Our place among the ranks of the unknown

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 1-16 and 18-23) recounts the genealogy of Jesus, going back to David and eventually to Abraham. A whole procession of names, most of them unknown to us, pass us by, as we await the coming of the Saviour. At last, the gospel relates some of the circumstances around Mary’s pregnancy, St Joseph’s prophetic dream reassuring him about the child, and the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah that ‘the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.'

What spiritual sense can we make of this passage which seems so alien to us? What was its meaning to the first Christian readers? The final section about the situation of Mary and Joseph in a way speaks much more to us, with its mixture of trial and relief, and the assurance of prophecy fulfilled. Surely, we can afford to leave the first section alone or just skim over it? But then, what if we did not?

There are recognisable names of course in the genealogy: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Zadok among them.  But here we find some beginning of a deeper mystery. Each of these men were individuals in themselves with stories and experiences of their own, private thoughts and feelings locked away in their own hearts, not listed in a genealogy. Yet, in another sense, they serve to point the way forward to Christ, the Saviour to come, the hope of every human breast that longs and longs and does not know why. Abraham and Isaac between them played out the drama of the persons of the Father and the Son, Abraham willing to countenance the sacrifice of his child, Isaac bearing the weight of the wood on his shoulders. Jacob’s struggles anticipated those of Jesus, as does his vision of the bridge between heaven and earth which is realised in his Divine descendent. David and Zadok between them speak to us of Jesus’ kingship and His priesthood, his passionate love of God poured out in the song of His heart, and His utter devotion to the adoration of God. Jesus does not merely appear, therefore, at the end of this genealogy; rather, He is present throughout it, His actions foreshadowed in those of his ancestors.

Arguably, however, this is not the only way that Jesus’ genealogy may speak to us. Jesus is God and man; His destiny was to bestride the world as its conqueror and live among us as our brother. And so, we can regard every one of these other names, especially the unknown ones, as types not of Jesus but of us, the anawim the very ordinary ones, the ones that are seen and forgotten, the ones who go unnoticed by the busy and important world. They lived in hope and so must we; they lived often in ignorance of God’s purposes, and so do we. They did not know when their waiting would end, and neither do we. They were probably perturbed by the many troubles of the children of God, and so are we, scandalised in our leaders, disappointed in those we trust, wearied by others and wearied by ourselves. Yet all we can do at times is to cling on to Jesus, our alpha and omega. Like them, therefore, we are participants in that grand tradition described by St Paul in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews:

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings… By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God… By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. … By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going… And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.

What is this except the tradition of faith, the faith that goes before us and comes after us, that we have received and that by God’s grace we must be committed to passing on, for there are, as Chesterton put it, no private suns and moons, i.e. there is no account of the universe that is simply for little me. We belong to a larger world. The Sun of Justice is the Son of the Father, and He will rule forever over His Father’s domain.

This grand genealogy means something to us for two reasons: first, because it tells us about Jesus, and second, because it tells us about ourselves. It tells us about Jesus whose coming, ministry and destiny are foretold in the major figures whose names we have dwelt on already. It tells us about ourselves in the unknown names, the litany of the little ones forgotten or ignored by the world but who play a role in the passing on of that life which bears fruit in ways that are incalculable. Every hair on our heads is numbered, as we know, and the Father holds us in the palm of His hand and shapes us with the skill of a potter, if only we will allow it; if only we will suffer ourselves to be remade in the image of His Son.

And how they must have greeted their descendent when He opened for them the gates of their prison between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, when a new light dawned upon their ignorance, and mercy and justice together breathed the possibility of life back into the moribund figure of broken humanity. This is our family tree, the fruit of divine promises and many hidden and unknown human fidelities, handed on down the ages, from father to son and mother to daughter, until the last syllable of recorded time.

 The genealogy of Jesus, so strange upon our ear, is, then, no excursion into mere curiosity or arcane trivia. It is the unfolding and making known of the tale of God’s mercies down the centuries, told out in the lives of the many most of whose names are known to God alone.