Merry Missional Christmas!
When we think of Christmas, we think of missions. To which you may retort: “Well, of course you do, that’s what you do for a living!” Actually, it has less to do with our calling and more to do with what the Bible actually says.
Did you know that the word missions is not in the Bible? (Now, I’m making my case more difficult for myself!) You can scan through your Study Bible, concordances, or Bible dictionaries and you will not find the word missions.
However, when you read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation (what we like to call “God’s Big Story”) you will find that the essence of what we refer to as missions is exactly what God has been doing from the beginning of time. And the Christmas story, as recorded in the Gospels (specifically the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and, in a way, John), is a key chapter in the Big Story of God’s mission plan.
For just one example from many that could be made, take a look at how Matthew starts his Gospel. Instead of giving us the backstory of Mary’s relatives and the birth story of John the Baptist, like Luke does, Matthew records a genealogy that takes us from Abraham to David to Jesus.
“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, 4 and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, 6 and Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah…” (Matthew 1:1-6)
Those are a lot of difficult names to pronounce and it continues for 42 generations all the way to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Starting with a genealogy gives us the impression that the story Matthew is about to tell us has its roots in all that came before, namely, the Old Testament. What God was doing in the birth of Jesus started long before with the calling of Abraham, multiplying his descendants, giving Israel a good king, and promising a Messiah in the lineage of David.
But did you notice something strange in the first six verses of that genealogy? There are four women mentioned. Now, this is not entirely strange because mentioning a king’s mother in the history of Israel in 1 & 2 Kings indicates that we are reading about the story of a king of Judah, the southern kingdom, rather than the northern kingdom called Samaria or just “Israel.” Jesus was born in the lineage of Judah, (verse 2) so that makes sense. Jesus is in the lineage of the kings of Judah!
But there’s something else going here. The four women all have some serious question marks about them that would have raised the eyebrows of the average Jewish-background reader of Matthew’s gospel when it was originally written. They are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah” (whose name was Bathsheba). Each of these women’s stories have a bit of scandal tied to them.
Tamar’s story can be found in Genesis 38. She was the neglected widow of Judah’s son. When several of Judah’s sons died after marrying Tamar one after the other to carry on the family line, Judah just ignores her for fear that another son will die. She rightly wants to have a son for the family. But, in order to do so, Tamar disguises herself as a pagan cult prostitute and Judah (her father-in-law!) sleeps with her not knowing it was her (what was he doing seeking out a pagan cult prostitute in the first place?). There are so many things wrong with what each of the people do in this story, one does not know where to start! The point here being that it is one of the most scandalous situations in the Old Testament and it turns out that the couple involved happens to be Jesus’ ancestors.
Rahab actually was a pagan prostitute who lived in Jericho. But she shows herself to be redeemed by her confession of faith and fear of the One True God (Joshua 2:11) and by helping the Israelite spies hide and escape from the city officials. When Joshua leads the battle of Jericho, Rahab and her family are spared and incorporated into the covenant people of Israel. She ends up marrying an Israelite by the name of Salmon and they have a son together named Boaz. This means there is a Canaanite Gentile former prostitute back in the early ancestry of Jesus the Jewish Messiah!
Then we read about Ruth in the Old Testament book named after her. Ruth is a story about another widow. But far from being scandalous, Ruth is a widow who is a model of endurance in hardship and faith in the God of Israel. In God’s providence Ruth would be remarried to Boaz of Bethlehem, the son of Rahab and Salmon. But, Ruth is a convert to Judaism from the Moabites. The Moabites were one of the most detested of Israel’s enemies. So, the surprise here is that Ruth is another Gentile convert, this time from one of the most loathed pagan nations in Israel’s history. And, yes, again, here she is listed as one of Jesus’ ancestors.
Finally, we read that the kingly lineage of Jesus as it was passed on from David was through Solomon. Of all the sons David had, God chose Solomon, the one who was born to David’s wife, Bathsheba. But the way Bathsheba became David’s wife… well… in a nutshell, David committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband, Uriah, then took her as his wife. It is the darkest blemish on David’s otherwise, rather spotless record. Matthew does not gloss over this scandalous story in his genealogy. That’s why he refers to Bathsheba as “the wife of Uriah.” David’s sin is forever highlighted in the ancestry of Jesus.
What’s the point? The point is that the Jewish Messiah came not just for the Jews, or for the holy and righteous. Jesus was sent as a missionary into a family full of broken, scandalous, sinful, unwanted, despised, and outcast people to seek and save people just like them all around the world. Jesus’ family tree doesn’t look much different than our own family trees.
The world is full of broken, scandalous, sinful, unwanted, despised, and outcast people like us who need the sacrificial death of Jesus to cover their sins, the resurrection of Jesus to promise them eternal life, and the Holy Spirit given by Jesus to live new lives of faith, hope, and love until he returns. Matthew wants us to think of the mission-heart of God when we read the Christmas story.
It should not surprise us, then, that it is Matthew who sends us off at the end of his gospel with a missional directive to the church (not just missionaries!)
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
When we adopt a missional mindset for our lives we are imitating God in his redemptive work to save the lost by sending Jesus. May you have a Merry Missional Christmas!
