An Unimpressive Candidate...

During this Christmas season, we are spending our time looking at the Christmas story from one of the four accounts of Jesus life in the Bible. This account, called the gospel of Matthew was written to prove to the Jewish people that Jesus was the Messiah, the one God that promised would come to rescue and restore the Jewish nation as His chosen people.

So to prove that Jesus was the long promised Messiah, Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy to show that Jesus had the proper family background to be the Messiah. But as we saw last week, for a Jewish person, who was so familiar with the history of the Jewish people that is recorded for us in the Old Testament, reading this genealogy, or family tree of Jesus, would not seem very convincing and would even be very confusing. So let’s look again at the beginning of the Christmas story as a Jewish person would have read it, beginning in Matthew 1:1:

The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.

Now as we talked about last week, a Jewish person reading this letter from Matthew would stop and pause here. They would stop and pause here because every Jewish person knew that Judah was not the most famous of Jacob’s twelve sons. Joseph was the famous son of Jacob.

Even if you are not very familiar with the Bible, while you probably have never heard of Judah, you may have heard of Joseph. Joseph was the guy in the Bible who had a fancy, multi-colored coat. And a Jewish person reading Matthew’s gospel would know the story of Joseph, which we find in the first book of our Bibles, called the book of Genesis. You see, Joseph was not just one of the twelve sons of Jacob, who was the father of the Jewish nation; Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob, who he spoiled.

The rest of Jacob’s sons, however, were so jealous of Joseph that they hated him to the point that they would not even speak to him. And Joseph did not help himself when he shared dreams that he had in which he ended up ruling over his parents and his brothers. After sharing these dreams, Joseph’s brothers became even more jealous and resentful of him. Later in this story, we read that Jacob sent his favorite son Joseph to check up and spy on his brothers while they were at work. We read next what every Jewish person knew, beginning in Genesis 37:18-28:

When they saw him from a distance and before he came close to them, they plotted against him to put him to death. They said to one another, "Here comes this dreamer! "Now then, come and let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; and we will say, 'A wild beast devoured him.' Then let us see what will become of his dreams!" But Reuben heard this and rescued him out of their hands and said, "Let us not take his life." Reuben further said to them, "Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but do not lay hands on him"-- that he might rescue him out of their hands, to restore him to his father. So it came about, when Joseph reached his brothers, that they stripped Joseph of his tunic, the varicolored tunic that was on him; and they took him and threw him into the pit. Now the pit was empty, without any water in it. Then they sat down to eat a meal. And as they raised their eyes and looked, behold, a caravan of Ishmaelites was coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing aromatic gum and balm and myrrh, on their way to bring them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, "What profit is it for us to kill our brother and cover up his blood? "Come and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh."

Here we see Joseph’s jealous brothers having he following conversation over lunch, as Joseph is stuck in an empty pit that was used to store water: “Should we sell him, or should we kill him? What works out better for us?” And in the middle of this discussion, it is Judah that suggests that they should sell him. We then see what happens next:

And his brothers listened to him. Then some Midianite traders passed by, so they pulled him up and lifted Joseph out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. Thus they brought Joseph into Egypt.

So, the brothers of Joseph, at Judah’s suggestion, pull Joseph out of the pit and proceed the sell him as a slave for 20 shekels. Can you imagine how Joseph must have felt when his brothers looked at him and sold him into slavery? Can you imagine how much jealousy, hatred, and hardness you would have to have to sell your own brother into slavery, despite his pleading cries to the contrary? And the man that came up with the plan was Judah. So as you might imagine, a Jewish person reading Matthew's letter would not be impressed with Judah.

But, for a Jewish person, there was another story about Judah in the Bible that made him even more unimpressive. We will look at that story tomorrow.