The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Jesus Brings Us Home from Exile:  Mt.1:12 – 17

^1:12 After the deportation to Babylon: Jeconiah became the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel. ¹³ Zerubbabel was the father of Abihud, Abihud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor. ¹⁴ Azor was the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud. ¹⁵ Eliud was the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob. ¹⁶ Jacob was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah. ¹⁷ So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.

When I was about nine years old, there was a boy a few years older than me who lived on our street two houses down.  He was Korean, and I’m Japanese, so I felt a common Asian camaraderie with him.  We had a few other things in common, like dirt bike riding and drawing.  He was a good artist.  I remember being impressed with the things he could draw just with a pencil.  Unfortunately, he had stumbled onto his father’s stash of Playboy magazines, and he would invite me over to his house to look through them while his parents worked full time and weren’t home.  Even though I was young, I had a vague sense that something was not quite right.  Nevertheless, I did this a few times.  Then we got caught.  My friend had taken to drawing sexual acts on paper.  He left one of his drawings in my desk drawer, and that’s where my parents found it.  Needless to say, they were mad!  They held that paper and looked down at me with a piercing stare.  Fortunately, I couldn’t draw that well, so my parents knew that I didn’t do it!  They questioned me about it.  Shame, dread, and confusion flooded my heart.  I knew they were right, and I felt dirty.  Suddenly, a huge distance, a Grand Canyon-like break, yawned wide open between me and my parents.  I confessed that it was that particular friend, and I also told them about the magazines of naked people he had.  They took the drawing from me, forbade me from playing with that boy, and told his parents about the discovery.  We never spoke of it again, but afterwards, I still felt a sense of confusion and shame.  What could fix that distance between me and my parents?  I knew I had done something wrong, but what was worse, I felt like there was something wrong with me. 

I don’t think there’s a single man or woman I know who is proud of feeling a sense of distance in friendships and relationships.  There’s not a single person I know who goes around boasting about how their friendships came to an early demise.  In fact, we tend to keep those memories as deep down as possible.  But we all have them. 

What about the break that has opened up between us and God?

The Jewish people had a way of expressing this huge distance between themselves and God in a single word:  exile.  Israel marked time by ‘the deportation to Babylon’ as Matthew points out here (Mt.1:12, 17).  In a sense, God exiled Adam and Eve from the garden land because of their sin, though actually it was Adam and Eve who attempted to exile God from the world He created – ‘dying’ was merely the consequence of their attempt to kick out God, the Life Source, from the world.  In exile from the garden, humanity eventually wound up in Babel (Gen.11:1 – 9).  Israel saw the parallel between the first humanity and themselves.  God exiled them from the garden land, though actually it was Israel who attempted to exile God from their midst by relying on foreign powers like the Babylon Empire, and ‘the deportation to Babylon’ was merely the consequence.  Now, even though many Jews had returned to the land, the exile continued in a new way (Neh.9:36 – 37).  They were still not free; God had not returned to His Temple; the Davidic throne sat vacant. 

They knew the final king, sent by God, called the Messiah (Mt.1:17), would bring them back from exile.  How exactly, they weren’t necessarily sure.  But Jesus showed them, and will show us as we read Matthew’s Gospel.  Along the way, they – and we – will find out that exile is not like getting a time-out for bad behavior, which is what I do to my kids when they misbehave (‘Timeout!  Go to your room!’).  Rather, we are in exile because we have a disease internally to us which resists God, which God must then heal before He comes in fullness and provokes our deepest resistance. 

God had promised to both forgive their past sins and change the underlying cause of the sins, which Israel shared with all humanity:  a corrupted human nature.  The Christmas hymn says:

O come, O come Emmanuel

And ransom captive Israel

That mourns in lowly exile here

Until the Son of God appear

Rejoice!  Rejoice!

Emmanuel has come to thee, O Israel!