An Image Reflection for the Saturday of the Third Week of Advent
STM's staff will share an image and reflect on it each Saturday. Today, Grace writes about the genealogy of Jesus.
When the genealogy of Jesus comes around in the Lectionary, I am guilty of tuning out the long list of names. In one ear and out the other…until I hear the line, “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.” Ahh, yes, the person we were waiting for!
As my fiancé and I stand on the brink of marriage—adding to family trees and histories—the laundry list of Jesus’s ancestors is harder to tune out. I slowly read through the genealogy from Matthew today, taking in each name, both those familiar and unfamiliar to me. These were real people in real relationships within real families. Did they realize the role they played in salvation history? Could they have known that they would be counted among the generations that led to Christ? They certainly lived in expectation of the Messiah, yet they, like all of us, could not see the full picture. Our human vision is limited, often unable to grasp the ways God is at work using our imperfect and messy lives to bring about God’s will.
Today, in 2022, there is still a lot that we do not know about God’s plan for our lives. My fiancé and I did not know when we met many years ago that we would date one day and later marry. We do not know what our life will look like in five, ten or thirty years. We do not know what crosses we will carry together as a family. Yet, we do know some things. We know who our Messiah is. We know that he came into this world to redeem us. Jesus Christ, descendant of David and Abraham, was born to Mary and Joseph. He is the Word made flesh and the fullness of God’s revelation. And, one day, he will return.
So, as we continue waiting for Christmas (or, for the end of exams, for a job offer, for healing, for a wedding day…), we remember the great gift of knowing and believing what has been revealed to us. Our lives, with all their uncertainties and human frailties, begin and end in Jesus Christ, the Messiah. He has our past and our future, too. What a gift to know that and to praise God for it.