God with Us

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Matthew begins with a list of names. Forty-two generations, father to son, from Abraham down to Joseph down to Jesus. Most first-time readers either skip it or endure it. But the list is doing something, and once you see what, it becomes one of the more interesting openings in the whole Bible.

Read chapter 1 in two parts: the genealogy, and then the short account of how Jesus came to be born. The second part is told entirely from Joseph's perspective — which makes it different from how the birth story is usually told.

Walk-through

A list worth reading (verses 1–17)

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Matthew 1:1

Matthew's first sentence is a declaration: Jesus is the fulfillment of two of the oldest promises in the Jewish scriptures. God had promised Abraham that through his family all the nations of the earth would be blessed. God had promised David that one of his descendants would reign forever. Matthew is saying, from the opening line: this is that story arriving.

The genealogy is divided into three groups of fourteen generations: Abraham to David, David to the Babylonian exile, the exile to Jesus. The three sections mark the three great eras of Israel's history — the founding family, the kingdom, and the long waiting after the kingdom fell. Jesus arrives at the end of the third era, at the moment the waiting is over.

But the names worth pausing on are not the kings. They are the women.

Five women appear in a genealogy that had no obligation to include any. Each one is connected to an unexpected or irregular story. Tamar disguised herself to secure justice after being wronged by her father-in-law. Rahab was a prostitute in Jericho who hid the Israelite spies and was saved when the city fell. Ruth was a Moabite — a foreigner, an outsider by every social and religious measure — who chose loyalty to her mother-in-law and ended up in the line of David. Bathsheba is referred to only as the wife of Uriah — keeping the name of the man David had killed front and centre. And Mary, the last, is an unmarried woman pregnant before her wedding in a culture where that was a matter of life and death.

The family tree of the Messiah is not a clean record of respectable people. It is the full, complicated, irregular human story. God has been working through it for two thousand years, and the people he chose to work through were not the obvious ones.

Joseph (verses 18–25)

Mary is engaged to Joseph when she is found to be pregnant — by the Holy Spirit, Matthew tells us, though Joseph does not know this yet. He knows only that she is carrying a child that is not his.

Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man, and not willing to make her a public example, intended to put her away secretly.

Matthew 1:19

That one sentence tells you who Joseph is. He is described as a righteous man — someone who takes the law seriously — and his righteousness expresses itself as mercy. He could have exposed her publicly. In that culture, the consequences would have been severe. He chooses instead the quietest possible way out, one that protects her as much as the situation allows.

Then the dream:

But when he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take to yourself Mary, your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She shall give birth to a son. You shall call his name Jesus, for it is he who shall save his people from their sins."

Matthew 1:20–21

The name Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua — the same name as Joshua, which means the LORD saves. Matthew is not offering a coincidence. The name is the mission. This child will do what the name says.

Matthew then quotes a prophecy from the book of Isaiah, written seven hundred years before:

"Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son. They shall call his name Immanuel;" which is, being interpreted, "God with us."

Matthew 1:23

Immanuel. Two Hebrew words: God and with us. Not God above us, not God watching, not God sending instructions from a distance. With us. Matthew is saying the whole story of the incarnation — the Word becoming flesh, as John would put it — in two words. Whatever is about to happen in this gospel happens because God decided to come close.

Joseph wakes from the dream and does what he was asked. Matthew puts it plainly: he arose from his sleep, did as the angel commanded him, took Mary as his wife, and named the child Jesus. There is no recorded negotiation, no request for a second opinion, no delay. He got up and did it.

Take with you

Two things from this chapter are worth carrying.

The first is the genealogy. Before a single event is described, before Jesus says a word or does anything, Matthew roots him in a family line full of foreigners, failures, and people whose stories went sideways. The Messiah did not come from a perfect pedigree. He came from the human story as it actually is — complicated, irregular, marked by loss and rescue and unlikely grace. That is deliberate, and it says something about who this gospel is for.

The second is the name. Immanuel — God with us. Matthew chose that word to describe what the birth of Jesus means, and he chose it first, before any story is told. Whatever else this gospel will say — healings, teachings, confrontations, a cross — all of it is an unfolding of those two words. God came to be with us.

That is either the most extraordinary claim ever made, or it is not. Matthew is writing because he believes it is.