Matthew includes four women in his list - Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba - and my response to their inclusion has, in the past, been a fairly simplistic, 'Oh, how nice that Matthew has gone to the trouble of naming four of the women who played a part in Jesus' story!'
There are, of course, many, many unnamed women whose presence in the list are implicit - for every man whose name appears there is a woman who conceived and gave birth to the son whose name appears next on the list.
So why, when that list of unnamed women includes people like Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel (to name the three most obvious), does Matthew choose Tamar (who tricked her father-in-law into sleeping with her in order to preserve her dead husband's line), Rahab (a prostitute), Ruth (who may or may not have engaged in some morally dubious shenanigans in order to claim the protection of a male relative) and Bathsheba (who had an adulterous relationship with David)?
I've read two explanations recently. Kenneth Bailey, author of Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, suggests that the list as a whole 'Matthew gives us clues about the kinds of people that the Messiah came to save. He was to be a Savior for women and men who were both saints and sinners, Jews and Gentiles.'
In contrast, Paula Gooder, in Journey to the Manger, suggests that these sinful women are included specifically to place Mary's situation into a broader historical context in order to protect her reputation; God has always used fallen women and Mary is just the latest. What I think is particularly interesting here is that Gooder appears to have opted for the worst case scenario with Ruth, choosing to highlight the possible use of a euphemism in the text ('at his feet' can, apparently, refer to the genitals) rather than focusing on her self-sacrificial actions as the Gentile daughter-in-law of an impoverished Jewish widow.
Personally, I can't help but go back through the list and reflect on the damaged and damaging men who also made the list, individuals who lives (and leadership) were often far more problematic than those of the women whose names appear, and yet they don't stand out in this list, simply because of how the list is constructed.
But maybe the point is that all of these people were flawed (some more obviously than others) but some allowed themselves to be used by God (consciously or unconsciously) in the face of huge personal cost and at severe risk to their reputation. Is it possible to argue that that cost and risk was always going to be greater for women in the Old Testament (and, indeed as Gooder suggest, in the New) and therefore we shouldn't be surprised that the women God used were those with the least to lose? Perhaps, but I'm not sure that really answers the question of why women like Sarah, Rachel and Rebekah don't make the cut but these four women do.
