The Gospel of Matthew opens with a genealogy— or a family tree— of Jesus the Messiah. In our modern day, we tend not to care too much about genealogies and long family trees. We might even view genealogies as incidental information, but this list of Jesus’ family tree tells a story about Israel, a story about us, and even a story about God. In mentioning Jesus as “the son David, the son Abraham”(1:1) Matthew’s audience would be clued in about a story of royal lineage and covenant promises. They might expect that the Messiah and Saviour of the world would come from a long line of faultless heroes and notable dignitaries. The opposite is true of Jesus’ family record. You have the scandalous stories of Judah treating his daughter-in-law Tamar as a prostitute (1:3), Boaz being the son of the Jericho prostitute Rahab (1:5), David committing adultery with Bathsheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite (1:6), and even the recounting of exile (1:11,17). Matthew does not try to hide away the faults or sins of the past—and that is the point! Jesus willingly chose to unite himself to a broken family story in order to heal all our family stories.