An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Matthew 1:1)

              My intention in these next weeks of Advent is to look at the familiar stories of Jesus’ birth in the gospel of Matthew to help us see some of the things we may otherwise miss in these stories that are so familiar to us.

              Go ahead and read the first seventeen verses of Matthew. I’ll wait.

              What did you notice in those seventeen verses, other than a lot of hard-to-pronounce names?

              Did you notice the genealogy started all the way back with Abraham? Father Abraham is the first ancestor of the Jewish people. He was the grandfather of Jacob, who also was called Israel. Matthew is placing Jesus firmly within his Jewish ancestry. When Luke offers up his genealogy (Luke 3:23-38), he traces Jesus’ lineage all the way back to Adam. For Luke, the Messiah is for ALL people.

              Did you notice Matthew included some women in the genealogy? We start with Tamar, who seduced her former father-in-law, followed by “the wife of Uriah,” or Bathsheba, with whom David had an affair before he married her. There was also Rahab, a prostitute, and Ruth, who seduced Boaz and became the great grandmother of David. An interesting group to include in a family tree, each with a scandalous past but also each considered a great matriarch of Israel. When Matthew finally gets to Mary’s unusual pregnancy, perhaps the reader now understands God works in mysterious ways.

              If you read both Matthew’s genealogy and Luke’s genealogy, you will wonder if they are talking about the same family tree. But each gospel writer was making a point, and for Matthew the point is that Jesus, son of Mary, is the long-awaited Messiah.

              It’s easy to skip over the hard parts of the Bible, or the boring parts, but the writers had their reasons. In these first seventeen verses of Matthew, the gospel writer is making it clear that Jesus is the one the Jewish people have been waiting for. And as we read Matthew, the stories of the Old Testament should never be far from mind.