Friends
Peace be with you.
I’m guessing many of you were surprised that we read the long version of the gospel. I’ve chosen the short version of every other reading since I got here in July. Why, on Christmas, read the long version of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, especially, THIS long version, the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham? One commentary I read said, “Seldom has such an important book begun in such a repellent way.” It went on to describe it as “a stumbling block for modern readers”. Another commentary said, “Reading other people's genealogies is about as exciting as watching other people’s (vacation) videos”. I mean, aside from the scene in Christmas Vacation in which Clarke W. Griswald finds himself trapped in the attic so he decides to watch his old home videos while Spirit of Christmas by Ray Charles plays underneath, I can’t think of a time I’ve been excited to watch other people’s home videos. Although, a few years ago, there was a show called Who Do You Think You Are, which was all about helping famous people know who their relatives were and, generally, connecting them to famous people throughout history. Kelly Clarkson’s three times great grandfather fought in the Civil War and became a state senator who advocated for temperance. Josh Groban descended from a German theologian and scientist who believed Haley’s comet was sent from God to end the world in divine judgment. I always thought it was interesting that these famous people descended from such important historical figures. Made me wonder if I did the same.
The struggle with the genealogy from the Gospel of Matthew is that we don’t hear it the way the original listeners did. We tend to be afraid of the Old Testament, right? That’s the scary Testament with the mean God versus the New Testament where God becomes nice and loving. In the Old Testament, God wants to destroy the world by flood and disease and causes wars between people. In the New Testament, God is love who sent his son to die for us. The God of the Old Testament is Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life or Scrooge before the ghosts visited or the Grinch before his heart grew three sizes that day. The God of the New Testament is George Bailey after he sees Mary as an old maid or Tiny Tim or Lucy Liu Who or even Buddy the Elf in his simple, loving demeanor.
If we’re going to hear this passage as it’s intended, and I’d like to suggest that if we’re going to keep reading Matthew every Sunday from now until November of 2023, which we’re slated to do, we need to understand this passage. First, let’s set aside that clumsy misunderstanding of the difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New. It’s the same God in both. We are the ones who change. Look at the three groupings of fourteen generations St. Matthew outlines. St. Matthew starts with Abraham, who had a special relationship with God and goes all the way to King David, the greatest of the Old Testament kings. It appears that St. Matthew especially wants to show that Jesus was a relative of King David as the Messiah was prophesied to be one of his descendants. Throughout this first fourteen generations, the people seem to be drawing closer and closer to God, even incorporating three women who were not Jewish into the fold of believers, namely Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. Things take a turn for the bad with the second set of fourteen generations as the great King David conceives his son, Solomon outside of wedlock and through treachery. St. Matthew even goes so far as to refuse to name Bathsheba, Solomon’s mother, but simply calls her the wife of Uriah to underlie King David’s failure. Each of these names highlights a failed King of Judah. And it ends with the Babylonian Exile. Judah follows its sister, Israel, in being led away from home in slavery for 40 years because of the failure of her leaders. But, God eventually led them back home and we have the third set that takes us to Jesus.
This is when things get interesting. We don’t know much about these men, other than the fact that they were responsible for getting God’s chosen people through the occupations by the Greeks and the Romans. We know Joseph but that’s about it. Were they good or were they bad? We don’t know. Maybe they weren’t either. What we do know is that, through these somewhat unremarkable men, God had a plan. Rather than St. Joseph being called the father of Jesus, he is called the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born. This is, in part, to highlight what will be stressed next, namely that St. Joseph isn’t Jesus' biological father but that he is still expected to take Mary into his home and raise Jesus as his son. I learned that, at the time of Jesus, a man would ask for a woman’s hand in marriage and sign a contract to marry the woman and then, for a year, would prepare a place for his wife before going through an elaborate ceremony of marriage. St. Joseph has asked Sts. Simeon and Anna, Mary’s father and mother, for marriage but is waiting the year before the ceremony takes place when he finds out she’s pregnant. He wants to divorce her quietly because he knows she would be stoned to death if he makes a big deal about it. That’s why it is so important for the angel to clarify that Joseph should follow through with the marriage and take Mary into his home: because he is going to give Jesus his name, a name meaning the Lord saves. What a convoluted way for God to enter the world. Isn’t there an easier way?
But that seems to me to be the point of both the genealogy and the story of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of St. Matthew: that God’s got a plan and we’d be wise to follow it. The plan may seem messy to the outside world but, in the end, it is the way God wants it to happen. Do you ever look back on your life and ask yourself if you have so messed it up that there’s no point in even trying to be holy any more? Maybe you’ve missed so many Masses that you’ll never catch up or you’ve allowed your prayer life to lapse so long that it hardly seems worth starting. What if that was all a part of God’s plan? God is saying to you that it may appear an imperfect way to be saved but he doesn’t care. We can’t keep looking back, either to our ancestors or our past life, and wishing we were more faithful or more prayerful. We only have today and today you’re in church seeking a relationship with God. Jesus is inviting us today into his family, to make him our brother and recognize his Father as Our Father. Can we let go of the failures of our history to let him work in our life today?
