Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
The New American Bible notes on Matthew’s detailing of Jesus’s genealogy point out that many of the names we hear do not appear in
Old Testament genealogy. The notes also point out that four of Jesus’s female ancestors—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—“bore their sons through unions that were in varying degrees strange and unexpected,” then calls Jesus’s birth to Mary “the supreme ‘irregularity.’”
And wasn’t it, though? We can all imagine what friends, family, and nosy members of the community had to say about Mary’s situation… and Joseph’s acceptance of it.
We likely know someone born of a union “strange and unexpected”; perhaps we’re the product of one ourselves. Maybe that’s a takeaway for us today. Regardless of how or why we are born, through Christ, we have the hope of eternal salvation. It doesn’t matter if we were born into luxury or poverty, whether our family background is one of great literacy or illiteracy, what language our parents spoke, what color their skin was, how they dressed, or what they ate. Thanks to that “supreme ‘irregularity,’” we all are invited into the family of Christ.
