Unexpected Fruit (The Director's Cut)

After I was done preaching this Sunday, one of my friends said to me: "Okay: did you make a bet in Seminary that you could preach a sermon on one of the genealogies in the Bible or something?"

The answer was no; but I do believe there's something important about standing under the whole word of God, all of it, even the strange or obscure corners of it, and letting it all address us as the word of God. To do this means hearing from its genealogies (and temple inventories, and tables of nations, and bizarre oracles and terrifying apocalyptic visions) as much as from its nice, neat, orderly Pauline discourses. And as ancient documents, genealogies are actually pretty fascinating texts-- theologically rich and spiritually verdant and imaginatively fertile-- or at least they can become so when you start meditating on them deeply.

All this is to introduce this Sunday's Sermon:

Matthew 1:1-17

Unexpected Fruit on the Family Tree

And speaking of theologically rich, spiritually verdant texts, here's a fascinating thought about the Matthean Genealogy that was a bit too esoteric for my sermon, but I thought I'd post here (the following comes primarily from W. D. Davies and D. C. Alison's 1988 commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, as reiterated in John Noland's 2005 commentary).

Matthew lists 42 generations in all from Abraham to Jesus; then he takes careful pains to note that there were 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Exile, and 14 from the Exlie to Jesus. All of which is, in one sense, just plain wrong ... or put a different way, sure there were at least 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus, so technically Matthew's not wrong, but there were a lot more that don't get mentioned. Matthew's trimmed out a few generations here, and he's compressed a few others there, and sometimes seems to be using the term "begat" much more loosely to mean "was the ancestor of."

None of this, it seems, is all that unusual for ancient genealogies, but the thing is: Matthew's taken pretty intent care to fit Jesus' genealogy into exactly 3 groups of 14. Almost as if the 3 x 14 schema was more important to him than any mere biological/biographical accuracy.

As moderns, this might seem pretty fishy to us, until we remember that Matthew thought like an ancient, and probably an ancient Semite at that. And of course, for an anceint Semite, there is power in numbers (7,3,12,40 being among the more famous ones). Not only is there power in numbers, but names themselves also have numbers (it wasn't just the Beast whose name had a number after all). Every word had a "number" that mysteriously related to the word itself, a number that could be determined through various numerological systems known generally today as "gematria."

In Hebrew, the name David has three letters, dalit, waw, dalit, whose respective numerical values are: 4, 6, 4, making the number of David's name 14 (note that David's name comes 14th in Matthew's genealogy). According to at least one system of gematria, the mispar misafi, you also added the number of letters in the word to the "number" of the word, which would give us (loosely speaking), the numbers 3 & 14.

This may get us to the bottom of Matthew's 3 x 14 schema for presenting the geneaology. Has he shaped Jesus' geneaology so that, in a strange way, it all "adds up" to the name "David"? Almost as if he were saying: not only is this Little Lord Jesus the legal descendant of David, but his whole family tree is actually "Christ-shaped"?

Maybe not pulpit material yet, but it sure makes you think.