00:00:00:52 – 00:00:26:33
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us. Appreciate you being with us as we take a look at the Bible and Christmas. Today we’re jumping in Matthew and Luke kind of bouncing back and forth between the two, as those are the two gospels that give us the Christmas story. And the place where we start is actually well before that, we go back to the Old Testament, to a word that we use in the church.

00:00:26:33 – 00:00:51:29
Clint Loveall
But I don’t it’s not an unfamiliar word, but it’s not the most common word. The word Messiah and the word Messiah means anointed one. It’s a Hebrew word. And as it developed it, it became an expectation of the people. So originally the word Messiah could be used of a king, could be used of a priest. Occasionally it would even be used of a prophet.

00:00:51:34 – 00:01:38:37
Clint Loveall
And it meant somebody anointed, somebody appointed, somebody selected to do God’s work. But over time, in the aftermath of Israel being conquered by the Assyrians, Judah being conquered by the Babylonians, a messiah became a very specific title, and it became synonymous with the expectation of the person who was going to come and set Israel free. And likely for those in Jesus time who used it, they meant free from Roman occupation, free from Roman oppression and the clear expectation of the Messiah was a military leader.

00:01:38:42 – 00:02:10:01
Clint Loveall
Not necessarily a divine figure, but, a commander, a conqueror who was going to come and overthrow the people. And and this is, this is well established. If you look at the 20 years before Jesus birth and the 20 years after, there are many people in that time frame called the Messiah, people who started rebellions, and people thought maybe they’re the Messiah, maybe he’s the Messiah, maybe he’s the Messiah.

00:02:10:06 – 00:02:42:13
Clint Loveall
And I think understanding that expectation, Michael, to some extent, helps us understand the difficulty people would have had with Jesus, not only in general, but as we specifically think about the Christmas stories that it does. You don’t have to read very far to think, well, Jesus, isn’t that. Yeah. I mean, very humble circumstances, a humble family, no mention of wealth and power and military might.

00:02:42:18 – 00:02:50:01
Clint Loveall
And so the very expectation of the Messiah is a difficult one as pertains to the Christmas story.

00:02:50:06 – 00:03:33:36
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And I think that’s worth taking a little bit of a pause here. If you’ve ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they’re actually a significant contributor to our understanding of some of what Clinton is talking about here. There’s a lot of historical writings written, especially from the Roman point of view, about this time frame. But one of the things that the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us with their discovery was this awareness of alternate faith communities that were taking very seriously the kind of messiah figures, the kind of revolt and overturn Rome ideologies that we’ve come historically to understand was very common at the time.

00:03:33:41 – 00:03:59:22
Michael Gewecke
That is a really important component of this story, because what it means is that when the gospel writers are sitting down to tell the story of Jesus’s birth, they are telling this story in the awareness of a context that has in their thinking the idea that someone is coming. And like all humans, they have expectations about what that person will be like.

00:03:59:22 – 00:04:27:46
Michael Gewecke
And of course, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that one of those expectations would be that the Anointed One, the Promised One, would come in the line of David. Well, who’s David? David’s a mighty man of war. David’s a king. David is someone who sits and occupies a place of power and authority as a person of Israel. Well, fundamentally, people were looking for someone who would function in the same role.

00:04:27:53 – 00:05:06:54
Michael Gewecke
You might also have some prophetic ideas. You had prophets who were anointed, and so you might have that idea. The spiritual teacher and, those aspects that people would be expecting for this Messiah to live out. But either way, and this is really essential information either way, the birth story of Jesus is told in such a way that neither of these are incredibly prominent throughout this story is written to people expecting a messiah, but the gospel writers are making it clear the Messiah that you’re looking for may not be the Messiah who God actually gave you.

00:05:06:54 – 00:05:09:56
Michael Gewecke
And that is an important start to this story.

00:05:10:01 – 00:05:35:19
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think particularly in Matthew’s case, who is maybe more aware of a Jewish audience. But the the reason this matters, I think Michael’s twofold. And the first is a thing that people might know, but they might not know. They know the word Messiah is a Hebrew word. The word Christ is the exact word, but the Greek version.

