First Day of Christmas: Jesus, the Son of David

The opening words of the New Testament, the first words of the Gospel of Matthew, are a family tree.

There is perhaps nothing so boring as someone else’s family tree. To the casual reader, it seems an odd choice to begin what claims to be the greatest news in the world. It’s just not a grabber.

But Matthew’s genealogy has a purpose. Even in this list of names, the good news of God’s grace and the redemption of humanity is subtly being told. To an audience familiar with the Old Testament, as Matthew’s audience was, some of these names – especially the women he emphasizes – call to mind dramatic stories from the Bible.

For the first few days of Christmas, I will be telling the stories of the ancestors in Jesus’ family tree that are listed by Matthew. Contrary to custom, Matthew lists not only the male ancestors of Jesus, but some of his most scandalous female ancestors, too. His choice to mention these women tells us something about God and the redemption he offers through Jesus Christ.

But Matthew’s primary purpose in this genealogy is to connect Jesus to David. David was a king of Israel, and his reign achieved a mythic status similar to the reign of King Arthur for English speakers. David was promised that his sons would sit on the throne forever, and Christians see this promise fulfilled in the kingship of Jesus, descended from the line of David.

But David was not only a great king. David was also a flawed man who made some disastrous mistakes. Mentioned explicitly in Matthew 1:6 is David’s seduction of another man’s wife, a man whom he then murdered. The great king of Israel, loved by God and described in scripture as “a man after God’s own heart,” was also an adulterer and a murderer.

David embodies both the human predicament and its salvation. God loves us not for our own character, but for God’s own character. God’s love is not created and sustained by our well-deserving action. We don’t earn specialness from God. We are like David, given the wonders and joys of the earth, only to mess it up by reaching for something that isn’t ours.

But David’s error (oddly, the authors of scripture often focus on the adultery rather than the murder, which only goes to show that the fascination with sexual escapades over all other sin is very, very old) does not remove him from God’s love. The royal line of David extends through Bathsheba, the woman whose husband he murdered. God’s love includes redemption from sin.

Redemption is a heavy theological term, borrowed from the language of debt-slavery. In the ancient world, people could go so far into debt that they (or their children) could be claimed as property by the debt-holder. Redemption was the act of an outside party buying back freedom for the slave.

God’s redemption is his ability to free us from our own enslavements, and to reach into our bad choices, or our greedy or hateful or destructive acts, and bring out something good. The omnipotent God is stronger than our own sin. Our errors cannot disrupt his redemptive plan for the world, and when we turn to God in our brokenness and recognition of our own sin, we become active agents of that plan.

Out of David’s repentance and faith, God inspired some of the most beautiful scripture ever written. Out of David’s adultery and murder, God brought the eventual birth of Jesus.

Jesus is the Son of David, which means he is the long-awaited Messiah, promised and prophesied for hundreds of years. Jesus is also the savior of David, and of you and me, and anyone who turns to him in longing for their own redemption.