Birthing hope

Some are named, some are hidden. Some are unexpectedly front and centre, others are obscure. These are the women who are connected to the birth of Jesus, many of whom are marginalized both in their culture and in our readings. All of them are seeking to birth hope in a world where the powerful seem to control the lives of women. 

The beginning of the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t make it into many Christmas plays, with its long list of Jesus’ ancestors. Oddly, four women are referred to in this long list of men: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and “the wife of Uriah.” Why might Matthew have thought these women needed to be a part of Jesus’ genealogy? Why did they matter? Did they have something in common?

Based on their stories as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, commentators have emphasized the sexual irregularity of these women. Tamar was married to the eldest son of Judah, Joseph’s brother. When her husband died, she was given in marriage to Judah’s second son, according to the custom of the time. When her second husband died, instead of giving Tamar to his third son, as was required, Judah sent her back to her father’s house. Realizing that she had no future, Tamar dressed to look like a sex worker and Judah availed himself of her services. When it became apparent that she was pregnant, Judah condemned her to death – until he discovered that he was the father (Gen. 38).

Rahab was a sex worker in the city of Jericho when two Israelite spies showed up to see her. When soldiers came looking for the spies, Rahab hid them and sent the soldiers on a wild goose chase. As a result, the spies promised to save her and her family when Jericho was conquered (Josh. 2).

Ruth is the Moabite widow who accompanies her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, to Bethlehem after their husbands have died. Ruth not only cares for her mother-in-law by gleaning in the fields during the harvest, she also acts somewhat provocatively by heading to the threshing floor to offer herself to a man named Boaz in hopes that he will “do the right thing” and marry her. In the end he does, and she and Naomi are saved from starvation (Ruth 1-4).

Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, is the victim of rape at the hands of King David. When David finds out that she is pregnant, he attempts to get her husband to return home to her to cover up what happened; when that fails, David has her husband killed and marries Bathsheba himself (2 Sam. 11).

These women, some argue, are all involved in some sort of sexual escapade; their mention in Jesus’ genealogy sets us up to expect something unusual about how Jesus is born, since Mary herself doesn’t get pregnant in a usual manner.

But what if there are other ways that these women are linked to one another? What if there are other reasons Matthew included them in this genealogy, reasons that were important for the gospel then, and important for us today?

Foreigners and Outsiders

It is possible that all of the women that Matthew describes in the genealogy in Matthew 1 are foreigners, none of them part of the Jewish people. Tamar and Rahab are Canaanite women, a people that the Israelites are later told to completely destroy because of their idolatry. They bear sons, however, who are part of the lineage of Jesus.

Ruth is a Moabite, also considered an enemy to the Israelites, whom the law says no Israelite should ever marry. She is the great-grandmother of King David.

And Bathsheba, the only one of the women not given a name in the genealogy, is the wife of Uriah, who is a Hittite. Is it possible her husband is named in order to emphasize not only David’s sin in seizing someone else’s wife, but also to indicate that she herself was not an Israelite?

The inclusion of these Gentile women in the genealogy demonstrates right at the outset of the story of Jesus that those often considered outside the promise have an important role to play in God’s new community. They suggest that this is a story of welcome for the foreigner, and welcome for those who are supposed to be enemies. Jesus demonstrates this welcome throughout all of the gospels.

Suffering and Grief

Each of these women has also endured deep sorrow. Tamar was grieving the loss of two husbands, and was facing a barren future when she decided to take matters into her own hands.

Rahab was a sex-worker, an occupation often rooted in grief – either the grief of sexual violence, which meant she could never marry, or the grief of poverty. Either of these things could have forced her into sex work. No one in her position had escaped deep sorrow.

Ruth’s story is also shaped by sorrow. The sorrow of the loss of her husband, her brother-in-law, and her father-in-law. The sorrow of Naomi’s grief. The sorrow of the loss of her community and her homeland when she returned with Naomi to Bethlehem. Her grief was extensive.

Bathsheba had also experienced deep grief. First she is raped. Then she discovers that she is pregnant as a result of violence. And then her husband is murdered.