00:05:35:24 – 00:06:13:57
Clint Loveall
So when we call Jesus the Christ, that’s just a one language saying Messiah. It’s so the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One. And when we open the Christmas story, particularly in Matthew, we get an account of the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, or the Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham and Matthew will then go on to tie Jesus to all those historical figures, those prominent figures of out of Israel’s history, particularly with an eye toward David.

00:06:14:02 – 00:06:43:50
Clint Loveall
Luke is going to do the same thing. Slightly different reason Luke’s going to not stop with Abraham, but go all the way back to Adam. But if you’ve ever wondered why this long list of names, if you’ve ever tried to read through the father of the son of the father of. ET Cetera, etc.. Well, this is why. Because to make this case that Jesus is in fact the Christ, that Jesus is the Messiah.

00:06:43:55 – 00:07:18:14
Clint Loveall
None of these other people, no one who has come, no one who will come, but Jesus. Matthew and Luke attempt to make the connection with David because everybody expected, everybody knew that the Messiah would be in the lineage of David. So this is more than storytelling. This is resumé building. This is Jesus. This is Matthew, particularly because, again, Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience.

00:07:18:14 – 00:07:48:18
Clint Loveall
And so he he has to do this, that the Jewish people know the expectation that the Messiah will be of David’s family line. So what is Matthew do? He traces it and he connects Jesus to all of those people, not only to David, but all the way back to Abraham, the initial receiver of the covenant. And, that I it’s not anyone’s favorite part of the Christmas story, Mike.

00:07:48:18 – 00:08:06:31
Clint Loveall
Like, I get that it’s a long list of names. Sometimes we don’t recognize them, but it it is, I think, particularly in Matthew’s case, it is vitally important for what Matthew is trying to do with this Christmas story.

00:08:06:36 – 00:08:33:41
Michael Gewecke
You don’t want to be too specific, but I think it’s a fair argument to say that Matthew is particularly focused in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, and therefore evangelizing within the context of people who have a substantial understanding of what we would call the Old Testament. The Jews were, of course, reading those scriptures as their Bible. That that is their scriptures.

00:08:33:41 – 00:09:06:55
Michael Gewecke
And so when Matthew comes to tell the story of Jesus, he wants it to be abundantly clear that the story that I’m about to tell you about this man, Jesus Christ, is not a departure from the things that you know. It’s not a departure from the work that God has been doing. Matthew, it’s really abundantly important that you firmly understand that what God has chosen to do in this revelation of Jesus Christ is in continuity to all of the things that God has been doing before.

00:09:07:06 – 00:09:34:01
Michael Gewecke
And the way that he makes that argument is by starting with an orientation inside that context, so that, you know, basically, if you were to receive this and if this is your only book as an ancient Jew and you receive this, this account of Jesus’s life, you would look at it and you would intuitively know right from the start where it fits inside this other canon of Scripture that you already know really well.

00:09:34:06 – 00:09:58:39
Michael Gewecke
And make no mistake about it, in your Christian Bible, with all of the books that we have collected in what we call our New Testament, it’s not a mistake that Matthew is the first gospel in our New Testament, because fundamentally, this genealogy in a very important way, serves the same purpose for the Christian New Testament, because it provides for us the context of how Jesus’s story fits into the larger story.

00:09:58:39 – 00:10:26:11
Michael Gewecke
And so I think Matthew’s telling you that is interesting in that way. The the reverse of that, the converse of that, you might say to me, what’s really interesting is Luke does not begin with the genealogy. In fact, Luke gets to a genealogy after all the stuff that you and I think of as Christmas stuff. Luke doesn’t even tell you of Jesus’s genealogy until, you know, he literally says in Luke chapter 323 that Jesus was about 30 years old.

