Readings:
Genesis 49:2, 8-10
Matthew 1:1-17
Reflection:
My wife, Joanne spends hours on ancestry.com.au researching family histories. Whom we came from is a key part of our identities. Matthew, the evangelist no doubt would have loved this technology and Joanne’s devotion to our back stories! His Gospel generally has been understood as being Jewish Christian in outlook and the evangelist wastes no time in demonstrating the identity of Jesus as the promised Messiah.
The first verse is unambiguous. Jesus is the Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. The evangelist goes on to use the literary form of genealogy to validate who Jesus really is. Matthew plants Jesus firmly within the Jewish people. Descended from David, he is qualified to be the Christ and to fulfil the many messianic prophecies of the Hebrews Scriptures. (Matthew quotes the Old Testament 41 times!) As son of Abraham, promised by God to be ‘the father of a multitude of nations’, Jesus is Messiah of gentiles as well as Jews, that is, all of us.
There are surprises in the list. Unlike other such ancient genealogies, neither Isaac, Jacob nor Judah were first-born sons. And the evangelist makes it very clear that Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, but Jesus has Davidic line because of the formal acceptance by his presumed father later in the chapter.
Further surprise! Women were never included in genealogies but there are five named here. The first four, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba) were foreigners (from “the multitude of nations”) and shared what could be euphemistically called ‘irregular circumstances’ with their partners. Are they a counter-cultural salute to women, or representatives ‘of the nations’, or symbols of those society shun, or precedents for Mary’s own ‘irregular circumstance’? I like to think that they are all four!
So, this genealogical list is not a boring read after all!
John McGrath is a parishioner of St Brigid’s Marrickville.