Isaiah 7.10-16; Psalm 80.1-8,18-20; Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-end
COMMENTATORS note that John marks his Gospel as a recent Genesis, by his echo of Genesis 1.1: “In the start”. But Matthew does something similar, and does it twice: “The book of genesis of Jesus Christ” (1.1); “Now the genesis of Jesus the Messiah took place in this fashion” (1.18). So, a case could be made that, like John, Matthew thinks of his Gospel as a recent Genesis. One commentator goes to date as to state that “By selecting a biblical name for his book, Matthew makes an implicit claim to biblical authority.”
That Greek word “genesis” has a wealthy complexity. Well before it became a book title, it embraced ideas of starting and becoming, from the microcosm of human birth to the macrocosm that’s creation. A type of it even underlies the word of the angel that “The child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
Every child born into the world is a recent starting — at all times for the kid’s mother; almost at all times for the daddy; and, God willing, often for a community of family and friends as well. One of essentially the most instinctive reasons for the appeal of Christmas is that sense of latest beginnings and fresh starts. We get up on Christmas morning, and all the things seems possible. Or, at the very least, it looks as if it must be possible. Whatever the realities of Christmas, the best is there before us — to long for in our hearts, to strive for in our lives.
Matthew’s Gospel holds a singular place within the Christmas cycle. The three Gospel passages set by the Church’s lectionary for Christmas Day come from Luke and John only. Matthew is sort of a pair of bookends encompassing the nativity: at one end, this Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent; at the opposite, what has come to be often called the following phase of the cycle, Epiphany.
One purpose of Matthew 2 (the Epiphany Gospel) is to clarify why Jesus was born in Bethlehem, provided that he lived in Nazareth and died in Jerusalem. This Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent answers a distinct query: not “Where?” but “Who?” Right before the nativity itself, the Gospel gives an account of who Jesus was: his ancient ancestry described; his miraculous parentage predicted.
I even have just once heard Matthew’s genealogy read aloud during a service, and it struck me then in the way in which that it was perhaps intended to by the Evangelist: dignified but opaque, cataloguing mysterious history and the distant past. Its wealth of detail and the boldness of the development of that genealogy have the specified effect: authentication. It is straightforward to miss the incontrovertible fact that the person they authenticate is Joseph, who was Jesus’s adoptive-/foster-father.
Like Luke, Matthew doesn’t attempt to clarify how this miraculous conception takes place. He simply states it, and attributes it to the motion of the Holy Spirit. In the context of such a miraculous miracle, to cavil at Joseph’s genealogy as an authentication of Jesus’s identity seems too very like “straining at gnats” (Matthew 23.24).
The angel addresses Joseph as “son of David”, reminding us of the generations within the genealogy, and preparing us for confirmation of that Davidic ancestry within the nativity at Bethlehem which can follow within the Epiphany Gospel (Matthew 2.1-12). It is difficult for us — familiar as we’re with the identity of Jesus as Messiah and Son of David — to understand how striking the angel’s words to Joseph will need to have been. On the one hand, kingly ancestry; on the opposite, sexual wrongdoing.
There is a moment of crisis when Mary is found to be pregnant. Matthew doesn’t tell us who discovered, or how they told Joseph, or why. But disputed paternity means disputed posterity. Paternity and posterity really matter to people within the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. The genealogy is itself a proof of that.
In Matthew 1.21, the angel tells Joseph, “You are to call him Jesus.” Thus, one other link with the book of Genesis is revealed; for, when God formed living creatures “and brought them to the person to see what he would call them . . . regardless of the man called every living creature, that was its name” (2.19). By giving him the position and honour of naming, God confirms that Joseph could be a true father to Jesus. Making that parenthood one of the best it could actually be is — as for each other parent — as much as him.
Buried Treasure: The collected Church Times Sunday readings by Cally Hammond is obtainable now (Canterbury Press, £24.99 (£19.99); 978-1-78622-567-2).