00:10:26:11 – 00:10:51:53
Michael Gewecke
So for for Luke, the way that this story needs to be told, the universal appeal of Jesus’s life isn’t best served by starting with his resume. To use that phrase, it’s best served by starting with Where is Jesus in the time block? Who are the major characters of Jesus’s early story? How is he born? How does his ministry begin?

00:10:51:54 – 00:11:13:31
Michael Gewecke
And then once we get to what we would call adulthood, then Luke is going to give us the context of where this Jesus fit in salvific history, the way that they even lay these out inside their books. This is the simple point. Even the placement of them gives us a clue to different purposes and understandings of those genealogies.

00:11:13:31 – 00:11:43:36
Clint Loveall
Yeah, where I think Matthew wants to point out that Jesus is the one who fulfills the promise to the Hebrew, the Jewish people. Luke wants to point out that Jesus is the culmination of the promise God makes to all creation, to Adam, right? And so they are different. And not only are they different in their intent, I think one of the things that is fascinating and difficult, troubling to some, is that the genealogies themselves are different.

00:11:43:40 – 00:12:07:54
Clint Loveall
They don’t match. And that’s that’s very strange for us. Who would think that you should be able to chart your family lineage? Although I would suspect most families have an aunt or uncle that gets into genealogy and and you find out there’s a question mark here or a question mark there. Maybe that’s some of what’s going on here.

00:12:07:58 – 00:12:39:18
Clint Loveall
Matthew and Luke present some different names. They present, different. So they may name the same person, but then they’ll name a different father for that person. At least that seems to be what’s going on historically. The best guess for this is to say that Matthew, as a Jew, is tracing Joseph’s lineage, where Luke might be tracing Mary’s lineage.

00:12:39:23 – 00:13:10:33
Clint Loveall
That’s an acceptable answer that we don’t we we can’t say that that is exactly. And it doesn’t explain all of the differences. But for whatever reason, there is some looseness in these genealogies, as you think there might be in such, a broad, long spanning family history. Matthew again, very organized. He presents the names in three movements of 14 and 14.

00:13:10:33 – 00:13:36:49
Clint Loveall
Is the number of David’s name. If you take the numbers of David in Hebrew, add them up in the Hebrew number system. So it the scholars think that maybe that even that is reinforcing the connection between Jesus and David. There’s a lot that we don’t understand about these genealogies. We certainly understand why they’re here. We get their purpose as to some of the nuances.

00:13:36:54 – 00:14:14:01
Clint Loveall
Even Bible scholars scratched their head at some of it. But I think what it tells us, and I think fundamentally the importance of it, is that in occluding a genealogy, both Matthew and Luke say that Jesus is not something that God started upon. The Christmas story. Christmas is the continuation and the culmination of what God has always been about, which is leading people, guiding people, bringing hope to people that Christmas is the the fulfillment of something, not necessarily just the beginning of something.

00:14:14:06 – 00:14:24:15
Clint Loveall
And I think I yes, there are lots of questions we can ask about the, the genealogies, but I think ultimately that’s their that’s their purpose.

00:14:24:19 – 00:14:58:17
Michael Gewecke
There’s some really interesting differences, one being that Matthew wants to start with Abraham and go up through time, and Luke wants to start with Jesus’s father and then go backwards in time. You know that just like the 14 generations piece, I’ll be honest, this is one of the reasons I think that we’re we gravitate towards some of these Christmas stories that we have because for us, the donkey coming into Bethlehem is a very accessible idea.

00:14:58:17 – 00:15:26:04
Michael Gewecke
And then the idea, oh no, we can’t find a room. And then we imagine exactly what that stable looks like. We can get our mind around it. We can imagine it. What’s difficult about this is 14 generations likely makes no difference for you. But Matthew is very, very intentional throughout the entire gospel. If you read all of Matthew, not just the Christmas sections, numbers are very important to Matthew because numerology is very important in ancient Judaism.

