I read this morning the Greek of Matthew 1:18-25, and I have to admit it was some of the easiest Greek I’ve ever read, even though I don’t think I’ve read this story before in Greek. Why? Because the story is so familiar. I found myself translating in King James’ English, since I’ve heard this story so many times. Often I tell my students that one of the biggest challenges to reading the Bible critically is to “forget” the stories that we’ve heard in church contexts so many times and let the text be foreign once again, as it would have been to those first-century audiences who had never heard the story before.

But this morning I realize that’s perhaps not the best hermeneutical approach. For the last few months, I’ve been reading the patriarchal narratives of Genesis in a Hebrew reading group I’m in. That background gives me a different understanding of this announcement of Jesus’ coming birth to Joseph. What I realized, having read so many announcement and etymology stories in Genesis, is that this would have been a very familiar story to that hypothetical first-century audience I’ve been asking my students to imagine. That is, this announcement of Mary’s divine impregnation, prediction of Jesus’ salvation of people, and instruction for his naming, is absolutely ordinary in the context of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. Nothing stands out; nothing.

So, I’m starting to think that the feeling of familiarity should stay with us as we read this narrative. Sure the predictions for Jesus are big. Sure, there’s a certain anticipation or excitement for what this particular child will do. But the narrator has led us into familiarity. As I noted with the genealogy, the genre of literature here is nothing new. But we recognize that there is going to be something new about this story. The challenge for us as readers is to allow ourselves to be led down this path of the mundane and familiar, so that the narrator can flip the script on us. So, rather than “pretending” I’ve never heard this story before this Christmas season, I’m going to remember and read it in that same King James English, expressly so that it will be familiar. Then, as my guard is down, I expect to have my eyes opened anew to the advent of Christ. The familiarity with the story is a gift, as it lets us experience anew this same pattern of announcement and expectation, unaware of where and how that experience will come.

This morning I read the first 25 verses of Genesis, the account of the creation up until the creation of the “man” (ADAM) from the “ground” (ADAMAH; btw, I’m going to be really lazy with my Hebrew transliteration). Like the Matthew genealogy, this is a pretty routine passage that I’d normally skip over rather quickly. Also like the Matthew passage, it has some oddities that make me sort of chuckle. After all, how can you have day/night (v. 5) when you haven’t even had the creation of the sun and moon (v. 16). Silly Bible! But what struck me on this reading was that that silly aspects of it come from the imposition of our order on the creation narrative. That is, the narrative is told in such a way that it makes sense to a human reader who is using to the work of creation. Even the verbs used, like “Make” and “See” and “Declaring Good” are the types of verbs we’d use to describe a bench we’re making or a field we’re plowing. With this language, the narrative of creation seems rather mundane. I liken it to other “creation” narratives in the Bible, like the creation of the tabernacle or the re-building of the walls of Jerusalem. There is a particular order of steps that are followed, and each builds on the last. So, you have light/darkness created so that you can have day/night. You have the firmament put in place to separate the waters so that you can have dry land and gatherings of water, so that you can create beasts to fill the waters and beasts to fill the earth.

But back to those oddities that make me laugh in the narrative. These break up this ordering. They make me pause in the narrative and realize that my normal structure to this creation doesn’t make sense. They’re like those little tears in the Matrix that give you some sense that what you’re seeing is not really the reality. Like Origen’s “stumbling blocks” in the gospels, the oddness of the creation account gives me some sense that I’m not getting the full picture, just one take on what may have happened. People tend to get squeamish in seminary world when we talk about the creation narrative, science, etc. But the reality is, why would we want a creation narrative that literally recounts how everything got made, in 6 days no less. Surely the process was a bit more complicated than 25 verses can capture. So I tend to appreciate this narrative for what it is: a human’s imagination of a divine act. This is why we put it in stages. This is why we personify the divine as satisfied with a good day’s work. But this is also why we have a “dome” that separates heaven from earth. This is also why we have irregularities that don’t add up. Of course they don’t add up, because what we’re doing is translating a divine act into human language. That’s going to “fail” in some sense every time. And thank goodness that is does. A divine act that can be sufficiently captured by human language is not all that divine, methinks.

So I’m going to enjoy continuing to read this human narrative of creation, told with language that is so human and workmanlike. I am going to enjoy it not because it completely captures what happened in those 6 “days,” but rather because it attempts to give me some sense, in language I can understand, and imperfectly at best, the majesty of what has been created. God made it all. That, to me, seems to be what the author’s getting at. It’s up to me to realize that recognizing that everything was made by that same divine figure, in whatever manner it was made, has some serious implications for how I treat other things and beings.

This morning I read the genealogy in Matthew (Mt. 1:1-17), a passage we all normally skip over. After all, it is a bunch of names begetting names. Easy Greek, boring story. In slowing down, though, I did notice a few things that I never really stopped to think about before. First, this is not a genealogy of Jesus, and that’s a bit surprising. Of course we all recognize that this is the genealogy from Abraham through Joseph. I was struck, however, by the fact that the author doesn’t really clue you into that until you reach the end. That is,   the book begins as standard books do, with the “book of the history of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” The genealogy proceeds, then, to recount the progression toward Joseph, but then the script is flipped on you. In v. 16 we learn that Joseph is “the husband of Mary, from whom Jesus, the one called anointed, was begotten.” After all these active verbs “X begot Y,” we get our first passive verb, and it’s Jesus being born of Mary. There is always that point in middle school Sunday school where each of us determined we were smarter than the teacher and noted that this genealogy leads to Joseph, who, according to the later story, isn’t even a blood relative of Jesus. We think this is odd. But reading carefully, it seems the author is right there with us. He’s noting that this story is not like the toledot of the OT (see Genesis 36, e.g.) that recounts how we got from one man (in that case Esau) down to other figures of history. Very early on Matthew is letting us know we should expect something different, one whose story looks a lot like the stories we know, but ultimately is quite different. Imagine if you’re hearing this for the first time and those toledot legends are the stories you have grown up on. Matthew seems to start in on yet another. Just like Abraham, Jacob, Esau, etc., this Jesus is another figure. As Matthew is going to show us again and again, though, this one is different. The opening chapter subtly  introduces this motif that he’ll trade on throughout the narrative.

A second thing that sticks with me in this reading, though, is the marking of the story of Israel with the “deportation to Babylon” (vv. 11, 17). The word literally means something like “change of homes.” We all know historically and sociologically what a significant event this was for the development of the nation of Israel. And we have all thought about how odd a marker this is for the genealogy (like the inclusion of Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth). However, what strikes me here is the language of “changing homes.” This writer seems to note how important stepping outside of the physical geography of Israel’s story is for what has led to his story. That is, the story took a circuitous root through Babylon to get where it is today, and that route is worth noting, as significant a marker as Abraham and David (v. 17).

So it’s clear from the very opening of this chapter that this is a story of continuity and discontinuity. Matthew’s tying this figure of Jesus to the story of Israel we all know, but he’s doing so in an odd way. Perhaps he’s suggesting that this story we’re about to hear is going to make us rethink that story of Israel. We’ll start to recognize why events like the “changing of houses” are so significant. We’ll start to think about why the figures like Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth are significant. We’ll start to think about why blood relations matter, and yet why they do not. We skip over this chapter often because it strikes us as a mundane beginning to this story. This is the background the author feels he needs to include just to set some context for Jesus. As we slow down, though, we realize that this passage is not simply setting a historical context for Jesus, but rather introducing us to the hermeneutical shift that Matthew believes Jesus causes.