Matthew 1 — Two Names

A genealogy that is an argument (1:1–17)

The New Testament opens with the one page everyone skips — a genealogy — and Matthew put it first on purpose. To a reader who knew the Old Testament, this list is not a formality; it is the whole claim in miniature. "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." Two names anchor it. Son of Abraham — here is the seed in whom "all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 22:18). Son of David — here is the heir of the king whose throne God swore to establish forever (2 Samuel 7). Every promise the list touches is a promise now coming due.

Matthew even shapes the numbers to preach. He arranges the whole span — Abraham to David, David to the exile, exile to Christ — into three sets of fourteen generations (1:17), and the number is not random: in Hebrew the letters of David (D-V-D) add up to fourteen. The genealogy quietly spells the king's name over the entire history, three times over, and lands it on Jesus. The message is a drumbeat: the right King, of the right line, at the right time.

And the three movements retell Israel's whole story in shorthand — the long climb up to David and the throne's golden age, the long slide down to Babylon and the loss of everything, and then a quiet third act no prophet could put on a calendar. Read the middle set of names and you are reading a nation's failure: a few good kings and a string of murderous ones, and at the end the crown in the dust and the people in chains. The genealogy does not airbrush the ruin. And then, out of the wreckage of the exile, without fanfare, the names simply keep coming until they arrive at "Jesus, who is called Christ." The list is really one long argument that God keeps his word through centuries of human wreckage — that the promise outlasts the exile, outlasts our sin, outlasts everything we do to lose it.

But the strangest thing about the list is who Matthew lets into it. Genealogies of kings ran through fathers; Matthew stops to name five women, and they are not the matriarchs we would expect. Not Sarah, not Rebecca, not Leah — but Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law by playing the prostitute; Rahab, the Canaanite harlot of Jericho; Ruth, a Moabite outsider; "her who had been Uriah's wife," Bathsheba, named by the scandal rather than by her name; and Mary, whose pregnancy would look, to the neighbors, like one more irregularity. Chrysostom, preaching through this Gospel, saw the point exactly: Matthew passes over the honored women and brings forward those "famed for some bad thing" — a foreigner, a harlot, an adulterous union — because the One descended from them "came not to abolish our sins only, but also our ancestral ones," and "was not ashamed" of a lineage streaked with scandal.^* The King's family tree runs straight through the very people the world files under unfit. Grace is threaded, generation by generation, through exactly the material out of which God delights to make a Savior.

Joseph, a righteous man in an impossible spot (1:18–19)

Then the account narrows to one quiet man facing a private catastrophe. Mary, betrothed to Joseph, "was found pregnant by the Holy Spirit" — but Joseph does not yet know that clause; he knows only that the child is not his. And Matthew's word for him is precise: "Joseph, being a righteous man, and not willing to make her a public example, intended to put her away secretly." Notice how righteousness and mercy meet in him. He is righteous, so he cannot simply ignore what looks like unfaithfulness; he is merciful, so he will not expose her to shame or worse. Before ever an angel speaks, Joseph is quietly bent toward protecting rather than punishing — which turns out to be the very temper of the God whose story he has stumbled into.

Two names that carry the whole gospel (1:20–23)

An angel meets his crisis in a dream: "Joseph, son of David" — the royal title again, reminding him whose line he carries — "don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit." And then the child is given two names, and between them they hold everything Matthew will spend twenty-eight chapters unfolding.

The first is spoken to Joseph: "You shall call his name Jesus, for it is he who shall save his people from their sins." Jesus — in Hebrew Yeshua — means "the LORD saves," and the angel presses the meaning onto the mission. Note carefully what he is sent to save from. Not from Rome, not from poverty, not from the hundred troubles a Messiah was expected to fix — but "from their sins." At the very first mention of his name, the King's true enemy is named, and it is not Caesar; it is us, our own guilt, the thing no political rescue could ever reach. And already the shadow of the cross falls across the cradle, because sins are not saved from by a wave of the hand; they are saved from at a price.

It is worth sitting with how much smaller a savior we usually want. We would gladly settle for one who fixed our circumstances — healed the body, steadied the finances, removed the enemy at the gate. The angel aims lower and deeper, at the one trouble underneath all the others: the sin that cuts us off from God and that no change of circumstances can reach. A Messiah who only improved our conditions would leave the actual wound bleeding. This one goes for the wound.

The second name Matthew speaks himself, reaching back to Isaiah: "they shall call his name Immanuel, which is, being interpreted, God with us" (Isaiah 7:14). The virgin's child is not merely sent by God; he is God, arrived. Augustine, preaching one Christmas, tried to hold the wonder of it in words: "The Word of the Father, by whom all time was created, was made flesh and was born in time for us… The Maker of man became Man, that the Ruler of the stars might nurse at his mother's breast."^* That is the claim in Immanuel. The infinite has an infancy; the One who made Mary is carried by Mary. Put the two names together and you have the gospel in a sentence: God with us, to save us from our sins.

Joseph obeyed (1:24–25)

The chapter ends not with Joseph's words — he never speaks in Matthew — but with his obedience. "Joseph arose from his sleep, and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him." He took Mary as his wife, honored the child's virgin conception, and "he named him Jesus" — and in naming him, Joseph the son of David legally owned the boy as his own, grafting Jesus into the royal line. A righteous man's quiet, costly obedience is the human hinge on which the King's coming turns. He asked for no sign beyond the word he was given, and simply did the next thing God said.

The whole Gospel is bracketed by the name Matthew gives the child here. In chapter 1 the promise is "Immanuel — God with us" (1:23); on the last page, the risen Jesus tells his church, "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (28:20). Everything between — the teaching, the healing, the cross, the empty tomb — is God being with us in order to save us from our sins, and the way he finally does it is by taking those sins to a hill outside Jerusalem. The genealogy told us he came from a line of sinners; the name tells us he came for them. That is the mercy hidden in the list we were tempted to skip: a King who was not ashamed to be born from the likes of us, so that he could save the likes of us.

:::pastor An illustration. Parents choose a baby's name for its sound or its family memory; the angel chose this one for a job description. "You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." Imagine a child whose very name announced, from the delivery room, exactly what he was born to do — and then a whole life, and a death, that did it. We hand our children names and hope they grow into some meaning; this child was given a name he would fill to the last drop, on a cross, for us.

From history. Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua (a shortened Yehoshua, "Joshua") — "the LORD is salvation." It was a common name; the man is not. There was an earlier Joshua who led Israel through the Jordan into the promised land; Matthew's Gospel will present a greater Joshua who leads his people through death into a rest the first one never could. The name meant "the LORD saves" on a thousand ordinary lips before it was ever spoken over this cradle — and here, at last, it came completely true. source)

Worth quoting. "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Immanuel." — Charles Wesley, "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" :::