The King Arrives in Person

If you were launching the most important book in the world, you would not open it with a list of names. Matthew does. Forty-two generations, fathers and sons, a few mothers who do not belong in a respectable Jewish genealogy – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah – marching down the page until they arrive at one name: Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

The plain sense is almost dull until you see what it claims. Son of Abraham means the promise made to one wandering family two thousand years earlier has a face now. Son of David means the throne God swore would never lack a king is filled. Matthew is not easing into his subject. He is producing the legal papers. Before Jesus says a word, His pedigree says it for Him: the long wait is over.

Then the angel names the child twice. Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins. Immanuel, which means God with us. The whole of Matthew 1 through 7 is the unfolding of those two names. The One who will save is the One who is with us – not a deputy God sent, not a message God mailed, but God Himself arriving in a body, in a town, in a family with a paper trail.

A friend of mine spent a hard year writing letters to a son who had stopped speaking to him. He wrote every week. Careful letters, no accusations, just news and longing and the same closing line: I am here when you are ready.

The son kept the letters. He told me later he reread them in stacks, late at night, and they did almost nothing. Words on paper from a father across the country are a strange comfort – real, and not enough. What finally broke him was not a letter. It was a knock. His father drove eleven hours and stood on the porch in the cold and said his name. The same words he had been reading for a year, now with a face and a voice and the breath of a body that had crossed real miles to be there.

For centuries Israel had the letters. Prophets, promises, a law engraved in stone, a temple where God’s presence dwelt behind a curtain. All of it true, all of it real, none of it the same as a knock. Matthew opens with the knock. God with us is not a better letter. It is the Author on the porch.

Matthew presents Jesus as the long-awaited son of David and son of Abraham – the rightful king in whom God’s ancient promises arrive in person. His first public word is a call to turn around, and His first sermon hands the kingdom of heaven to the poor in spirit. Born into a family tree marked by scandal and need, He is named both Jesus, the One who saves His people from their sins, and Immanuel, God with us. The whole of Matthew unfolds those two names, ending where it began – with the promise of His presence to the end of the age.