Genesis 38:12-30 "An Odd Grace" Scott Hoezee

The Bible has some funny stuff in it. Sometimes these oddments are limited to just a verse or two here and there, other times they are more lengthy, encompassing whole chapters and even maybe whole books. The Book of Esther is a curious biblical inclusion in that it never once mentions God. A few of the psalms say quirky things, and one psalm (Psalm 88) is a singularly dark poem in which God never does rescue the psalmist. Instead, Psalm 88's last line is "Darkness is my best friend." There are a few incidents recorded in the Book of Judges that can be described only as bizarre. The Song of Songs looks like an extended piece of erotic poetry (and the attempts to make it all allegorical have not been singularly successful). Ezekiel is shot through with spooky and weird imagery, but that seems little more than a preview for the Bible's last book of Revelation, whose battery of images has at times baffled readers, preachers, and commentators for two millennia now.

The Bible has some funny stuff in it, and Genesis 38 surely fits into this category of Scriptural oddities. This is the kind of chapter that prompts commentators to claim at first that there is not a whole lot to say here. But then they turn right around and say a whole lot anyway! It seems that few can resist pondering the tantalizing details of this chapter as well as speculating on questions such as, "Why is this here at all? Where did this story come from? How does it fit into the larger scheme of Genesis and the Bible generally? Is this at all connected to Joseph, or just a detour that heightens the suspense of what is happening to Joseph now that he has been sold into Egyptian slavery?"

Those are just a few of the questions people ask. Our own interpretations of narratives like this are frequently complicated by our tendency to read all of the Bible through the lens of Christian theology and ethics. For instance, last week after the service one of you asked me how to make sense of the literal meaning of Jacob's words at the end of Genesis 37. Literally translated, Jacob responds to Joseph's apparent death by saying "I will go down to Sheol still mourning my son." And so one of you asked me how Jacob could say that since this person thought "Sheol" was the Old Testament word for "hell." It's easy to read these stories assuming that Jacob and company had a view of death and the afterlife similar to our own views. But their thoughts on such matters were actually vastly different from our own. Sheol, they believed, was a kind of post-mortem holding tank where everyone went after they died. They didn't picture some heaven versus hell scheme as we tend to do.

Similarly in Genesis 38: reading and comprehending a story like this is complicated by the fact that the sexual mores of these folks appear to be mighty different from our own. We're startled that a man's wife would get passed from brother to brother in the event of her husband's death. We're taken aback that Judah so casually sleeps with someone he thought was a prostitute (and we are further jolted by the fact that, apparently, had she been a real prostitute and not his daughter-in-law, there wouldn't have been much stigma attached to what Judah did). But the real eye-popper is the fact that Tamar is commended when this story is all said and done. She engaged in deception, incest, and maybe a few other sexual shenanigans we could think of, and yet Judah declares her to be the righteous one! Indeed, in conclusion this evening, we will take note of one last shocker that resulted from all this, too.

We may or may not be able to come to some clarity in figuring this story out, but the logical place to begin in any event is with the story. So let's summarize its details. From the looks of Genesis 38:1, this story begins shortly after Judah and his brothers had disposed of Joseph. Near as we can tell, the events of this chapter span something like twenty years, meaning that there is overlap between this chapter and the Joseph story that follows. We know that the total span of time between the brothers' selling Joseph and their later meeting him again in Egypt was twenty-two years.

Judah, probably in defiance of his father's wishes, is said to marry a Canaanite girl instead of someone closer to his own kith and kin. They have three sons, the oldest of whom eventually marries a girl named Tamar. This man dies soon thereafter, however, without ever having an heir born to him. So, as was the custom of the day to ensure the succession of the family line, Judah makes his second son marry Tamar. But before long he dies, too, having refused to even try having a baby with Tamar. By now Judah is starting to think that Tamar is nothing short of bad luck. So even though he promises to give Tamar in marriage to his last and youngest son, secretly Judah intends to do no such thing. So what if Tamar remained a bereft and childless widow the rest of her days? This girl is a husband killer, she is jinxed, and so he wasn't about to let her wipe out also his final child.

