Story Of The Origin Of Jesus Christ And The Rest Of The Names — Matthew’s genealogy is extraordinarily comprehensive in his theology of the roots of Jesus’ story in the Old Testament.
But that is only one part of the story of Jesus Christ. The story has a sequence as well; and the continuing sequence is what makes the genealogy” good news” for Matthew’s audience and for us.
Human beings have been empowered to preserve, proclaim and convey the salvation brought by Jesus Christ throughout history. The God who wrote the beginnings with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness.
A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to whom the world hearkened and women upon whom the world frowned– this God continues to work through the same melange.
If it was a challenge to recognize in the last part of Matthew’s genealogy that totally unknown people were part of the story of Jesus Christ, it may be a greater challenge to recognized that the unknown characters of today are an essential part of the sequence.
The proclamation of that genealogy in the Advent liturgy is designed to give us hope about our destiny and our importance.
By stressing the all-powerful grace of God, the genealogy presents the greatest challenge to those who will accept only an idealized Jesus Christ whose story they would write only with straight lines and whose portrait they would paint in pastel colors.
If we look at the whole story and the total picture, the Gospels teach us that Jesus’ ministry was not thus; the history of the church teaches us that the sequence as not thus. God’s grace can even work with people like us.
Father Raymond E. Brown, S.S.