00:15:26:04 – 00:15:48:03
Michael Gewecke
And so you have lots of sevens here. You have 14. There’s a lot of structural elements to this gospel, which would all naturally make sense to the people who originally this book was delivered to. And so for us, it does require some work of us. It’s not just like a happy memory or nostalgia that we attached to our Christmas celebrations.

00:15:48:03 – 00:16:12:14
Michael Gewecke
If you really want to jump into this, you have to wrestle with how Matthew seems to be telling us about how Jesus represents God’s anointed plan to be the Messiah in the Old Testament sense. And then you have Luke, who seems to emphasize this idea that Jesus is the Son of Man and that ultimately he’s not just a human, but he’s the Son of God.

00:16:12:14 – 00:16:49:46
Michael Gewecke
And somehow these things together is good news. Not just for the people of Israel, but for all people. These two things can be troubling if your whole goal is to assimilate, if your whole goal is to figure out how each piece of that puzzle needs to fit with the other. But I would submit to you, Clint, that I think actually it’s one of the greater strengths of the Bible is because fundamentally, if you understand that these letters, these gospels, these accounts of Jesus’s good news were delivered to different people, and you can try to get yourself in a view that you can see that intention from a different perspective.

00:16:49:57 – 00:17:11:24
Michael Gewecke
What it gives you the ability to see is Jesus’s life has reverberations for every community, whether or not the numerology makes sense to you in Matthew. What might make sense to you is that Luke wants us to see through his genealogy that Jesus’s lineage goes all the way back to Adam. It goes all the way back to the beginning of creation.

00:17:11:24 – 00:17:42:56
Michael Gewecke
That Jesus is the first human in a real sense, that comes after, the sin of the garden, that Jesus is establishing a new kind of humanity. You get that image in Luke in a way that you just couldn’t with Matthew’s emphasis in his gospel. So I think there’s so much interesting nuance, and there’s so many wrinkles introduced by the differing audiences and ways of telling the story that may initially be missed by us if we’re trying to assimilate it all into one thing.

00:17:43:01 – 00:18:14:39
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And yeah, I think the very concept that Jesus has roots that that this child born at Christmas has ancestors, has a family lineage, has a tree that that Jesus takes his place in this line, whether you trace it back to Abraham or you trace it back to Adam, whether you include, as Matthew does, the the names of foreign women who find their way into Jesus lineage and celebrate those stories.

00:18:14:43 – 00:18:43:40
Clint Loveall
Or like Luke, whether you just plow through sun, of sun of, sun of, sun of and get that done, you know, Luke accomplishes in much less space a much longer genealogy than Matthew does. But but Matthew has to be more careful in how he presents it because of who he’s presenting it to. And and again, is this a part of the Christmas story that anybody pays any attention to?

00:18:43:49 – 00:19:10:15
Clint Loveall
I would argue that it’s not. I don’t think this isn’t a Christmas song. I, to my well, actually, there is one Christian singer who made a song of the begat the begat song. But people don’t know it. People don’t sing it. It’s not at church. It was more, I think, some fun thing. So I, I get it that it feels like, what are we doing?

00:19:10:15 – 00:19:59:11
Clint Loveall
But it matters. It matters that both Matthew and Luke are telling us that this story that we love so much, the Christmas tale, is a part of the ongoing story of God and his people. It is a special and profound moment, but it is not new. It is not God changing course. It is God fulfilling what God has always sought to do and you know, I I’m I’m biased, Michael, I admit that, but I, I think it’s the perfect place to start a story to to look backwards over what God has done in order to then move on and say what God has is going to do or is doing.

00:19:59:11 – 00:20:17:53
Clint Loveall
And, I probably find myself partial to Matthew’s version. They’re both interesting. But I think because Matthew starts with his, it, it carries, for me at least, maybe a little bit more storytelling force.

00:20:17:58 – 00:20:19:04
Michael Gewecke
I think Luke.

00:20:19:04 – 00:20:40:23
Clint Loveall
Uses it as a bridge to the rest of his gospel. I think Matthew uses it as a bridge to what we would call the Old Testament, to everything that has gone before, and that makes them both interesting. But I think Matthew, particularly the genealogy, is carrying a lot of water.

