Those who lie in unvisited tombs

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 1-17) 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. What spiritual sense can we make of this passage which seems so alien to us? What was its meaning to the first Christian readers? Surely, we do not need to know every one of the forty-two generations reaching back to Abraham, do we? And what can they possibly have meant to Jesus who actually derives no physical descendance from Joseph but only from His mother?

The first paradox of this gospel can be found in dealing with this last question. For why was Jesus sent to us in the first place? To save us from sin? That but not only that. For in saving us from sin, the Father determined that He should adopt us through His only begotten Son. This is the mystery of our adoption in Christ which St Paul will unfold in the letters to the Romans and the Ephesians. And with the opening of St Matthew’s gospel, we can say something more about it: that in order to adopt us and make known to us His divine paternity, the Eternal Father willed first that His only begotten Son be adopted by a human father and know the joys of being a real human son – the son of Mary but of Joseph also by adoption.  

Of course, in Joseph’s own genealogy, there are some very recognisable names: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David 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 some public record. Yet, in another sense, they serve to point the way forward to Christ, the Saviour to come, the hope of every human breast touched by grace 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, although the Zadok in this genealogy is only named after the great high priest of Solomon. David’s passionate love of God was poured out in the song of Jesus’ heart, and Zadok’s devotion to the holiness of God was expressed in Jesus’ zeal for His Father’s house. Jesus does not merely appear, therefore, at the end of this genealogy. Instead, He is present throughout it, His actions foreshadowed in those of his ancestors.

Neither are these the only ways 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 who, like George Eliot’s heroine Dorothea Brooke, live faithfully a hidden life and lie in unvisited tombs. 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 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 pass 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, therefore, 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 and who lie in unvisited tombs.