Have you ever been to a family reunion and thought, “I can’t be related to these people!”? Every family has a crazy uncle Larry who asks the youngsters to pull his finger or a frugal Great Aunt Grace who has apparently been stockpiling food since the Nixon administration! We enjoy sharing updates about our cousins who are doing graduate work at Harvard or our siblings who are first chair in their instrument in band, but we shy away from broadcasting the more embarrassing facts about our families… but Jesus didn’t.

Over the past 8 months I have been traveling with the middle and high school girls through the book of Ruth. We dove in to the text of Ruth Wednesday after Wednesday, but for the next to the last meeting we spent the night in Matthew chapter one – a chapter consisting solely of a (dreaded!) genealogy. A lengthy and daunting list of names opens the very first pages of the New Testament and precedes even the telling of the birth of Christ Himself! Though we often don’t understand the importance of genealogies, those two facts alone should show us the importance of slowing down and looking intently at the list of names.  In my time with the Ruthettes, I focused on just one aspect of the genealogy in Matthew chapter 1.  There are five women mentioned specifically in this register of ancestors: Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba), and Mary. For those readers unfamiliar with the women listed above, let’s just say that their lives were full of conflict, gossip, and misunderstanding.

These women were stained in the eyes of the world.

They were prostitutes, widows, foreigners, adulterers, and pregnant out of wedlock. They lied, deceived, and at times hid the uglier parts of their choices. At first blush, it would appear to many that something in their choices, or backgrounds, or persons should have excluded them from being used by God. And certainly many would agree that such women would not have been given the immense honor of being in the lineage of Christ.  Perhaps they wouldn’t be the women you’d be proud to be related to. You might even avoid them at the family reunion because of the shocking stories you heard about their breaches of tradition. Jesus could have been tempted to distance Himself from his extended family members by leaving their names out of the record, thus causing His origins to appear more “respectable.” Yet here they are proudly listed in the genealogy of Christ.

Praise God that He does not exclude people from his service who are stained in the eyes of the world. These women became the conduits of the purpose of Yahweh. They gave birth to, nursed, and raised godly men, kings, and even Jesus Himself. Even though our life situations may be vastly different from Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary, we sometimes believe the lie that we have a stain which prevents us from being used by God. I think this is one beautiful lesson we can learn from this genealogy – God redeems our pasts and uses us, stains and all.

“God’s hand is all over history. God works out His purpose, generation after generation. Limited as we are to one lifetime, each of us sees so little of what happens. A genealogy is a striking way of bringing before us the continuity of God’s purpose through the ages. The process of history is not haphazard. There is a purpose in it all. And the purpose is the purpose of God.”
—Derek Kidner, quoted by David Guzik, Commentary on Ruth, www.studylight.org