These are women acquainted with grief and familiar with sorrow.

Fear and powerlessness

What is more, all of these griefs are tied to fear: Tamar was afraid that she might always be damaged goods, never able to leave the house of her father. Rahab was afraid of the violence that is always present in the lives of sex workers. Ruth was afraid of starvation for herself and Naomi; and Bathsheba was afraid of more violence at the hands of the King, and afraid of what would happen when her pregnancy was discovered.

These women are not only outsiders in the communities where they find themselves. They are also victims and vulnerable in a world where women have no power unless they are looked after by powerful men.

Righteous and Faithful

Their status, their suffering, and their powerlessness make it all the more striking that these women are also described as righteous; that they are the ones who show us what faithfulness and steadfast love look like. When Judah discovers that he has been unjust to Tamar he acknowledges that she has taught him how to act with justice. He says to her: “You are more righteous than I am.”

Rahab is the first person in the book of Joshua to confess that the God of the spies is God in heaven above and on earth below. Her belief and faithfulness are contrasted with the fear that the spies exhibit (who, it should be pointed out, do not even do any spying).

Boaz gives special attention to Ruth because he has heard of her faithfulness to Naomi, and when she asks him to marry her (just a little forward in that context!), he tells her that this last example of her “steadfast-love” is better than her first. Boaz’s care for Ruth is modelled on Ruth’s care for Naomi.

And, oddly enough, it is Uriah the Hittite who demonstrates faithfulness in the story of David and Bathsheba. Perhaps this is why his name gets a mention. He refuses to go and have relations with his wife when the rest of the army is at war. His faithfulness is contrasted to that of the king.

What about Mary?

If these women do indeed prefigure something about Mary, it leads us to ask: what is the grief that Mary also carried? What were her fears? What was the way in which she demonstrated faithfulness?

Mary, like the rest of her people, lived in an occupied land. Her people had suffered the trauma of that occupation: violence at the hands of soldiers; the environmental destruction of battles; the loss of land to foreign settlers. Around the time of Jesus’ birth, Sepphoris, a village about 10 km from Mary’s home in Nazareth, resisted the occupation and was brutally destroyed: men killed, women and children raped and enslaved. Although we know the story of the death of toddlers from after Jesus’ birth, such a story was not unusual at that time. For these occupied people, there was ongoing grief, and there was ongoing fear about where the violence would break out next time.

Mary’s story was not that different from the stories of the other women who were ancestors of Jesus. They were all acquainted with grief. They had all known sorrow. And they had all trusted that somehow, if they acted in faithfulness to their God, if they resisted the injustice that shaped their days, that God would be present with them.

Perhaps this is why Mary sang such a revolutionary song for her cousin Elizabeth, the song about about how God provides food for the hungry, and sends the rich away with nothing. The song about how the poor are lifted from the dust and the powerful lose everything.

As I was writing this piece, one of my (adult) children showed me a photo from a visit to Palestine five years ago. The photo was of five young Palestinian girls, ranging in age from 12 to 16. They had lived their entire lives in Arroub, a Palestinian refugee camp between Bethlehem and Hebron. Growing up under occupation, their movements were severely restricted by the Israeli government; they were unable to even visit the place where their grandparents were buried because the cemetery is in the part of town where Palestinians are not permitted. My child told me that during their conversation, these young girls mentioned that none of them expected to live until the age of twenty. They knew that injustice, death, and violence shaped their future. In many ways they are no different than the women that we meet in Jesus’ birth narratives, who also lived surrounded by injustice, death and violence. Jesus himself was born to a mother suffering under occupation. That was his reality growing up.

If these stories have anything to teach us it is perhaps this: sometimes it is the outsider, the one whom we least expect to know God, who demonstrates what righteousness, faithfulness, and steadfast love look like. We see this today in the Israelis and Palestinians working for peace together in spite of ongoing violence. But even more important, in the Biblical story, God is always found with those who are suffering, those who are acquainted with grief, those who are the victims of the most powerful. If Jesus were to be born in our world today, who would be the women named as part of this genealogy? What would be their sorrow?