Gospel [Matthew 1:1-25 (§1)]
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Dear Father, brothers and sisters: Happy Feast!
At long last our Nativity Fast is almost at an end as we now come to this final Sunday before the Feast which is also called the Sunday of the Holy Fathers. Last Sunday we commemorated the Sunday of the Forefathers, where Holy Mother Church commemorates all the righteous of the Old Testament who awaited the coming of Christ. On this day we remember all those in the Old Testament who were related to Christ by blood and those who spoke of his birth as a man. We are thus being encouraged to mediate on Christ’s humanity and his flesh and blood ancestors.
Today the whole subject of family history has become very popular whether on popular TV shows or internet sites. People are having their DNA analysed, going to archives and scouring burial and baptism registers. Why are so many people doing this and going to such trouble? In a very tangiable sense we are shaped and formed by our family members who have gone before us, and with whom we are inextricably linked. Not only is this in the sense of inheriting sticky out teeth, big squashy noses, or big flappy ears, but also in terms of character and personality traits and even sinful tendencies – there is, for example, often a strong genetic component to depression, anxiety as well as compulsiveness and extroversion. Perhaps the current interest in family history and investigation is driven by self enquiry. We look to our own individual past in order to learn something more about ourselves and our own inherited human nature.
When we come to the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, however, we are looking at someone who is completely unique – one who derives his whole human nature from His Mother, the Virgin Mary only as our Lord had no human father. On this Sunday of the Holy Fathers when we are commemorating Christ’s human ancestry according to the flesh, let us thus look at our Gospel reading through the inspired teaching of St Chromatius Bishop of Aquileia.
Matthew, Luke and John all start with a form of genealogy. Whereas Matthew and Luke are exclusively concerned with the origin of Christ’s Human Nature, St John uniquely amongst the Evangelists starts with His Divine Nature and Divine Origin, from the Father giving us that most beautiful opening words of his divinely-inspired Prologue –
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
Although St Matthew is concerned with the origin of Christ’s humanity, it is clear from looking at his genealogy that we are not dealing with any ordinary family tree. Indeed, I think that many genealogists might be rather frustrated by the family tree which St Matthew presents. As St Chromatius goes on to show in his Homily, St Matthew’s genealogy deliberately omits some generations in the second section and omits one generation in the third section. Although, as St Chromatius demonstrates this can be understood and reconciled with St Luke’s own genealogy, which differs in a couple of places, it is important that we understand that what is being presented to us is more than a simple family tree but something much more theological. This in fact is clear from the very first words of St Matthew’s Gospel with its bold declaration –
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
St Matthew was at pains to show firstly that Jesus of Nazareth was a Hebrew of the House of David and a son of Abraham and second that Jesus of Nazareth was the precise fulfillment of an ancient hope carried by the Patriarchs and Prophets, that the Messiah, the anointed one would come to save His people from their sins. Both Abraham and David were “heirs of this promise”, to use St Paul’s phrase, as God told both of them that it would be from their specific blood-line and ancestry that the Christ would arise from and where salvation would dawn. Thus we hear in Genesis 28:14 God saying to Abraham –
And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
King David was also made heir to this Universal Promise, when through the Word given to his Prophet Nathan when the Lord said that He would, ‘raise up your seed after you … and I will prepare his kingdom … and his kingdom will be forever’ (2 Kings 7: 12,16). And in St David’s 131st Psalm, verse 11 we hear the Holy Spirit speaking through him saying –
The Lord hath made a faithful oath unto David, and He shall not shrink from it, Of the fruit of thy loins shall I set upon thy throne.
It was thus crucial for St Matthew that he demonstrate how Jesus relates to both Abraham and David as He is the realization and enfleshment of the Promise that had been given to both of them.
In terms of the structure of St Matthew’s genealogy, we see that it is arranged in three sections of 14 generations with King David acting as the pivot:
So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.
St Chromatius naturally asks why has the Evangelist arranged it in this way? His answer is that the number fourteen combines the divine number associated with the Old Covenant – 10 as in the 10 Commandments – and the divine number associated with the New Covenant – namely 4 as in the 4 Gospels.
Christ had already come to the fulness of the law, who joined the New Testament to the Old.
And as to the threefold structure, this of course reveals the Trifold Nature of God Himself –
And lest he should seem to have passed over anything without a spiritual interpretation, the very tripartite division of Jesus’ generations shows us the mystery of the perfect Trinity.
The structure of the genealogy of His Human Nature thus proclaims something of the structure of His Divine Nature.
As we have already mentioned, and as is emphasized by the second part of our Gospel reading detailing the circumstances of Christ’s conception and incarnation of Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit, Christ did not have a human father. St Joseph, the Betrothed and Guardian of the Mother of God’s virginity was rather His elderly step-father. Why is it then that the genealogy ends with Joseph –
the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ?
According to Jewish Marital Law, even as his adopted son, Jesus would inherit his lineage and have full hereditary rights.
Dear fathers, brothers and sisters: I hope that this has given a bit more insight into what is otherwise a rather confusing and intimidating heap of biblical names, some well known others much more obscure. In just a couple of days time we too shall mystically come to Bethlehem and behold as we heard in the second half of our Gospel reading that Emmanuel has come: God is with us and that Jesus – whose very name means Saviour – has been born. For the hope that the Prophets and Patriarchs carried and dimly perceived was not simply that a Jewish Messiah would arise for the political emancipation of the Hebrew people. No: rather that God Himself would come and that this would be for the salvation not only of the Jews but of all mankind. Let us return again to that promise God gives to Abraham –
In you all the tribes of the earth shall be blessed.
We can thus see that this blessing is not limited to one Tribe but to all mankind. Through our Saviour Jesus Christ, this son of Abraham and son of David, salvation has come into all the world. The King of Glory, the Creator of the world, Has come to us, has taken flesh, our flesh, our frail human nature in order to save us and heal us. As we hear in the words of the troparion of the Forefeast –
Christ is born // to raise the image that fell of old.
Amen.