Between — Back to the Birth

A look at the gaps in the lectionary.

This week: the gap between Advent 3A and Advent 4A.

Now we head back from Matthew 11 and the tale of John the Baptist to receive the story of Jesus’s birth in chapter 1. I’ve already covered chapters 1-2 and 4-10. So let’s keep this week’s installment short.

Here’s what we’ll do:
1) Remind ourselves how the gospel begins
2) Reflect briefly on how weird this birth story sounds now

1. In the Beginning, was a genealogy

The gospel begins with a yawn-inducing collection of old names we usually take as historically important. Like these guys meant something to somebody at some point. But for the most part, we skim the names if we’re not the unlucky person having to read them in front of the church.

If we take the idea of a genealogy slightly more seriously, we continue to gloss over its contents, but reason that its structure is important. It brings us back to the beginning and shows how Jesus connects to the original blessing through David.

Taking the genealogy even more seriously, we see that this doesn’t merely seat Jesus in the Kingly position, but connects Jesus to the religious origins of the people. He is the manifestation of that blessing. Jesus becomes the link, not just to First Century Jerusalem, but to all of Jewish history.

If we dwell on all of this for a moment, we start to think maybe Matthew’s starting with a genealogy isn’t so weird. Still kind of boring. But less weird. Maybe even important.

But if we actually see what Matthew does with this genealogy, we get a different story.

The women reveal God.

The patriarchal lens of powerful men, the kings who (fail to effectively) lead Israel, make the genealogy look like a useless who’s who of incompetence from one generation to another. Abraham and David become the touchstones in the story and serve as the names we know among a whole bunch of forgettable dead guys.

But three women are named. Despite their lack of power or their cultural relevance to the story. In First Century Judea, the mother was irrelevant to your line. It was your father that mattered. So it is entirely improbable that Matthew would include these women.

And especially these women. The genealogy wants you to see them:

Tamar who had a son by her father-in-law because her husband and his brothers weren’t up to the task. “and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar”.
Bathsheba, who was raped by David. And then David put a hit on her husband and stole her. “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah”.
Mary, mother of God. “and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary”

These women reveal God’s action in the story. Their presence in the genealogy serves to remind us of the ways the men don’t encompass the story. That God comes to these women and works through these women, too.

This means that the genealogy is about the family line. And it is a radical anti-patriarchal document that displays both the power and failure of men and God’s constant revelation through women and the powerless.

The Gospel starts here because that is the backstory.

Matthew will connect the revelation of God through Jesus as being a continuous line from Abraham. This is a central theme. But just as central is what that theme actually means.

It means God is revealed in the powerless and the weak. The Good News arrives in unexpected relationships and to the lowly. The Christ is feared by the rich and powerful alike. And the one who prepares the way for the Christ won’t fully comprehend how revolutionary this revelation will be.

2. The Birth

As I said last time, just take stock of how absent the Lukan elements are. Matthew doesn’t even give us a narrative of the birth itself. Matthew starts with a line that sounds like “OK, here’s how it happened.” Then proceeds to not actually talk about its happening. Ending instead with an “oh, by the way, Joseph never had sex with her until after Jesus was born.”

While we’re bound to hear all sorts of sermons on Sunday about Joseph or the coming baby, many will skip the sermon for a pageant with kids harmonizing all the narratives together. All of these, of course, are fine proclamations of the Good News for the day.

I’m not sure I’d be too excited about these options outside of self-preservation.

The greater question is how does this birth story reveal the truth just revealed in the genealogy? How does the absence of Mary’s perspective reveal just how dominant the maleness of the narrative is?

Or how might we preserve the context of this story more intentionally? We’re tempted to see the episodic nature embodied by these preaching moments as so self-contained. And yet this and the flight into Egypt amount to Joseph’s whole role in the narrative. How might we help contextualize that for one another? I’m not sure talking about Joseph’s struggle alone does that.

But what does it mean that this gets to be an episode in a bigger narrative of God’s work?

What if…

What happens when we put this story of Joseph with Mary beside those stories of Judah with Tamar and David with Bathseba? Scandalous, illegal, questionably legitimate?

Dare we say it?

Joseph broke the law by not killing his girlfriend. And God trusted a simple carpenter to stay his hand and protect her and a bastard son from a tyrannical king.

Oh, and by the way, in case you didn’t notice from the genealogy, Jesus isn’t a legitimate king. His father’s not the real father. Wiggling the semantics and sharpening the finer points proves the point further:

If God cared for Jesus’s legitimacy, the miracle would have come through Joseph. But the point isn’t our sense of legitimacy.

Matthew gives us a chance to see just how much God is revealed in the gaps between our precious order.