Matthew’s second choice is a prostitute! Matthew’s second female to be mentioned is REHAB: “the father of Boaz by Rahb”. Sometimes I think God is just having fun playing with the religious crowd. Why else would he make the first miracle that Jesus performs in the Gospel of John, one of turning water into wine? And here in this list of names leading up to Jesus, the first woman is a harlot! Way to go god!

His third choice of a woman to mention is RUTH; a foreigner, a Moabite! Why doesn’t Matthew mention someone from mainstream Hebraic culture? Why are all these people on the fringe, or not even in the fringe? Could it be that, as I said yesterday, God is saying that He loves everyone. It’s obvious the church doesn’t, but God sure does. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or even who you are at this moment that you’re reading this commentary. Jesus was brought into this world to give you a way to live a victorious life in spite of your past or present.

The fourth and last OT female name Matthew mentions , he can’t even address her other than through her husband’s name (Uriah, the Hittite). In case you’re not familiar with him, his wife was the adulterous Bathsheba. Once again, why did Matthew choose to mention these four OT women when he had so many other good models to choose from? My logical answer is two fold. First he was showing as with the men, that regardless of how bad we have been, God still loves us and wants us to come to Him. Secondly, there is one more scandalous woman to be mentioned: but, in a good way.

The fifth woman is of course Mary, mother of Jesus: written in Matthew uniquely as “Joseph, the husband of Mary”. An interesting list of men and women to set the stage for the genealogy of Jesus Christ (totally different than Luke). Why? Who knows! But the best answer or analysis that I’ve found comes from Raymond E. Brown who said, “The God who wrote the beginnings with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness. A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to who the world hearkened and women upon whom the world frowned- this God continues to work through the same melange.”

Bottom line- the birth of Jesus was and still is our HOPE!