The Genealogy of Jesus

Every Advent and Lenten season, Villanova's Office for Mission and Ministry commissions a set of short reflections from faculty, staff, and students on the readings for each day (link here). Here is my assigned reflection on today's reading, Matthew 1:1-17:

Today’s gospel reading—Matthew’s account of the genealogy of the Messiah by listing the dozens of ancestors of Jesus—is usually thought of as among the most tedious in the New Testament, much dreaded by preachers, rarely put on prayer cards, and never chosen for weddings. But in it we hear at two lessons for us.

First, Christ did not come to redeem our ideas about our salvation but instead to redeem our material, bodily history itself. Christianity does not teach a myth about the way God happened to save us. Christianity preaches the reality of God’s redemption of the world in and through a human being born of the House of Israel. In the genealogy of Jesus we hear the flesh and blood history of the people of Israel through whom God revealed himself and saves us.

Second, the ancestors of the Messiah are not generally the nice, quiet, kindly people we might imagine. In fact, the central figure in the genealogy of Jesus—David—was the unlikely shepherd boy chosen to be anointed as king, whereupon he ordered the murder of the husband of a woman he impetuously fell in love with and then fathered Solomon with her. As Herbert McCabe, OP notes, “The whole story of David, the ruthlessly and highly successful bandit who, in the power of the Holy Spirit, got control of a whole confederacy of tribes, is, of course, full of intrigue and murder—successful intrigue and murder.” A reader of Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus who knows the Old Testament figures recounted there would see that Jesus’ ancestors were, for the most part, sinful, corrupt, venal, murderous, and unfaithful—just like us, which is why, as McCabe concludes, Jesus “belongs to us and came to help us, no wonder he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope.”