Judah had his reasons for not letting Tamar marry his last son, but he was wrong. He was wrong not just because the custom of his day suggested Tamar now rightfully belonged to the youngest son. But he was wrong mainly because in refusing to generate more offspring, he was thumbing his nose at God's covenant promise of progeny, of offspring for old Father Abraham, of descendants that would eventually become a mighty nation. If we read Genesis 38 in isolation from the wider covenant picture of Genesis, we may miss this detail. But it is likely the key fact to bear in mind: the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had a kind of solemn obligation to be fruitful and multiply. Those who refused to do this were standing in God's way.

It's difficult to know whether Tamar knew any of that. Probably she was simply seeking a solution to the then-disastrous social status of being a childless widow. Tamar was one of those people the Bible consistently tells us we need to nurture and protect. She was a person without social standing, without power to change her situation. She was a social cipher without future prospects. Judah won't take care of her as he should, so she concocts her own plan of action. She poses as a prostitute replete with the traditional (and in this case mighty handy) facial covering--a kind of ancient burka that prostitutes wore.

Judah has no idea who she is, therefore, and so proceeds to transact this tawdry business with her, leaving her the ancient equivalent of his driver's license as a guarantee that he'd pay her for her services eventually. And so the deed is done. Tamar's fondest wish comes true in that she does indeed conceive a child from this one-time tryst. A few months later when her belly began to bulge a bit, a servant noticed this and so informed Judah, "Tamar is with child!" At last Judah saw the opening he had maybe been looking for: in one fell swoop he could get rid of this bad-luck woman, free his youngest son to marry someone else, and just be done with the whole thing. The best part was that since Tamar was clearly guilty of adultery and/or fornication, burning her to death was fully allowed by law. So he could get rid of this problem and not get into trouble for doing so at the same time.

But when Tamar gets hauled out into the village square where some kindling wood had already been piled up for the public execution, Tamar hands Judah his driver's license and says, "The father of my child is the man whose picture is on this card. Recognize him?!" Judah is quite squarely snared in the net Tamar set out for him. "Well," Judah said, swallowing hard, "You're a better person than I am! You are righteous, I am not. I see that you did this because of my failure to let you marry my youngest boy." And that was apparently that.

But why? Since when did two wrongs make a right? Truth is, they were both guilty of incest and so were both liable to punishment, if not death. But Judah indicates that his prior crime somehow cancels out her subsequent crime such that neither needed any further redress now. And so Tamar goes on to have twins, and this incident closes with that birth.

That's the story. Thinking about it this week reminded me, tangentially, of a scene from the movie Amadeus. The first time Mozart and his competitor Salieri meet, Mozart gives what at first seems like a compliment but ends up being a put-down. Mozart informs Salieri, "Do you know I actually once did a variation on one of your compositions?" "You flatter me, sir" Salieri replies. "Yes," Mozart says, "it was an odd little tune but it yielded some good things." In wondering how to wrap up this sermon, I thought this past week, "Well, it's an odd little Bible passage, but maybe it will yield some good things!" But if so, what in the world might those things be?

Let's start narrowly with the immediate context of the Joseph stories, then widen our scope to think briefly about the larger context within the Book of Genesis, and finally step way back to wrap it up with a much larger perspective yet--one that may well provide the real clincher for this story's role in the entire context of God's Scripture.

First, within the Joseph cycle of stories there are a few items to note. For one thing we see again, as we did last week, that Judah is a pretty cold-hearted and callous man. It was Judah, after all, who came up with the idea of selling their dear brother like chattel. Now in this chapter Judah continues to look out for his own best interests, come what may to the other people around him. But in a sense Judah also gets his come-uppance here. Commentators note that there is a parallel between Judah's handing his father Joseph's blood-soaked coat and asking, "Do you recognize this?" and Tamar's handing Judah his seal and cord and saying, "Recognize this?" And maybe Judah was genuinely chastened by it all. By the time we catch up with Judah again in Genesis 44, he will seem softer, more good-hearted. This incident may, among other things, have been a kind of severe mercy to crack through Judah's hard head and heart.

In the wider context of Genesis, chapter 38 ties in with the covenant and the need for Abraham's descendants to have lots of children, as we already noted. But there is also in this chapter yet another example of younger siblings rising to prominence over older ones. Due to the death of his two older brothers, Judah's youngest son became the sole heir. Then, at the very end of this chapter, we have a reprise of the Jacob and Esau birth story when the twin baby of Tamar who looked like he was going to come out first ends up actually being born second. The author and editor of Genesis certainly seems to have a lot of fun playing up these sibling reversals of expectation at every opportunity.

