It’s Advent-tide once more, my friends, and once again we’ll be spending the next four weeks preparing our hearts to receive the coming Messiah. But while many churches use this time to recall the events immediately preceding Jesus’ birth, it’s important for us to remember that Jesus’ story doesn’t begin in the gospels. In fact, the impact of the incarnation is severely diminished without understanding everything that came before it. So while we’ll definitely still spend Christmas Eve with the beloved stories of the angels, the shepherds, the manger, and the magi, these next four weeks will be devoted to things that came long before all that.
Of course, four weeks isn’t nearly enough time to cover everything leading up to Jesus’ birth – heck, even 52 weeks isn’t enough – so we have to make some choices. One place to start is at the very beginning of the New Testament. Matthew 1 opens with a genealogy that conveniently connects Israel’s past, beginning with Abraham, to its future through Christ – and this genealogy contains a very peculiar feature. Although the culture of the Hebrew people was generally patriarchal, Matthew lists four women among Jesus’ ancestors: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. These women are far more than just progenitors. They each have unique gifts that are crucial to the unfolding of God’s plan. Their stories help us understand not only how Jesus came to be born, but why his coming matters. So over the next four weeks, we’ll be honoring each of these women as we discover what their gifts have teach us about the kindom heralded by Christ’s birth.
Today, we start in Genesis 38 with Tamar. But in order to understand her story, we first have to understand the concept of levirate marriage as prescribed by Jewish law.* According to Deuteronomy 25:5-6, if a married man dies without leaving any children, his brother is duty-bound to marry his widow. The firstborn son from a levirate marriage is then considered a continuation of the original husband’s family line. This may sound like a bizarre arrangement to our ears, but it’s actually designed to be mutually beneficial: it offers protection for the otherwise vulnerable widow, a wife for the still-living brother, and an heir for the deceased man. Whether it actually treats everyone with the dignity and autonomy that they deserve is certainly up for debate, but given the culture during the time that this practice was common, levirate marriage was supposed to be a system that promoted justice and mutual care.
But a basic underlying principle of ANY system is that EVERYONE has to follow the rules in order for it to work. In everything from social contracts to traffic patterns to card games, the whole system falls apart the moment someone goes rogue. “Go Fish” doesn’t work if one player refuses to give up their cards when another player asks for them. Major intersections don’t work if one driver decides that they don’t want to wait for a green light. And levirate marriage doesn’t work if the widow isn’t allowed to marry her brother-in-law. While Tamar followed the rules and did exactly what the system required of her, Judah (for whatever reason) didn’t. And since the system didn’t include any provisions to correct this, Tamar found herself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
We human beings like to uphold our systems of law as black-and-white absolutes, an immutable good to be preserved at all costs. But we seem to forget that these rules don’t exist apart from humanity. They neither follow nor enforce themselves, so laws can only be as good as the human beings that engage them – human beings that are vulnerable to selective memory, self-interest, and bias. Because humanity is so deeply flawed, the systems that we create are also necessarily imperfect, both in design and application.
That’s not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t have laws – imperfection isn’t a problem when we recognize and are willing to work around this reality. The danger comes when we uphold these systems as objectively good in and of themselves, because it leaves no recourse for those whom it will inevitably fail – like Tamar. There were no consequences built into the system of levirate marriage for when the person holding all the societal power refuses to participate. So, the system broke down, but the impact was disproportionate: Judah held all the cards, and Tamar was left with no legitimate way to force his hand.
Someone else in her shoes might have felt helpless and resigned – after all, the system works by convincing everyone, especially the most marginalized, to prioritize its preservation at the cost of even their own well-being. But instead of accepting the hand she’d been dealt and continuing to play the role assigned to her by the system, Tamar made a different choice. She leaned on her gifts. She got creative and figured out a way to claim what the system had promised her by working OUTSIDE of it. She called upon her determination and her sense of self-worth to take what she needed from the person unjustly withholding it from her.
Make no mistake: this was a risky and dangerous move. Just like the civil disobedience practiced in the 1950s and -60s, Tamar’s actions were unacceptable within the existing system – they were illegal. There was no guarantee that Judah wouldn’t follow through with the prescribed (and entirely lawful) punishment, whether out of embarrassment or even just a miraculously renewed devotion to rules that he himself had so recently disregarded (with no personal consequence). But she recognized that, while the system itself didn’t offer her any help, she was not helpless. There were ways for her to pursue the justice that had been denied to her as long as she was willing to risk looking for a solution outside of the system that had failed her.
It’s because of her determination that Jesus’ ancestral line was able to continue, unbroken, through her son. Our Messiah, the one sent to offer salvation to ALL people, was born of Tamar’s refusal to fall through the cracks of society. His own ministry was a continuation of this legacy – a legacy of refusing to embrace laws that neglect or exclude for the sake of preserving a demonstrably flawed human system. In God’s kindom, people ALWAYS come first. And in this season of preparation for that kindom, we, too, are tasked with continuing Tamar’s legacy in the systems that exist today.
It won’t be easy. The systems of our culture are so deeply entrenched that it’s often difficult for us to even imagine any alternatives – and in some cases, they’ve become so normalized or subtle that they’re completely invisible to us. Systems of racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and heterosexism all still exist, but many of us are unable to see them because of how they’re baked into the culture around us. It’s “just the way things are” to us, instead of something that deserves to be challenged. And if a system has personally benefited us, we’re even less likely to do something about it – not because we’re bad people, but because we don’t see just how many people are actually falling through the cracks. Many of us today are like Judah – unable to see anything wrong with a system that was built to accommodate and support us, even when we break the rules. But make no mistake, the systems by which we organize ourselves today are failing just as many people as they ever have before.
Like Tamar, we are NEVER helpless. The system may not provide us with an option for true justice, but God ALWAYS will. Will this option be obvious? Probably not – it’ll require us to think in brand new ways we never have before. Will it be easy? Almost certainly not – there’ll be personal, societal, and possibly even legal risk for going outside of the system. Will it be straightforward? Pushing back against the status quo rarely takes a linear path. But will it be righteous? Holy? Faithful? Just? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
If God can take on flesh to dwell among us, is it too much to ask that we spend our time preparing the world to be worthy of God’s presence? Tamar didn’t seem to think so. She took what little power and agency she had, and she used it to expose an injustice that ultimately stood in the way of the incarnation. Without her gift of tenacity in the face of injustice, there would be no Christ. Without ours, we wait for him in vain. Let’s give thanks for Tamar and the way her gifts point us towards God’s kindom. May we receive and honor them for the sake of the one whose birth we await. And may we live them, this and every day. Amen.
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* Incidentally, this is one of the many examples of how “biblical marriage” is not as straightforward as some Christians might suggest, but that’s a separate discussion.
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