Some people like to remind you of their ancestry to let you know how important they and their family are. But Matthew’s genealogy comes as a stinging rebuke. He reminds us of a central truth of God’s kingdom, that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things-and the things that are not-to nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before him” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).
If we are not snared by pride in trying to boast about how “good” our past or present is, we can also fall into denial about how bad some of it is. Perhaps my family and my past are not so bad? We are “good” people, right? Normal jobs, good neighborhoods, the right schools? The truth, we know, is that there are in fact parts of our lives and people in our lives who constitute very bad news, chapters in our histories that we simply wish were not there-a broken marriage, a wayward child, unfulfilled potential, financial mismanagement. The list goes on of the many things about me I decidedly do not want you to know.
But if the genealogy of Jesus comes as a stinging rebuke to human pride, it can also come to us as a gentle solace to whatever we have experienced at the hands of human devastation and dysfunction. The stories of Matthew’s five women are the stories of widowhood, second and third marriages, incest, prostitution, lying, murder, adultery, economic hardship, foreign exclusion, and geographic dislocation. He reminds us that there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:39), and that there is nothing of life’s bitterness that cannot be woven into God’s providential, redemptive history for me. My story is not over; there are more chapters to be written.
The human ancestry of the incarnate son of God includes the likes of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. In his memoir, Now and Then, Frederick Buechner reminds us that every human story is not only interesting but sacred, our personal histories being the very means through which God speaks to us… “autobiography becomes a way of praying.” As we listen to the sounds of our own very human stories, may we hear, above all, the sound of the voice of the Prince of Peace-Jesus