Sermon 63 - FFF1 - Tamar
Matthew 1:3-6
Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,
Perez the father of Hezron,
Hezron the father of Ram,
Ram the father of Amminadab,
Amminadab the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon the father of Salmon,
Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,
Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,
Obed the father of Jesse,
and Jesse the father of King David.
David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife
Genesis 38:26
Judah recognized them and said, "She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah."
When you read the Bible, cover to cover, you often wonder why a lot of it is in there. Yes, a lot of the Psalms are variations on a theme, in praise of God. Yes, a lot of the stuff in the prophets (both major and minor) is about how we have fallen away from God. But there are lots of sections that just seem pointless, like lists of towns (many of which no longer exist), and lists of kings (many of whom are never mentioned either before or since).
And genealogies.
You probably don't read the first couple of chapters of either the Gospel of Matthew, or the Gospel of Luke, except around Christmas time. Both of these gospels contain a genealogy of Jesus. It's in chapter one of Matthew, and chapter two of Luke.
I prefer the one in Matthew, because it has four anomalies. I'm always interested in anomalies. They tend to tell you very interesting things.
In the first place, there are four women in the genealogy in Matthew. This is the primary anomaly. Everybody knows that women aren't important in genealogies. My little brother is very big into genealogies. He is adding all kinds of people to our family tree. In terms of what he had done, our family tree spreads far and wide. And he's using WikiTree, so you do have to pay attention to the women. My father-in-law, on the other hand, was very interested in genealogies, but he was very much of the old school. Women were below the line. An add on. It's always much more important to know about the men than it is about the women. (Even though motherhood is a matter of fact, whereas fatherhood is a matter of trust. Then there's that whole issue of the mitochondrial DNA descending unchanged in the maternal line.) But, for most people the deal with genealogies is to look at the paternal line rather than the maternal. So why do you need to have women in the genealogy at all? And this was particularly true back in the first century. So it's really interesting to find that there are women included in Jesus' genealogy.
But that's not the only oddity. All four of these women were foreigners. They weren't of the children of Israel. So their inclusion, in the genealogy of Jesus, is, once again, an anomaly.
There is another point of anomaly in terms of their inclusion in the genealogy. On first glance, for all four of these women, a case could be made that they are all no better than they ought to be. And their sins were not of the ordinary, forgivable kind like fraud or murder. No, all of these sins were about sex, which makes them really, *REALLY* bad, and completely unforgivable. (You might want to say that the anomalies are that they were Female, Foreign, and Failures, just to make it easy to remember the three points for this sermon series.) That makes it really strange that there would be this extra effort made to include them in the genealogy of Jesus.
So, let's look at these four women. One at a time.
The first is Tamar.
We really aren't given very much information about Tamar. We don't know where she comes from, and there's no background for her (not even who her father is). Judah (yes, that Judah, the patriarch of the tribe of Judah), picks her as the wife for his first son. The only things that we are told about this son, her original husband, is that his name was Er, and that he was wicked in God's sight. We aren't even told what kind of evil, but apparently it was bad enough that God put him to death. So, now Tamar is a widow.
If you pay attention to the Old Testament, you know about this business that if the husband died, and the wife has not borne a son, then the wife is passed to the next son in line, in order that she produce an heir. Actually, we get that reference in the New Testament, as well, when a group of Sadducees tries to make up a trick question for Jesus, and, as usual, the result is that Jesus points out that their question is ridiculous.
But let's stick with Tamar for the moment. So Tamar gets given to the next son in line, who, for selfish reasons, doesn't fulfill his duty. And so God kills *him*, as well.
Judah has three sons at this point. And so, he should marry Tamar to the third son in line. But Judah doesn't. (It's quite possible that he is, by this time, concerned for the third son's safety.) He tells Tamar to go home to her family. He also tells Tamar to wait until the third son grows up.
So Tamar goes home. And waits. And notices that, while the third son is now of marriageable age, she still doesn't have a husband. So, she decides on a bit of a trick.
By this time, Judah's wife has died. (The Bible says that Judah recovers from his grief, and I don't believe that. You don't actually recover from grief. However, that's not the point here, so we'll let that go.)
Anyway, Judah goes to shear his sheep. Tamar hears about this. She dresses herself up with a veil, as a prostitute. She positions herself someplace where she knows Judah has to pass by. Judah passes by, thinks she is a prostitute because she's wearing a veil, and asks to sleep with her. She asks what he will give her in payment. Judas says he'll send a young goat from his flock. Tamar asks for something to guarantee that he will send it, and Judah asks what he should give as a pledge. She asks for his seal, and its cord, and the staff in his hand. These were all evidently indications of identity, much like your driver's licence is today. So Tamar and Judah come to an agreement and Judah is physically intimate with Tamar. Tamar gets pregnant.
Now, of course, this is the point at which we think that Tamar is no better than she ought to be. She is sleeping with her father-in-law. Okay, let's not beat around the bush. She's having sex with her father-in-law. She's having sex with Judah, contrary to the agreement that they have that she is his daughter-in-law, as well as contrary to whatever taboos might have been in place at that time about incest.
But notice that Judah has been the first one to break the agreement. Judah has not provided her with a position in his family, where she can be supported and have status in the community.
