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.
Yet in Bryson’s passage, naturally, he summarizes events for the same reason that Matthew summarizes, curates, the genealogy of Jesus: To abridge allows a focus on what matters, not to belabor over each trivial detail. He writes what the audience needs to know, not what it needn’t know. And what can we gather from both passages?
Everything which happened before arrived upon a moment in time which invited something new.
Lesson: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Make it count. Carpe Diem. Whatever aphorism or motivational platitude fulfills its purpose here. But for those who possess something within them burning, aching, to come into being, do it, do it, do it. Stop postponing the most important aspect of yourself. The idea which possesses you and wishes to summon itself into existence can do it through you—or through someone else willing to make the sacrifice and put forth the effort. For you to do otherwise, to neglect whatever gift or talent you possess, would be to waste the one reason why you likely exist in possession of something worth offering the rest of us.
Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit
What can we gather from this?
Matthew’s genealogical account intentionally abridges the generations to emphasize a textured breadth of people—saints and sinners, murderers and whores, paupers and princes, intellects and exiles, failures, poets. But why?
How many of us might revel or find shame in our family name, our family history, the absent parent or wayward sibling or successful uncle? We often carry these shadows as though they were messengers of who we, as individuals, are, manacled by the actions, good or bad, of those other than us and beyond our own control. We judge ourselves by conditions which possess no genuine bearing over our individual character. We all know the aphorism that “comparison is the thief of joy.” I would argue it is also the thief of our potentiality too.
Matthew offers us Jesus as the inheritor of a rich breadth of characters who represent all manner of background. Many fail to bear witness to the biblical narrative properly, seeing its God and its savior as perfect, establishing an impossible and unfair judgment upon ourselves. Perhaps we might better consider our nature. Joseph Campbell writes in Pathways to Bliss:
Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love—and I mean love, not lust—is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal … peeks through, say, this is a challenge to my compassion. Then we make a try, and something might begin to get going here.
Lesson: Those who shared our collective familial past do not represent who we might be or become, and perhaps we owe them—and, in turn, ourselves—compassion so that we can actualize more fully and more maturely.
To contend with the shadows of our nature, it requires us to look at ourselves wholly—and with love—to not judge ourselves by the perfection we imagine in our minds but with the reality in which we live. We owe that to others too. This does not mean we must accept what they do, what we do, but we can love them, love ourselves, and through that love and understanding, guide that person to their better selves.
The poet Robert Bly offers us an understanding of this historical drama into which we find ourselves thrown in media res and clambering, hopefully, toward solid ground amid troubled waters in his book A Little Book on the Human Shadow:
The drama is this. We came as infants ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, bringing with us appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life—in short, with our 360-degree radiance—and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of the drama. It doesn’t mean our parents were wicked; they needed us for something … We do the same thing to our children; it’s a part of life on this planet. Our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre-verbal place.
We must learn to transcend that element of our past which we reject and accept them as part of a whole.
The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us
This is what it means to confront and accept our shadow.
And what is the Shadow? Bly explains the origin story of what we do with the part of ourselves which we would rather not—or do not—acknowledge:
When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is like a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: ‘Can’t you be still?’ or ‘It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.’ Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: ‘Good children don’t get angry over such little thing.’ So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time [we reach adolescence] … [o]ur bags [are] already a mile long.
We each come from a textured history, not only within our ancestry but within ourselves. Who I am, who I have been, what selves of people came together, failures and triumphs, flaws and nobility, wickedness and grace, to bring me into being? I must look upon my own history in the way I might look at my ancestry and recognize my myriad selves stretching back through all action and inaction in the way that I might stand before all myself within a hall of mirrors.
Otherwise, what happens to us when we ignore and neglect and reject the part of ourselves which essentially makes us whole?
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
Ignoring and neglecting and rejecting ourselves, even if only in part, will only cause suffering, tragedy which will manifest in our—and, in turn, others’—lives until we recognize ourselves wholly. In the same way that we might avoid judging ourselves for the actions of relatives beyond our control, we might also avoid judging ourselves—at least to destructive ends—and instead offer ourselves forgiveness in our weaknesses which—if proven sincere—led to our growth. The same saints and sinners, murderers and whores, paupers and princes, intellects and exiles, failures, poets who compose a genealogical past might also constitute my own history as an individual.
I have lived as all these individuals within myself, literally or figuratively, exhibiting goodness and wickedness, murdering good portions of myself or others, whoring my values or character for gain, choosing to live in moral and spiritual destitution, leading others with noble intentions or to their own suffering, thinking of ideas I never explored or overthinking ideas which needed no exploration, failing—both in my attempts and also to act, writing that I existed—flaws and all. All these people lead to—and from—myself.
I am fortunate. I arrived upon meeting and recognizing myself in reconciliation of who I am in relation to what others wish of me. A difference exists between the elements of my nature which need attending and the elements which I might wish to keep hidden. What happens when we continue this pattern of hiding ourselves though?
We spend our [lives] until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed. Suppose the bag remains sealed—what happens then? A great nineteenth-century story has an idea about that. One night Robert Louis Stevenson woke up and told his wife a bit of a dream he’d just had. She urged him to write it down; he did, and it became Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The nice side of the personality become, in our idealistic culture, nicer and nicer. The Western man may be a liberal doctor, for example, always thinking about the good of others. Morally and ethically he is wonderful. But the substance in the bag takes on a personality of its own; it can’t be ignored. The story says that the substance locked in the bag appears one day, somewhere else in the city.
