Straight to the Heart

When Matthew makes a point, he really makes a point. He finds an individual who completely fits the bill.

He does so in only the fifth verse of his gospel. It’s not enough for him to tell us that Jesus was born to a poor Galilean peasant-girl. He rightly suspects that we will airbrush Mary’s profile into something sanitised, saintly and safe, failing to be shocked by her unimpressive credentials. Instead, he uses another individual to make it clear to us that Jesus is after a team of Ordinary Radicals. He surprises us by taking us to see a prostitute.

Rahab took money for sex in downtown Jericho. She was about as unlikely a candidate for the family tree of the Jewish Messiah as a bacon salesman. When we first meet her in Joshua chapter two, she invites two spies to hide in her brothel because shady visitors were her everyday business. No one would notice two strangers in the corner and no one would compromise their own secret life by reporting them.

Not the kind of woman you expected in Jesus’ family tree? It gets worse. When the soldiers of Jericho make a raid on her brothel, she lies to them that the two Hebrews have gone. She sends the soldiers on a wild goose chase which saves the two spies’ lives, but she breaks the Ninth Commandment in doing so. Matthew mainly mentions men in his account of Jesus’ family tree, but he particularly singles out Rahab the prostitute to tell us from the outset that Jesus is after a very ordinary group of followers. There was nothing in Rahab which earned a place in God’s favour, any more than you and I can earn a place in his favour either. She was totally ordinary, the kind of person God still saves today.

Actually, Rahab did have one thing in her favour. She wasn’t just ordinary, she was an Ordinary Radical. She had more faith in God’s promises than the Hebrews who had left Egypt and later died in the desert through their lack of faith in God’s power to grant them the land he promised. “I know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us,” she tells the spies in Joshua 2:9-11. “We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt … for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.” She turned her back on her compatriots in Jericho and sided with the People of God out of reverence for Yahweh. She was a sinful, lying prostitute who had faith in God which led to a radical choice. She was the kind of person Matthew tells us to be too.

James puts it this way in his New Testament letter: “Was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” Matthew is therefore not the only one who takes Rahab as a powerful reminder of God’s willingness to redeem the ungodly. She was ordinary, but she gave up everything when she heard about the Lord. As a result, she became part of the People of God, a forgiven and transformed ancestor of Jesus the Messiah.

If you are conscious today of sin in your life, then this should encourage you. The priests, the Pharisees and the other supposedly godly men of Israel will turn out to be the bad guys later on in Matthew’s gospel. It is ordinary people like Rahab who receive his commendation as permanent reminders that God forgives anyone who cries out for his mercy.

If you know that you have been forgiven, then it should also encourage you to make sure that your response to God’s grace is as radical as Rahab’s. She clung onto nothing from her past life when she hung a blood-coloured piece of rope out of the window of her brothel, literally nailing her spiritual colours to the mast. She took radical actions which spoke of a radical faith in God.

She was an Ordinary Radical whose example still echoes through history.