Gen 49:2, 8-10, Psalm 72:1-4, 7-8, 17, Matthew 1:1-17

Matthew begins, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And then we get this difficult and rather tedious list of ancestry which in the end doesn’t actually biologically connect to Jesus.

These opening lines tell us what is important to Matthew and I think what should therefore be important to us. Jesus, the King, the ultimate savior, the anointed of God, the one we have been waiting for, is one of us. This is not John’s Gospel where the Son of Man exists before the earth. For Matthew, this Jesus has a human ancestry. It says, if you want to know Jesus, you have to look at where he came from. This Jesus has a history. Its place is Hebrew Scripture, what we call the Old Testament.

We get a little review of the whole story of Israel in that list of names. Beginning with Abraham and going through King David and all the rest, with some notable women as well. For me concretizing Jesus’ history emphasizes the central reality of the Incarnation, God is with us. To know Jesus is to get close to the human history that formed him. To know God is to pay attention to the reality in which God operates. This world is the access point for developing a relationship with God. Therefore, being close to God is not an ethereal or distant exercise. It is comprised of living attentively to the reality of everyday life. We need to take the time to pay attention to our own experience, our own history. The perspective from which to view our world is the one Jesus gave us. A loving, gentle but principled approach is how we are to live in this world.

All this means that the world is a graced existence. That is the view emphasized at this time of year when we celebrate the gift God has given us in Jesus, God’s very self. In so doing God has reminded us of how giving to others is the key creative work we can do to make the world a place of peace and joy.

The peace and joy of Jesus Christ, son of God, be with you all.