How can we ever be whole if we consistently lie about—and to—ourselves? We cannot.
So we alienate ourselves from others and from ourselves, lying and hiding, choosing to ignore and neglect and reject what part of us completes us. We grow bitter and lonely because we deny ourselves to ourselves and to everyone else for fear of being ignored and neglected and rejected, for fear of becoming bitter and alone.
How foolish.
In the Dungeons of Sleep
Let us return again to Matthew whose genealogy in 1:16-17 continues:
and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.
So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations2; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.
We read the distinction of no paternal association between Joseph and Jesus, only the connection between “Mary, of whom Jesus was born,” the immaculate conception, and the decisions made between Joseph and Mary in the proceeding verses:
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’
Here, we see Joseph—“being a righteous man”—initially plans to dismiss Mary in secret until a vision speaks to him. I do not claim to offer any proof toward the supernatural and the metaphysical, of course, but would like to explore my own humble consideration of this: I have believed for a long time that that strange little voice which appears from the quiet corners of our minds, our consciences, arrives from our future potential fully actualized selves—in other words, our highest possible and best selves speak to us from our potentiality through time and space, the full majesty of our highest being whispering to us through the chrysalis of our weak yet persevering selves in the present. I would then argue that this would be in another sense how I see God, the Source, the Origin of Creation—however a person wishes to understand it—the Original Light, the Throne of Love, the Axis of the Universe, the Truth. This creator and source of creation also beckons through us toward creation of ourselves. And we may find this through individual choice.
Joseph listens to his conscience and chooses to accept what he—and his culture—would otherwise characterize as an “imperfection” and marries his beloved. I would then argue that this symbolic act precedes the forgiveness of imperfections of sin which Jesus will represent in thought, speech, and action later in his life. We must consider how this relates to Joseph choosing Mary as his wife and what we gathered from Bryson’s account about how each of our ancestors found and decided upon an acceptable mate and Campbell and Bly—as quoted below—regarding the Shadow:
I maintain that out of a round globe of energy the twenty-year-old ends up with a slice. We’ll imagine a man who has a thin slice left—the rest is in the bag—and we’ll imagine that he meets a woman; let’s say they are both twenty-four. She has a thin, elegant slice left. They join each other in a ceremony, and this union of two slices is called marriage. Even together the two do not make up one person! Marriage when the bag is large entails loneliness during the honeymoon for that very reason. Of course we all lie about it. ‘How is your honeymoon?’ ‘Wonderful, how’s yours?’
The lies we tell ourselves and, thus, one another—often for fear of rejection and abandonment—which ultimately lead us to a terrible loneliness, whether with or without company.
It all stems from failing to understand our own Shadows and welcoming ourselves into our own lives.
What is to be done?
Long Is the Way, and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads up to Light
I imagine learning how to tell the truth might save ourselves and then the world. It might be easier to set the bar lower by first learning how not to lie to ourselves before we might bravely profess the truth to others.
We might overlook how hard it arrives upon the heart and soul to tell the truth, to ourselves, to others. It means setting boundaries, essentially, and choosing values. It means deciding what and whom a person wants in life. It indirectly means committing to values which might transcend life and death and allowing them to serve as lampposts along the path to individual salvation.
The passage from literature which I have long felt might be the most important to the human condition speaks on this directly. Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov3:
And above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root of it all … You have known for a long time what you must do. You have sense enough: don't give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech; don't give way to sensual lust; and, above all, to the love of money. And close your taverns. If you can't close all, at least two or three. And, above all—don't lie ... Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love, he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness … All this, too, is deceitful posturing.
Take a look at the world around you and all the people finding offense in as many ways conceivable, all sourced from lies which root in self-shame.
Yet another way forward exists.
Matthew 1:22-25 closes as follows:
All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,’which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.
We do not get to choose our parents. We do not get to choose our names. We do not get to choose our identities. All of these exist either beyond us or in relation to others.
Jesus receives his name from his parents and the identity “God is with us” from the multitudes. Our actions and our character become our name and how we find ourselves remembered.
Learning how to tell the truth means inviting the rest of us back into our lives to save ourselves from the falsehoods and narrative we choose to weave to protect us from others and the world. Bly expresses the importance of our Shadow:
If any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality.
Why does this matter?
Joseph Campbell offers the answer:
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
The rest does not matter and what matters will come into our lives as a result.
If you enjoyed the read, please like this and share with those who might value it.
I love that the etymology of Bible originates from Greek for “books,” thus The Bible meaning “The Books,” which, given the historical literacy and advent of publishing, makes sense.
Let us appreciate the doubled use of seven, a number which returns, again and again, in the Old and New Testaments with symbolic meaning, from perfection to wholeness, from healing to fulfilled oaths: the six days of creation and seventh day of rest; the seven accounted statements of agony made by Jesus on the cross; the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer; the seven metaphorical pathways to salvation as made by Jesus; the number of times Jesus instructs his disciples to forgive someone—meaning until wholly true; the number of people Jesus healed on the seventh day; and covenants and promises—among many others, undoubtedly. It makes me wonder, too, removed from biblicism, the number seven and the connection between the seven chakras and perfection, wholeness, healing, and a fulfilled oath to the self.
Qualifier: This translation is written by a professor whom I admired and valued in graduate school.