Why? Because in some ways I think this is Genesis' way of reminding us of the sovereignty of God's choice as well as of the pre-eminence of grace. Every time God saves, raises up, or works through someone on the bottom of the social heap (and in a way Tamar functions this way, too), it reminds us that God saves not based on merit, not based on social standing, not based on any human convention or way of reckoning value but sheerly and solely and always by grace alone. We saw that beautifully illustrated a few weeks ago when Jacob, who was the younger child, ended up being defeated by God at the River Jabbok as a way to remind him that the best thing in life comes to us not by our cunning, not by our strength, not by our skills but as a gift.

All through Genesis God works the miracle of his grace in the lives of a lot of misguided, weak, frail, faulty, and least likely folks. God sticks with Abraham despite several early failures of trust, despite his and Sarah's laughter in God's face. God sticks with Jacob despite his being essentially a lie, a cheat, and a crook. And now God sticks with Judah, even bringing into Judah's life a most amazing gift. God brings a gift to Judah, and to all Israel and to the whole world, through the single least likely means imaginable, and that is Tamar's playing the prostitute, Tamar's incestuous union with her father-in-law.

Had it been left up to Judah, Tamar would never have had a child. How Judah finally planned to provide a family for his youngest son is not clear, but that he would not allow it to happen via this bad-luck Tamar is very clear. But somehow God manages to accomplish something quite amazing through even the morally dubious actions of this woman. Because according to Matthew 1, Tamar became the great-grandmother seven generations out of no less than King David and so, finally, the ancestral mother of the line that produced Jesus of Nazareth. If Tamar had not executed her strange little plan of sexual deception, Judah would never have been able to stand in the family line that produced David and Jesus.

Judah declared Tamar righteous because he knew that her desire to procreate put her nicely on God's covenant track. She, not Judah, behaved like the true descendant of Abraham, despite her being only an in-law. But because of what this Canaanite woman did, Israel one day got its David and the world one day got its Christ.

In years past I preached a whole sermon on that family tree or genealogy that opens Matthew's gospel. We noted then that Matthew actually went out of his way to include in that genealogy of Jesus four women, each of whom was a non-Israelite originally, and three of whom had checkered pasts. Tamar the daughter-in-law prostitute, Rahab the Jericho madam, and Bathsheba the adulterous partner of David (whose husband David murdered so he could take Bathsheba to himself ): these were all "skeletons" in the family closet of our Lord. Matthew didn't have to mention any of them since women were typically excluded from formal genealogies anyway.

But Matthew was grinding a theological axe when he did include their names so prominently. He wanted to open his gospel with a poignant reminder of grace, with a powerful testimony of God's love for the whole world (including non-Israelites), and with a moving and startling portrait of God's providence--a divine will and plan that can, and often does, move forward through even the most tawdry of circumstances.

You could hardly call either Judah or Tamar biblical role models. No one would look to either figure in order to determine the best way to conduct one's life. But precisely in their weakness, in their proneness to sin, in the mistakes each makes and in the sin into which both fall--somehow in and through all of that we maybe can identify with these two a bit. No, they are not role models. We don't want to be just like Tamar or just like Judah. No one would ever distribute bracelets with the letters WWTD: What Would Tamar Do? No one would ever compose a song, "Dare to Be a Judah" similar to that song urging kids to emulate Daniel.

But although we don't want to imitate them, we may recognize that even so, sometimes we are like them anyway. We, too, make mistakes. We, too, sometimes find ourselves doing or saying things that place us on the opposite side of God's desires. And sometimes we, too, may discover that God accomplished something good in our lives despite how undeserving we are, despite how badly we messed things up.

In any event, we know how much we need grace. And if at the end of the day we find that we have received just such grace--if we, like Tamar, are startled to find our names appearing in the family tree of Jesus, having been adopted into the divine family despite all that we did to disqualify ourselves from that sacred lineage--well, then it's yet another cause to sing the doxology to the God whose grace is sufficient, whose love is never-ending, and whose providential care is often as surprising as it is constant. This is a funny little story. But if it can cause us to marvel afresh at the wonder of grace, then it yielded some very good things after all. Amen.