Anyway, there's a little bit more to the story. Judah sends his friend to pay off what he thinks is a shrine prostitute. That's possibly another factor in terms of thinking that Tamar is no better than she ought to be. Shrine prostitution relates to the worship of the Baals and the Asherahs. This is a kind of fertility activity related to Canaanite worship, and the Israelites, particularly when they came back to the promised land, were definitely told not to engage in these types of activities. But the payment doesn't go as planned because when the friend gets to the location and asks about the shrine prostitute, he is told there has there has never *been* any shrine prostitute in this location. So he goes back to Judah and says I can't find her, and Judah says okay let her keep what she has; we don't want to be embarrassed by all this and we did try to honor the payment.
So about three months later, people complain to Judah that his daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution and as a result she is now pregnant. He says she should be burned to death. She says that she is pregnant by the man who owns these, and produces the seal, and the cord, and the staff.
Judah, at this point, recognizes them. And, to his credit, he also recognizes that he is the one who is in the wrong. Judah admits, she is more righteous than I, since I wouldn't give her to my son.
(Tamar, when she gives birth, has twins. So she sort of gets a twofer.)
Now you may have heard of this story, at some time. If you have ever read all of the Bible yourself, or even all of Genesis, you will have come across it. But it's quite possible that you've never heard this story, because it's not one that prompts an awful lot of sermons. It's not exactly an edifying story. Nobody comes out of this story unscarred. Judah doesn't act very well. He does finally fess up in the end, and admits that he has created a problem, and none of this is really Tamar's fault. But, to begin with, he doesn't act very well.
His sons certainly don't come out of it very well: they come out of it dead. We aren't told very much about that, so we'll just leave it alone.
Tamar lies. Tamar engages in deception. Tamar dresses up as a prostitute, and has sex with somebody she isn't supposed to have sex with.
The thing is, Tamar does what she thinks she has to. She has been married, but her husband dies. Her husband dies without leaving her any children to support her, or any particular claim on the family to have a responsibility to support her. Tamar has been married, and that meant you became part of a family. Part of a tribe. Part of the community. A community, and a family, that had a responsibility to take care of you. And instead Tamar is just sent packing back to her original parents. This isn't how it's supposed to work.
Even though we think that system (of having your brother-in-law fulfill the responsibilities of your dead husband, if your husband dies without leaving you children) is very strange, it is intended as a guarantee of support for a woman who pledges herself in marriage. She joins a family. The family has a responsibility to support her. And Judah didn't. Judah didn't fulfill his part of the bargain. Tamar is left alone without any support.
So, Tamar takes things into her own hands. She gets pregnant. Not, perhaps, in the prescribed way, but in a way that is available to her. Yes, she lies in order to do it. But the end result is, basically, the same. Tamar becomes part of the family, and the family has to acknowledge that they have a responsibility to support her.
Now Tamar, out of the deal, actually becomes the ancestor of a king, and a line of kings, and, in fact, the King of Kings. There's no indication that she saw this coming. That she had specific faith in buying into this particular family line. But there is a lesson that we are taught, through parables, that has a strong relationship to this anyway. In Matthew 13, we are told that the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in the field. When a man finds the treasure he doesn't bring it out but covers it up (lying), but then goes and sells all that he has to buy the field, and so gain the treasure. And, again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he finds one of enormous value, he goes and sells everything that he has, to buy that pearl.
There's another parable in Luke 16, and again, probably one that you have seldom heard about in sermons, that goes even further than these parables in terms of doing anything you need to do in order to obtain the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus talks about a manager, or steward, for a rich man. But this steward doesn't exactly seem to be trustworthy, and the manager is under threat of being fired. So he calls in his master's debtors, and assists them in perpetrating a fraud so that the debtors will feel beholden to the unjust manager, and, when he is fired, will feel an obligation to support him. This does not sound like a terrifically edifying story, and sometimes people twist themselves into knots trying to make it seem something different than it obviously is. (And there's a quirk in the way that the New Testament is written, which means that we are unsure whether the estate holder praises the untrustworthy steward for being shrewd, which seems unlikely, or that Jesus is praising the unjust steward for fraud, which seems unlikely.) But, once again, there's a central theme here, that you do anything that you need to do in order to be part of the Kingdom of Heaven, and part of the family of God. That seems to be the most logical takeaway from these parables.
Probably the point of the parables is that the Kingdom of Heaven is worth whatever you have to do for it. In a very real sense, Tamar is fulfilling the teaching of these parables. Tamar is doing whatever she needs to do, even though it isn't exactly the done thing, in order to ensure that she has a place in this family. In order to ensure that she has a place in the children of Israel and the children of God. And because of that, she has a place in the lineage of Jesus.
Tamar isn't perfect. You can probably find at least four sins in her actions, and probably more if you really want to try hard. But we also know that she's in a bad situation, not of her own making, as well as the truism that the best is the enemy of the good, and that you shouldn't do nothing just because you can't do everything. I am not saying here that being in trouble justifies our sin. But I am saying that, while God expects us to strive for perfection, he does forgive us if we fall short. Tamar makes it into Jesus' genealogy. God honours her choice.
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