This is a story and a teaching about the quiet feeling that some people are born inside the good family and other people are born outside of it. Almost every culture has had a version of it, a sense that your name, your bloodline, or the town you came from decides how much you are worth before you have done anything at all. Plenty of good people still carry that feeling about themselves, and they would never say it out loud.
The very first page of the New Testament is a list of names, and whoever wrote that list went hunting through the family’s history for the most embarrassing names in it and wrote every one of them down.
So let us open that page together and walk through the names one at a time, and see who the writer chose to keep.
What a family list was for
A family list back then was not a fun fact about your great-grandparents. It was your standing in the world. It told everyone which people you belonged to, who would share a meal with you, and whether you counted as an insider. A clean line meant you were safe. One shameful name in it gave people a reason to look down on you for the rest of your life.
So the job of a royal family list was simple. Leave out anything embarrassing. Make it spotless.
The person who wrote the family list of Jesus did the opposite.
The first name he wrote in
He wrote in a woman named Rahab.
Rahab lived in Jericho, a walled city, hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Jericho was an enemy city, one the people of Israel were preparing to fight. Rahab sold her body for money, which her world counted as about the lowest work a person could do.
Two Israelite men came into Jericho as spies, to look at the walls and count the soldiers. The king of Jericho heard they were in the city and sent men to find them. Rahab hid the two spies on her roof, under stalks of flax laid out to dry, and told the king’s men the spies had already left through the gate. Then she let the spies down the outside of the city wall on a rope from her window, because her house was built into the wall itself.
She saved their lives. And her name is on the first page of the New Testament.
The second name
Then comes Ruth.
Ruth came from Moab, a country on the other side of the Dead Sea. Moab and the people of Israel had feuded for generations. The old law named Moab out loud.
An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever.Deuteronomy 23:3
A person from Moab was to be kept out of God’s people, and so were their children, and their grandchildren, for ten generations.
Ruth’s story starts with a famine. A man from Bethlehem named Elimelech took his wife Naomi and their two sons across the border into Moab looking for food. The two sons married Moabite women there, and Ruth was one of them. Then Elimelech died. Then both sons died. Three widows were left in one house.
Naomi decided to go home to Bethlehem. She told both of her sons’ widows to stay in Moab with their own mothers. Orpah, the other widow, kissed her and stayed. Ruth would not let go of her. She told Naomi that wherever Naomi went she would go, and Naomi’s people would be her people.
So Ruth walked out of Moab, crossed the border, and came into Bethlehem, a small barley town in the hills, with nothing. It was the start of the barley harvest. She went out into the fields behind the reapers and picked up the leftover grain they dropped, which was what the poor were allowed to do.
The field belonged to a man named Boaz, a landowner and a relative of Naomi’s dead husband. Boaz noticed her working, told his young men to leave her alone, and told them to pull extra grain out of the bundles and drop it where she would find it. Later he married her.
Ruth had a son named Obed. Obed had a son named Jesse. Jesse had a son named David, the shepherd boy who became the greatest king the people of Israel ever had.
Three generations. That is the whole distance between the banned foreigner and the king every child was taught to be proud of.
The name he refused to clean up
The list runs straight through David, and it runs straight through the worst thing David ever did.
David was on the roof of his palace in Jerusalem one evening while his army was away at war. He saw a woman washing, down below. Her name was Bathsheba, and she was married to Uriah, a soldier in David’s own army, a foreigner from the Hittites who had sworn loyalty to David and was out fighting for him at that very moment.
David sent for her. She became pregnant. So David called Uriah home from the front, hoping Uriah would sleep in his own house and everyone would assume the child was his. Uriah would not go home while his fellow soldiers slept in tents in a field. He slept in the doorway of the palace instead.
Then David wrote a letter to Joab, the commander of his army, and sent it to the front in Uriah’s own hand. The letter told Joab to put Uriah in the hardest part of the fighting and then pull the other men back from him. Joab did it. Uriah was killed. David took his wife.
The family list gets to that generation and will not smooth it over. It will not even print Bathsheba’s name.
David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias.Matthew 1:6
The wife of Uriah. The murdered man’s name is sitting in the royal family tree, on the first page, where nobody reading it could pretend it never happened.
What the list was for
That is the family the writer put on paper. A woman from an enemy city who sold her body. A woman from the one country the law had shut the door on. A king’s worst crime, spelled out with the victim named. And at the end of that line stands Jesus.
He had not said a word yet, and the list had already said what he came to say.
There is no such thing as pure blood. The family God worked through was made out of the exact people the world was busy throwing away. The foreigner, the enemy, the woman with a past, the man who did the terrible thing and had to live with it.
So the list was never really about who Jesus came from. It was about who he came for.
If you have ever been the one left off somebody’s list, the wrong family, the wrong town, the wrong past, the wrong kind of person for the room, the first page was already making room. For Rahab. For Ruth. For a king who did a terrible thing. And for you.
You were on the list the whole time.
Isn’t it a wonderful thing that a writer sat down two thousand years ago, with every reason to hide those names, and wrote them in instead. Now you know one of the quiet messages tucked into the first page of the New Testament, and there are more of them waiting further in. Come find us online, where we keep turning back to the old scripture and finding the love that was hiding in it all along. There is a place at the table for you here, too.