So…

Today we are looking at the other Christmas story!

Most of us are really familiar with the kind of hybrid Christmas story that folks have learned from Christmas cards and creche scenes, about Jesus being born in a manger and then the shepherds coming and then Wisemen.

And, yes, it is hybrid, because it is actually putting part of the birth narrative from Luke’s gospel together with the birth narrative from Matthew’s.

To be clear, its not a bad thing, unless of course you don’t recognize that it is two stories.

The totality of Jesus birth is well beyond either Luke or Matthew’s version of it in their gospels. 

Lots of things happened that are not recorded. And that’s okay, because Luke and Matthew told the stories they told for reasons beyond just what the curious would want to know.

They, each of them, were trying to tell specific audiences things they would need to hear and understand in order to come to faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ!

Luke was writing his gospel to the Roman and Greek world well beyond the Holy Land. His gospel was written as part of the defense of the Apostle Paul as he went to trial in Rome in 60AD or later.

His readers, some of whom might have been born in the Jewish faith, were much more likely to have been born as pagans. They were steeped in the Greek and Roman mythologies of Gods and demi gods, like Zeus and Jupiter.

For them, Luke recounted the supernatural events of Jesus birth, stories that would sound familiar to Greek and Roman ears, yet with the twist of Judaism’s one God and one and only son.

Matthew on the other hand, was writing primarily to a Jewish audience, and for his readers, while the supernatural aspects of Jesus birth were fine, he, Matthew, laser focused on the elements of the story that those who had studied the Hebrew scriptures all their lives would find familiar.

The spirit whispering in Mary’s ear about the child she was carrying, and an angel who comes to Joseph in a dream to tell him that Mary is God’s chosen one to birth God’s son.

It sounded familiar! No angel choruses in Matthew. Instead, Matthew starts with genealogy!

His concern is how Jesus could be the Messiah!

I don’t know how much you know about your own genealogy. In my family we know a few things. Like my great-great-great-great-great-maternal grandfather came to the United States, before it was the United States.

And that while we thought his last name was Young and that he came from England, in fact the family name was Jung, and he came from Germany.

My cousin Mark, a Methodist preacher discovered that Mr. Jung was actually the Rev. Jung and that he was a preacher!

And that he came here to help preach the gospel on behalf of the Lutheran Church, but that the colonists in Maryland weren’t interested in Germans or Lutherans coming to their colony, so the Anglicans on behalf of the gospel co-ordained him as an Anglican Priest and sent him with the new last name of Young.

Genealogy matters. 

On my paternal side of the family, we can trace my grandmother Jessie MacDonald’s family through Canada all the way to a small town in Scotland. 

But the Farley’s only go back as far as my grandfather Oscar Rufus Farley, born in Canada. Who his parents were is a mystery! It doesn’t in any way change who I am. But it does in some ways explain who I am.

And that is what Matthew does in Matthew 1, verse 1, when he writes “Jesus Christ came from the family of King David and also from the family of Abraham. And this is a list of his ancestors.”

Matthew takes great pains to make sure that his primarily Jewish readers understand how this child born out of wedlock could be the Savior, God’s promised Messiah, the son of David, the son of God!

Because while Luke’s readers wanted to hear about miraculous signs like that angel chorus, Matthew’s readers needed to hear how Jesus fit the narrative that they had learned about God’s character.

They needed to know that God was fulfilling his promises to Israel! That this child was not a Roman or Greek God, but was instead, Yahweh’s own son, one born within the tradition, one who was from all time to be Messiah.

Yes, Matthew’s story goes on to tell on the visit of the Magi, the astrologers from the East. But even that is nothing like a supernatural angel chorus!

Rather God uses nature in the position of the stars in the sky to convince those who study the stars to travel to the birthplace of the one come from God to save the world. They believed they were looking for a new king and they were.

So, you see, there are two stories about one story!

Matthew’s gospel is all about how Jesus is the one God had always promised Israel would come. A successor to King David, the greatest king in the chosen people’s story and Abraham, the father of the Jewish people and more.

He’s the one! 

Look and see what has happened!

And the story has just begun! 

Merry Christmas and amen!