Let's celebrate who we are

Good morning, happy Thursday, and many blessings.

It is odd to start a book with a boring list of names (Matthew 1:1-17). Such a tactic is not an attention grabber or page turner. That, however, wasn’t Matthew’s primary intent. Matthew first wanted to link Jesus to his Jewish heritage. Jesus’ genealogy begins with Abraham, who is the father of the nation of Israel. The list of names, which is divided into three groups of fourteen goes from Abraham to David, Solomon to the Babylonian Captivity, and from the return from exile to Joseph who was the husband of Mary.

Matthew also wanted to affirm Jesus’ connection with the Davidic dynasty. God had made a covenant with King David that an heir of David’s would always sit on Israel’s throne. Jesus’ lineage is traced directly back to King David. Jesus is worthy of bearing the title, “Anointed One,” another name for King is Jewish terminology, which is also translated the “Christ,” or the “Messiah.

For Matthew, Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. (Christ is not Jesus’ surname—as in son Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Christ. Christ is Jesus’ title. Jesus is King, Savior and Redeemer.) Matthew identifies Jesus as “Messiah” in verses 1, 16, 17, and 18. Jesus, as a descendant of David and as the Messiah, is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with David and the promise God gave to all of Israel.

There are several lessons from this list of people that we can bring forward and apply to our lives today. No one has a perfect heritage—not even the royals—still God uses them.

We are not perfect, and God does not call us to be perfect. Rather we are called to be loving and compassionate.

Also, Matthew’s genealogy is the only one that makes reference to four women in Jesus’ family tree: Tamar, Rehab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Bathsheba’s name is not explicitly mentioned by Matthew; she is only identified as Uriah’s wife. A fifth woman, Mary, is mentioned by name. However, since she is a New Testament personality, Mary falls outside of the purview of the Old Testament because she was not one of Jesus’ great-grandmothers.

In a time when genealogies didn’t normally contain even a single female name, why are these women included? And what does their presence imply? In other words, they were women just like us: ordinary, tarnished by sin, unlikely to shape the course of history. They are in the Savior’s genealogy to give us hope, and to foreshadow the kind of people Jesus the Messiah came to save. He came from a lineage of sinners to save sinners. But He remained sinless.

And we will be like the women from Jesus’ genealogy as we put our whole future into the hands of our God, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He offers to give our simple lives great significance as we follow him. Like the women of the genealogy who put their hope in the coming Messiah, following him is worth far more than we will know until eternity. Today we can celebrate who we are—who our ancestors were and what part of the world we come from. We also rejoice that God uses us as God used Jesus’ ancestors and ours in order to bring forward God’s promises and kingdom.

Blessings

Fr. Luis+