00:20:40:28 – 00:20:58:12
Michael Gewecke
I think. Absolutely. You mentioned this in the previous study not long ago. That part of the ordination process in our denomination is you have to be able to take a test and know where things are in the Bible and what are the skills that you need in that test is you need to have a sense for where with a passage like you.

00:20:58:17 – 00:20:58:42
Clint Loveall
Said.

00:20:58:42 – 00:21:27:40
Michael Gewecke
That. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think that this is one of the examples where that might lead you astray, because, Luke, if you know Luke’s gospel, Luke is very interested in women and the outcast and the poor. And so when you looked at these two genealogies, if they were unattached to the other context, you might look at Matthew’s and you would be justified in thinking, wow, this includes Tamar.

00:21:27:45 – 00:21:28:31
Clint Loveall
A Gentile.

00:21:28:31 – 00:21:59:49
Michael Gewecke
Woman. Yeah. You would look at that and think, man, I would bet that this is Luke and you would be wrong. I, I think that is just a fascinating twist, that these authors are doing things outside of some of the expectations that you might have of the larger literature. Luke here is concise. Luke is very much like a doctor trying to drill down to the exact point of what that genealogy exists for, which is to establish how Jesus’s ministry initiates and inaugurates something new in the world.

00:21:59:54 – 00:22:24:54
Michael Gewecke
I, I agree with you completely. I think Matthew’s genealogy, though it includes so many names that quite frankly, the temptation is to be bored by what you are going to miss if you blow through. It is that these are real, living human beings. Some of them are women who are bending the history of Israel. Some of them are people who are nobody’s heroes list.

00:22:24:54 – 00:22:48:55
Michael Gewecke
Okay. And yet they’re part of the building up of what God’s going to do in the world. And Jesus is coming onto the scene through this large, messy family story. I agree with you completely. I think that in a way, Matthew’s genealogy brings a kind of human life to Jesus. Is Christmas birth story. That is beautiful. It’s important.

00:22:48:55 – 00:22:56:21
Michael Gewecke
It’s connective. Our Bibles, though we may not find, is the easiest. Reading our Bibles are better because it’s in it.

00:22:56:25 – 00:23:26:49
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I don’t want to overdo this. I don’t want to take more time, but I this is a little overstated. But give me some leeway. Luke is locating Jesus, the man on a family lineage, right? Luke says he was 30. He was the son. It was thought of Joseph, who was the son. On and on and on. Matthew is telling the history of Israel.

00:23:27:03 – 00:23:40:28
Clint Loveall
So when when Matthew gets to David, he says, David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. He he can’t even say Bathsheba. Yeah. Because that’s such a painful story.

00:23:40:28 – 00:23:40:55
Michael Gewecke
Yeah.

00:23:40:55 – 00:24:04:23
Clint Loveall
To this great man, David, this man who was thought to be great in the in the faith. And so that just has all the markers of, you know, he these are names that are known and stories that are known to those who read them. And we’ve lost some of that, unfortunately. So this does read dry and dusty to us.

00:24:04:28 – 00:24:29:13
Clint Loveall
But I, I think if you can think of it like sitting with your children to share the old family album and tell stories about the wild uncles and the crazy aunts and the wonderful people and your amazing great grandmother and etc., etc.. That’s the vibe here. And I think ultimately it’s it’s helpful.

00:24:29:18 – 00:24:49:00
Michael Gewecke
Well, friends, thanks for sticking with us up to this point. If you’ve made it to this part of the study, man, give this video a like. It’ll help others find it as they’re trying to study the Christmas story right there in their Bibles. I’m also subscribed because we’ve got a lot more to come as we look in more detail into Matthew and to Luke, some of the characters, the Christmas, you’re not going to miss it.

00:24:49:04 – 00:24:50:23
Michael Gewecke
Look forward to seeing you there tomorrow.

00:24:50:24 – 00:24:51:01
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.