Matthew 1:1
So for some reason this intractable fellow named Matthew decided it would be best to kick off his written account of the life of Jesus with a highly exciting list of unpronounceable names. "...and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat..." I used to hate him for it, to be honest. A genealogy seemed to me to be a pretty faulty method for capturing an audience's attention at the top end of a narrative. Nowadays, though, I know better than to yawn.
Matthew, the author traditionally linked to the first book in the Christian Scriptures and also a disciple of Jesus, understood that before he could dive into the action of this story he had to establish the identity of his main character. His audience, incidentally, was primarily Jewish, and at that time in history a person's lineage was of supreme interest to the Jewish community. More than anything, your ancestry defined who you were and determined who you could be. Matthew's goal was to make sure that his readers knew that Jesus' family tree more than qualified him to be exactly who his followers claimed he was: no less than the promised Messiah, a prophesied deliverer of the people, who was expected to abolish oppression and ungodliness while permanently establishing righteousness, justice, and peace.
This is why my opinion of Matthew's wordy prologue to the story of Jesus has changed for the better. The point he's making essentially is that Jesus hasn't just dropped out of nowhere, another faddish miracle man with a cult following among the peasants. No, says Matthew, the man I shadowed at close range for a period of three years is part of a much bigger story, one that began long before any of us were born and that is also destined to outlive every one of us. See, in the eyes of Matthew and his readership, the names in this list were anything but ordinary. They represented people whose identities were charged with significance for the entire human race. Their lives, like most human lives, were full of imperfections and disappointments, but running through them all a powerful thread of divine presence linked them to a transcendent saga that had been going since before the dawn of time. The power behind all existence had touched down in these particular lives in a big way, Matthew believed; and I believe it, too.
This breathtaking legacy of encounters with ultimate truth culminates gloriously in Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Watching him stand there on the threshold of time with the eternal story burning brightly in his being, I experience the thrill of the endless ages crashing down around me when I realize: I know him personally.
And he loves me.
I love you, too, Jesus, choosing to enter humanity's story and intertwine our life with God's. I love how you came not to nullify all that came before you, but to complete it, to make sense of it. And I love the fact that because of you my story no longer has to be limited to the confines of my fragile, fleeting little lifespan in this fragile, fleeting age, but instead I can enter the Great Story - your story. Our story.
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