ON WHY THE GENEALOGY IS MORE INTERESTING THAN NASCAR.
This is the way the world begins.
This is the way the world begins.
This is the way the world begins.
Not with a bang but a genealogy.
I was in a meeting today with my boss (Joe) and my colleague (Zack) discussing important church beeswax, when somehow, something snapped and everyone but me wanted to show off his knowledge of NASCAR.
We live in the south where stock cars are king, and Joe and Zack have made it a spiritual discipline to know the name, car, sponsor, and number of every driver. So, seeing as the Daytona 500 is rapidly approaching, our meeting turned into a riveting round of the "Name a Number and I'll tell you the NASCAR Driver, Car, and Sponsor" game.
Joe answered a lot of trivia correctly after only a few squabbles with Zack (who has an i-Phone and therefore knows everything), so to speed things along, I finally just asked him how many drivers he knew altogether. A lot, he said. And how many people listed in the genealogy of Matthew did he know? I asked. Not as many. Why not?
It's not as interesting, Zack said.
I couldn't agree less. And not because I find NASCAR wholly uninteresting (that's part of it) but because I find the genealogy so interesting that I'd literally shave it into my back if I had enough hair.
But, let's face it, I'm weird. Why would anyone want to read the genealogy at all? It's boring, isn't it? Just another chapter to read if you want that Gospel of Matthew notch on your lipstick case. On and on and on it goes. There aren't any red letters, commandments, or chiasms to attract us to it. No miracles in the genealogy, no parables, no "you've heard of the old way but I tell you a new way."
Not at first glance anyway.
So we stumble through the list if we have to and pay no attention really until we get to names we know. Even then, though our ears might perk up, those names, the ones we know, hold no significance because they are bookmarked in between Jehoshaphat and Zerubablahblahblah, names that no respectable preggo actually considers anymore (like Agnes and Enid) and by the time we get to Jacob or Joseph, we're just dying to get to the next of Matthew – the Christmas story – everyone's favorite. Who doesn't love the old yarn about the starry starry silent night, the friendly ox, the twinkly-eyed magi, the baby who would rock the world?
When you think about what's coming next in the story, well, it's hard to think of the genealogy as anything of vital importance or intrigue.
Sure it's in there; it has to be in there. Always has been. But it seems a little archaic, don't you think? Let's skip to the next bit, okay? The bit about sugarplums and snowflakes and silver bells, silver bells.
But there's a catch, you see, when we skip to the next bit. The catch is that the end doesn't make much sense without the beginning. It's kind of like "Stairway to Heaven", the genealogy is. It's tedious and sounds like the same thing over and over again. And it goes on and on and on for four and then six and eight minutes and you wish they would just get to the good part already. But if you fast-forward to the last minute and eighteen seconds of "Stairway to Heaven", which is when Robert Plant goes nuts, or read verse 1:16 only, when Matthew announces the whole reason for the long list of branches on Jesus' family tree, if you skip past it all and just listen to the good part,
you don't ever really understand the good part, do you? You have to climb up Robert Plant's long, twisty story to dance around at the top for the best minute and eighteen seconds ever. You have to walk through Matthew's Hall of Records and Vital Documents to hear Jacob's name called, and then Joseph's, and then Mary's, and finally, that clincher, that reason for all of their being, to hear the name Jesus.
And here we learn it's not just why we read the genealogy that's important, but who we read in the genealogy that's important. Every name in the genealogy was chosen to be part of that genealogy, chosen by one who knows every name ever, the one who could have excluded the poor and impoverished for the sake of the rich and royal. But didn't.
The names in the genealogy, like all Jewish names, are packed with meaning, stories of their own. And we have to read through the whole bloody mess of it, the parts where Abraham almost kills his only son and Jacob steals his brother's blessing, the part where Tamar seduces her father-in-law, where Rahab the prostitute saves the men of God, where David sleeps with Uriah's wife and kills him to cover it, the part where I do all these things in my heart every day, it all has to happen first, before the part where the unmarried teenager gives birth to the son of God makes any sense at all. Truly, we have to wander through a little desert to find the burning bush or the Promised Land.
But it's so worth it.
And there's a twist. The story we expect is not the story we get.
In the genealogy, we see a scurvy crew made into kings. We see Rahab adorned in royal ribbons. We see David, Uriah, Bathsheba, and Solomon sharing an umbrella on a rainy day. We see Babel dismantled and rebuilt anew as a brand new city, a city of gold. And here the unlikelies, the foreigners and adulterers, the murderers and prostitutes, and even a few of the righteous ones are adopted into the family of God.
And we too are invited, no matter how unlikely, unruly, unholy, unclean, to dine with Him at the table of tables. At this table, all nametags are welcome and ready or not, here they come: the cowboys and Indians, the princes and paupers, the Capulets and Montegues. And all we saints and sinners are offered a seat at the great round table.
We are Cornelius. We are ten lepers. The old way drove us to the edge of camp with the other untouchables. The new way invites us in, beaming, on the arm of the guest of honor, Himself an unlikely, God and man.
And we're not just on His arm. We are His arm, His foot, His finger, His very eyelashes. This family tree is not just a list of branches but a list of body parts. To forget about it is to forget our medical records on a trip to the doctor. When we look at this list, these stories, each other, we see nothing less than Emmanuel, God with us.
The genealogy is, every verse, red letter. It's a commandment, parable, and miracle, the point before the proof. It fulfills all the prophecies before we even get to the salad course, the first testament in a bread bowl. It's the genealogy that leads us from the old way to the new, the thesis statement that opens the essays of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the character guide, the index, a family history for the God of the universe. The genealogy is, in so many words, so many unpronounceable Hebrew words, the "once upon a time" in the greatest story ever told.
Let's begin.
-Brynn Camery-Hoggatt
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