A SURPRISING AND PROTESTING GOD

Saturday in the 3rd Week of Advent
Mt 1:1-17

Boring – you may not be saying it but am pretty sure that this is how you feel about the Gospel today. What with a mere list of names! The litany of names, with the refrain, “was the father of…was the father of…was the father of…”, may even sound like a lullaby for those attending the dawn Mass on this second day of the Misa de Gallo.

According to Matthew (a competent tax collector therefore very good at recording names), the people whose names he had listed were the great, great, great, great grandfathers of Jesus. They were the ancestors of the Messiah. The Gospel today is the family tree of Jesus.

We may be bored while reading or listening the genealogy even of Jesus but that is in itself the first lesson for today. We are bored because there seems to be nothing happening for a very long while. If God would send His Son, why not send it right from the start? Why did He not send the Savior immediately after the Fall so that sin would had been defeated without much delay?

The proclamation of the Word of God, just as His Holy Incarnation, reminds us about the value of waiting. Great things take time to happen. But no matter how long the wait is, the fullness of time arrives. Kairos is the Greek word for “fullness of time”. It is also the word for “grace”.

Thus, just when we think that there is nothing happening, we should stay alert even more. Next time we are halfway to yawning, brace ourselves, for the best is yet to come. The Messiah came fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen generations from the Babylonian captivity to the “fullness of time”.

The boredom ends when there is a sudden twist in the list. At the end of the lineage of men, the lyrics of the refrain change: “…Joseph, the husband of Mary; OF HER was born Jesus who is called the Christ.” A woman, Mary, signals the great things to come. For a highly patriarchal culture such as the Jewish society, this is an absurdity. Women do not count. Yet, Mary herself sings, “For He has looked upon His lowly servant…. He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast the might from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things while the rich He has sent away empty.” The coming of the Messiah would reverse the order of things. He would not be determined by the past. Rather, the past would be seen in His light.

Another lesson for us is that our past should now be viewed in the light of Christ. We are not the sum total of our mistakes, wrong decisions, and even sins in the past. Welcoming Jesus into our life sheds new light upon whatever we have done and whoever we have been in the past.

Even with little knowledge about some of the people mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus, we can easily conclude that the family tree of the Messiah was not a perfect family tree after all. He had prostitutes, relatives in incestuous relationship, murderers, and adulterers among His ancestors. But these dark spots in His lineage did not frustrate God’s plan. The Light, who is Jesus Himself, still shone; and the inclusion of Mary’s name in a highly patriarchal genealogy of the Messiah tells us that God is never determined by what comes before neither by what comes after.

Christmas is the dawning of hope amidst boredom with the present and imprisonment in the past. It is God’s surprise to a sleeping world and protest to a world of regrets and resentment. It is the birth of hope against all hope because Jesus is the hope of the world. In Him, hope and its fulfillment meet.

Stay alert! God is surprising us. Rise up! God is protesting.