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.