[Automatic Translation - to clarify or report corrects please reach out to podcast@glendale-church.com] God with us, son of David, son of Abraham, Matthew 1.
That's the title I was given.
Emmanuel, God with us, son of David, son of Abraham, Matthew 1.
I've been really blessed in reflecting on Matthew 1, and I trust that encouragement
that I have received will come through to you.
You know, what we say and what we speak has got a lifetime behind it.
A lifetime of learning, growing, failing, relearning, discovery, thinking, rethinking,
reading.
I guess in Matthew and Matthew 1, Matthew, the book of Matthew, if I were just to think
of people who have influenced me in more recent, maybe the last 10, 20 years, I would say Charles
Price, William Barclay, Paul Wright.
I just say that because we're all a product of thoughts and thinking and growth and development
that along the path of life people input into us.
I'd just like to tell a little story that will come out in the end with meaning.
I like to have a walk.
Sometimes I like to have a walk with someone because it's just lovely to be out in God's
open nature and walk with someone with whom we can just allow the world to speak to us
and the trees and the birds and no agenda but be open together.
I love that.
If there's anybody here that I haven't been doing that with and you'd like to, I'm always
open to schedule that.
And there's other times I just like to walk by myself, very particularly.
That's a schedule for me.
That's my day.
I just want to be myself in the open, particularly on the hilltop, God and me.
I had one of those days many years ago on the Isle of Wight and Ruth would release me
for a day.
And I was walking on the coast and I came to Tennyson Down and I went up to the top
of Tennyson Down and on the top of the little monument at Tennyson there's a seat and I
sat down and the seat was lovely day.
I was looking out to sea and there I was.
There didn't seem to be one person on the hill looking out to sea.
And I thought, ah, you know, Northern Ireland feels very far away.
Home, schools, remember those days?
Fall feels very far away.
I have my journey, who understands the depth of my journey?
I'm sure you all know what it's like some far away place to feel, do you know?
Who is there here that understands me?
And then sometimes you may be asked the question, where is God?
Heaven seems far away.
Just let me say one little thing here.
Andy's read Matthew 1.
Can you just think about yourself on that seat?
Let me think about myself on that seat.
Over 2000 years ago I'm sitting, let's say, in that location.
I only know what I then know because there's no New Testament and Jesus hasn't arrived.
So I only know what I know.
I only know what the Old Testament had to tell me.
And I'm thinking about it.
Must be very easy to think.
Where is God?
The Isaiah people talked about a Messiah.
Where is he?
Well, back to reality, I was sitting on the seat.
Suddenly somebody appeared and he sat down.
Chump sat down.
All the same seat.
It was he and me now.
I turned and I said, where are you from?
He said, Northern Ireland.
Where are you from?
I said, yeah, Northern Ireland.
Where are you from in Northern Ireland?
I said, I'm from County Down.
He said, so am I.
He said, where are you in County Down?
I said, I went to school in Downpatrick.
He said, I went to school in Downpatrick.
And then suddenly, sitting on my own, looking out to sea,
feeling there's nobody around here, understands me.
I've got this guy sitting beside me.
Well, in those few sentences of exchange,
he already had a few things summed up.
He said, I know you went to the Green High.
I said, yeah.
He said, you know, you would know that I went to the Red High.
I said, yeah, I do.
Well, the Green High is where the Protestants went.
Red High is where the, well, the Roman Catholics.
That's a nice way to put it.
But in those days, you would say, that's where the Finians went.
But anyway, you hadn't heard that.
So I thought, oh.
And then he looked at me and he said, we're in the same seat together.
I said, yeah.
Yeah, but he said, when you walked the streets of Downpatrick,
going to school, you saw me in my red uniform.
You walked on the other side of the road and didn't look at me.
I said, yeah, and you walked on the other side of the road and didn't look at me.
He said, that's right.
We're on the same seat.
And there entered a depth.
He had a pedigree and I had a pedigree.
I had a place I lived, a place I went to school,
and a thousand things come into his mind and in my mind
that we understood on common ground and about each other.
And there embarked a conversation that was an in-depth, fascinating understanding.
So what was far, far away, suddenly,
there was a reality came to the seat, meeting this person.
If you were, we'll park that till later.
If you were a Jew, a Jew in the then world, who you are,
we talk in our culture, people talk very much in our culture today about their CV.
