Third Saturday in Advent: December 17

Genesis 49:2,8-10; Psalm 72:1-8; Matthew 1:1-7,17

Today we begin the final countdown, leaving the adult Jesus and entering into the mystery of the Incarnation.  We begin with the first part of Matthew’s genealogy (which differs from Luke’s, if you’re curious).  Matthew tells this story to frame the Messiahship of Jesus as the fulfillment of the history of Israel.  But tucked in here is a bigger story, a story that is carried by women.

Four women are named in this first fourteen generations.  Aside from them, Matthew only mentions the fathers.  Judaism may reckon one’s Jewish identity through the mother, but you wouldn’t know it here.  If they reckoned through the woman all the time, Jesus wouldn’t have been Jewish.

In fact, all four of these women are “foreigners,” not Israelites or Hebrews.  And all of them are marginal figures, not the sort of women we want in our family.  So why does Matthew go out of his way to include them in Jesus’ genealogy?

Jesus may come to the people of Israel, but he is not only for them.  The love and the peace he brings flow beyond the borders of any national or ethnic or even religious group.  He is not bringing salvation to “Christians”; there is no such thing when he comes.  He is coming to fulfill the promise of Israel, which is not a promise about Israel’s good fortune as much as a promise to the world manifested through Israel.  His is indeed “a light to enlighten the nations.”

And it’s not only traditional identity borders that Jesus transgresses.  He walks right past the signs that separate the righteous from the sinners, the clean from the unclean.  Somewhere in him, he knows that his foremothers were exactly the sort of people who were kept out of the purity party.  Through their willingness to cross boundaries, and their sheer determination to survive and keep going, they moved the story of Israel along.  Without them, no Joseph; without them, a very different Jesus.

Think back to Isaiah 56.  Foreigners are welcome, Isaiah says, if they “keep my sabbaths.”  The old boundaries are a thing of the past.  Foreigners: welcome!  Outcasts: welcome!  Eunuchs: welcome!  Prostitutes: welcome!  Widowed: welcome!  Raped and forced to bear children: welcome!  In fact, more than welcome.  The outcasts are the ones bringing new life and energy, like immigrants and refugees today.  Like African-Americans who made the Great Migration from South to North, like their ancestors who survived the Middle Passage, the ones who dared and struggled brought hope and resilience to their communities.  Like Jesus.

Is there an outcast among you, or within you?  Where is there a hidden source of strength that you have not dared to welcome?  Look around, look within, and say: Thank you for not giving up.  Do not be afraid.