Advent #10 of 10:

Abraham begat Isaac… David begat Solomon

(Matthew 1:1-17)

It takes a lot of begetting to get from Abraham to David to “Mary, of whom Jesus was born” (Mt 1:16). “Begat” means we have something more than a genealogical list. We have a story. A story made up of all sorts of surprising begets stories, like how it is that David begat Solomon.

That’s how the Bible is. It prefers stories over lists. Or, if you have a list—say the Ten Commandments, you can’t just go one, two, three… you have to tell the story about what happened that day “when you stood at the foot of the mountain while the mountain was blazing up to the very heavens, shrouded in dark clouds. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Dt 4:8-14). If you didn’t tell the story, you didn’t tell it right.

So it is with our Lord’s genealogy. It’s full of surprising stories—the stories of the women most surprising of all. Tamar gets a whole long complicated begat story ending with Judah saying: "She is more righteous than I” (Gn 38:26). Then there’s Rahab, and then Ruth who gets a whole Book for her begat story—a story that won’t stop calling her, “Ruth the Moabites;” just so we don’t forget. All three women are Gentiles; and, maybe Bathsheba as well, since she was married to Uriah the Hittite.

What a jumbled lineage. Even its prominent heroes, Abraham and David, have their spiritual struggles and notorious shortcomings. Isn’t it something that the Bible wants us to know such begat stories? Maybe it’s to get us to the Virgin Mary. On Christmas morning, Jesus is born into this tangled lineage of Promise; only Jesus’ begetting will be different.