If you want who I am on paper, then there's my CV.
There's your CV.
And you hear it in conversation, oh yeah, that'll be good for my CV.
Somebody's done this or that and done that.
A child has done the Jew-Gadden-Burra scheme.
I'll be good for my CV.
If you were a Jew in the then world, in the then culture at that time,
it wasn't CV, it was here's my genealogy.
This is me.
And a good Jew with an impressive CV, with an impressive geology,
genealogy would have purity in their genealogy that would go right back, back, back, back.
So for Matthew to write a genealogy of Jesus that went zoom back to Abraham,
who on the face of it, that was impressive.
But my, there were things in the Jesus genealogy that were not impressive.
As far as the Jew was concerned, they needed purity in their genealogy to have acceptance.
A priest had to produce an unbroken record of pedigree back to Aaron.
And if he married a woman, he had to prove her pedigree at least for five generations.
So that was the culture of the then world, re-pedigree of genealogy.
But when we look at this genealogy, well, what a pedigree.
First of all, there's woman here.
But you didn't put that on your genealogy.
That wasn't the CV you produced.
The identity of a Jew had a genealogy of purity that certainly didn't mention a woman.
And as for a woman in the then culture, in the eyes of an orthodox Jew, they thank God every day.
That I wasn't a Gentile, I wasn't a slave, and I wasn't a woman.
But here we not just have woman, but we've got Rahab.
And she's a Canaanite prostitute, a professional Canaanite prostitute outside the camp.
And she's in this genealogy of Jesus.
And then you've got Tamar.
And she dressed in disguise according to Genesis 38 and offered herself as a prostitute to Judah.
And then Perez is one of her sons, and this is in the Jesus genealogy of identity.
And then we've got Ruth here in this genealogy.
And she is a Moabitess.
Well, according to Deuteronomy 23, no Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord down to the tenth generation.
And Ruth is in the genealogy, prominent.
And then we have Bathsheba referred to as Uriah's wife, with whom is the story of King David and adultery.
And many other things beside in relation to deception and in relation to purposeful strategy for murder.
Here is the genealogy of Jesus.
Even back with Abraham, funny things were happening.
Ishmael and Isaac and women and children.
Hagar, Jacob's here.
Oh my goodness, it should have been Esau, but then there was deception and manipulation.
And then it was Jacob and Jacob's here.
And this is the genealogy of who?
It's the genealogy of Jesus.
Yes, as Andy said, we have from Abraham to David and David to exile and exile to Jesus.
Each fourteen generations and split those in two and it's sevens and that's seven times six.
And Jesus is the beginning of the seventh seven.
And that's very mathematically impressive and scripturally impressive and interesting spiritually.
It's very much a Bible of sevens, God bringing things to completion.
For example, he created the world in seven days and the seventh day was the crowning day of creation.
He made the rainbow of seven colors and together in completion they send us perfect light.
Seven complete and here we have Jesus at the beginning of the seventh of the seven.
But together with this completed perfection, well, one commentator has said,
if you actually ransacked the whole of the New Testament to try to find woman,
unsuitable to be in the pedigree of the genus, Jesus genealogy,
you probably find the ultimate of that which is not credible.
Right up front, Matthew is very subtly opening the door to us about the genealogy and the pedigree
of someone coming along who is Jesus, who breaks down barriers.
And it's quite obvious even here we've got the barriers breaking down between Jew and Gentile.
And as we read the New Testament and we read Acts and then we read Galatians,
which deals with this specifically, we've got all of the issues that arise as people within a certain camp
see themselves as pure and look at people outside the camp as impure on how this affected the gospel
and the teaching that Paul had to give to counteract it.
But here in the very first Matthew 1 genealogy, Jew and Gentile barriers, social barriers are dismantled.
Jesus has come to show the love of God indiscriminately, non-judgmentally, unconditionally.
Social barriers broken.
The genealogy of Matthew chapter 1 shows with absolute clarity that Jesus is breaking the gender barrier completely.
There's no sense of apology for a woman in the genealogy.
Gender barriers are broken.
This God manifesting himself in Jesus as someone coming on the scene
who will sit on the well by the Samaritan woman, whoever she is,
this is the one who's breaking down all gender barriers totally.
And then we have the barriers of righteousness and sin.
Great person and not so good person, wicked person and righteous person.
This genealogy breaks down the sinner, righteous person barrier completely.
