When we hear the words broken, we often think of one of two options, repair or disposal. For most of us, when something can no longer perform its intended function to our specifications, it becomes “worthless,” and we set it aside. However, the scripture paints a very different reality when our Heavenly Father deals with the broken lives of his children. Throughout scripture, there are numerous illustrations of God using characters who are obviously and painfully flawed, and as we might expect, the birth of His Son is no exception.
Matthew begins his Gospel with a genealogy, declaring that the Jesus who was born in Bethlehem, raised by Joseph, and worked as a craftsman in Nazareth was the descendant of Abraham through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Matthew sought to convince his readers that Jesus, who had no home, no fortune, and only an unimpressive group of followers, was the royal King in the line of David whose kingdom would never end.
But honestly, if that was all that Matthew was trying to accomplish, he could have gone about recording Jesus’s family history in a very different way. If that’s all Matthew was trying to communicate, there would be no reason for him to include some of the names he chose to include in the genealogy, specifically the names of five women.
This week as we think about the birth of Christ, we will pause to consider what God is telling us through the genealogy of his son about the Kingdom he came to establish.
