Let us explicate Matthew 1 together.
Chapters like these embody what always estranged me from reading The Bible1 as I recall attempting in my youth to read the Old Testament from Genesis onward but becoming distracted and uninterested during the long passages in its early chapter which began enumerating name upon name of familial lineages. No, thank you. Many years later, I was encouraged to read the New Testament first for its accessibility and then return to the old testament. I began only to find that it opened with an enumeration of name upon name of familial lineages.
I would like to look at it with a scrutinizing eye, a poet’s ear, a symbolic imagination though—and a dash of Jungian shadow work. This approach makes me enjoy reading the text which constitutes the foundation of much of Western Civilization, its canon of literature, and the breadth of dialogue among the great minds over millennia.
Matthew 1:1-15 opens with the following verses:
An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.
And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Salathiel, and Salathiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob
But perhaps we might liken it to something we actually do enjoy elsewhere in our human love of storytelling: origin stories. We like to know what formed another. And like a child who not only listens to but requests the same bedtime story, over and over again, those listening to Matthew’s story opening about the historical account of this genealogy, they—like me—would recognize how it parallels what one finds in the opening passages in Genesis: a historical account of a people—the chosen people of God—and how that history arrives at the person upon whom we focus. More than this, we know Genesis as the book of origins and of creation. It moves from the vast to the specific, the cosmic to the chosen species, humankind, the ones known—like God—for their acts of creation, their creativity.
Matthew mirrors this style, curating a history to introduce us to the person Jesus, and nestles the reader into the familiar while also making something new, illustrating an ancestral accord of the man for whom Israel awaited as prophesied in the Old Testament. This is what the New Testament offers, a response, something new: “The Good News.”
But why pain ourselves to read that long, long list of names with whom we find ourselves unfamiliar and, perhaps, uninterested? Let us look upon ourselves and how we arrived to this moment to answer this. I ask us to turn to one of my favorite openings from nonfiction, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence ….
The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" … to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely—make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.
Welcome, indeed! And here you exist in this flitting moment in space and time, honoring me by reading my thoughts for God only knows why. But we possess this little, precious sliver of time, much thanks to all the folly and fumbling of our forbearers who met and decided, yes, life, and, over and over, until we came into existence in spite of all obstacles since the dawn of time.
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