I have come not to call the righteous, but the sinner.
So in the genealogy of Jesus, we have Jacob and the story of deception,
David and the story of manipulation and even murder.
We have the story of adultery.
We have the story of prostitution.
We got all these stories and they're all broken down and Jesus has come.
I'm not here. I'm here to call the sinner.
And there will be a prostitute at his feet and he will accept her fully
because Jesus is not talking, is not here for the moral or the immoral,
the righteous or the unrighteous, but Jesus is here for the world of people
with all social barriers, all gender barriers and all moral barriers broken down.
And it's so easy even at the sensitive time of year of Christmas
to come to the point where you think, oh, my black spots, black spots,
this one, that one or that thing in my life.
Jesus is saying whatever the black spot is that anybody thinks is in their life,
morally, adulterally, of whatever nature you put the label of vile sinner upon oneself,
says Jesus, look, I love you unconditionally, non-judgmentally.
And it's all there in his own genealogy, purposefully brought to the light,
purposefully exposed, purposefully declared.
Without apology, this is the essence of the gospel.
This is who Jesus has come to the world to save.
And then we're introduced then to the coming of Jesus and the word Emmanuel.
Isaiah introduces this to us in chapter seven and chapter nine.
And this word, yes, is a word which is a name.
The name of Jesus, Emmanuel, prophesied by Isaiah, and here we have,
Emmanuel has come, but this word is also a truth.
And the truth is, God with us.
Jesus has come and in coming he's bringing us God, God with us, Jesus with us, Jesus for us, Jesus in us.
You remember my story, sitting on the seat, looking out over the sea,
and suddenly something appears when I think,
it's all very far away, that life where I used to be in Northern Ireland,
but suddenly somebody comes and is with me.
And I suddenly feel understood.
In fact, I feel something exposed that was never exposed to me in that way before
because I didn't see myself as walking along the street.
And if somebody doesn't understand,
the Prophesianism and Catholicism in Northern Ireland, feel free to ask me and I'll explain.
But I feel, felt understood and in being understood was able to enter into emotionally
something of an experience with someone that was quite powerful.
Jesus has come.
Where has he come to?
To be with us, beside us, in us.
Who?
Everybody.
Who's excluded?
Moral creed type, social barrier, gender barrier?
No, no barriers.
Whatsoever.
Jesus has come to be with us.
Jesus came in human flesh to where we are.
That guy just sat beside me on the seat.
Jesus says, can I just sit beside you on the seat where you are now?
And could you just feel the reality of the eternal God with you?
With you?
Not focused on the past black spots of life or the things that come up to bring a guilty conscience,
but just who you are.
I just accept you as you are and I want to be with you.
Christmas can expose loneliness, isolation, feeling down.
Jesus said, I am with you now and forever.
At the end of the book of Matthew in chapter 28 verse 20, it concludes by saying, I am
with you always to the very end of the age.
It starts with Emmanuel and it finishes with, I am with you always till the very end of
the age.
What more do you and I want than that?
If we were to illustrate this with say one living New Testament example, take Stephen
in Acts chapter 7 and he's declaring the truth of the gospel with clarity and it's
not liked and it's not accepted and as a result of that people want to stone him and in the
act of wanting to stone him and he is going to be stoned and he's going to lay down his
life as a martyr, but in the act of that and in those critical delicate moments he sees
something.
Who does he see?
Looking up to heaven he saw who?
He saw Jesus.
Jesus the son of David.
Jesus the man.
Jesus the human being.
He saw Jesus the son of man.
It's all easy to think about God as a way far off and who and where when in fact he's
came to be with us on our seat where we are and just to be with us and he wants to be
with us forever.
So that the Bible then refers to us particularly in Hebrews as Jesus the great high priest
who is the son of David the son of man in the heavenlies there to represent you and
me as a man but God who is touched with the feelings of our infirmity.
In conclusion, Irish man, there was a rather significant Irish man called St. Patrick a
way back in the fourth century who produced a breastplate on prayer and one of the verses
reads Christ be with me Christ within me Christ behind me Christ before me Christ beside me
Christ to win me Christ to comfort and restore me Christ beneath me Christ above me Christ
in quiet Christ in danger Christ in hearts of all that love me Christ in mouth of friend
and stranger.
His name is Emmanuel.
God with us.
Amen.