The Origins of the Unoriginate God

The gospels provide two genealogies of Our Lord Jesus Christ. There is the beginning of the gospel of Matthew, which we read today – the Sunday before Christmas – The Sunday of the Ancestors of Christ. And there is the genealogy in Luke.

When these readings come up in our lectionary, it can be tempting to zone out and wait for it to be over – rather than to reflect upon their meaning. These long lists of names – which many of us do not recognize – do little to hold our attention or inspire spiritual reflection upon their meaning. Why do we bother with these boring lists of names? What do they have to do with us? There is, however, much to learn about our God and our salvation from these genealogies.

It is possible to go through these names and discover some interesting characters, who show us the absolute humanness of our Lord Jesus Christ and his origins. He is our God, as we know, but “he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped” (Phil 2). He did not choose exclusively exemplary and holy people through whom to come into the world. He chose sinful people - imperfect people. In fact, looking through his genealogy is rather like looking through mine. It’s not always pretty.

 There are among the ancestors of Jesus: adulterers, murderers, and prostitutes. Even out of evils such as these, God brings good – and not only good, but the greatest good – our Lord himself. Our savior, Jesus Christ.

Some of these characters are scandalous, but woe to us if we are scandalized. Woe to us if we turn away from this son of a carpenter – our own genealogies will then rise up and condemn us. Let none pretend that the ancestors who brought them into being are free from sin and error.

We may have family secrets – skeletons in our closets – parents or grandparents of whom we are ashamed. But Jesus has no family secrets – all the skeletons in God’s closet are on full display in the pages of the Old Testament. Jesus becomes a man through such people so that people such as us need not despair nor be ashamed.  Jesus is not ashamed of us no matter who our parents or ancestors are. He is one of us. He is not just anyone, but a particular man, with all that that entails.

In some ways more scandalous than the sins and foibles of some of Jesus’ ancestors is what is sometimes called “the scandal of particularity.”  

How is it that our Lord and God, who is “ineffable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, ever-existing yet ever the same” – as we say in the Anaphora of our Divine Liturgy – would change and become a man – and not only Man in the abstract sense of our human nature, but also a man in the particular sense necessary to that human nature? That is, He became a particular man at a particular time in history in a particular place of a particular race and people.

Jesus, we believe, comes to save the people of every era. Why then was he born more than two thousand years ago? If he is my savior, why does he not belong to my generation? Further, if he is the savior of Adam and Eve, why did he wait so long to come into the world?

Jesus comes to save the people of every race. Not only the Jews, but also the Africans, the Asians, the Americans, the Europeans, and every race. Why then does he come into the world as Jew? I am not a Jew, and yet my salvation comes from a Jew.

Jesus comes to save both men and women. Why then does he come as a man?  

Jesus comes to save people of every age – from the unborn to the elderly. Why then does he die so young? I am five years older than Jesus when he died. Yet he died for me too, even though I have not followed him in this.

These are some of his particularities. And they have everything to do with his ancestors. Because Jesus’ salvific mission to the world is universal – he came to save us all – it can be tempting to try to universalize him – to abstract him – to generalize him. But to do this is to strip him of his real humanity. It is part of being human to have a particular set of characteristics consequent to a particular ancestry.

He is Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary and – so it was supposed – the son of Joseph, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

By the way, these genealogies are in fact both not of Mary but of Joseph. So, they give us not his genealogy according to the flesh but the genealogy of his foster father – a genealogy that places him in a family created not by blood but by marriage. This tells us something of how sacred is marriage. 

Tradition, however, tells us that Mary is also a descendant of David.

All this specificity about his incarnation – that our Lord became a man – is scandalizing to those – such as Muslims and Jews – who do not accept the paradox of our incarnate God. It is a “scandal” to those who have not accepted the revelation of it, because reason alone – just thinking about it – will never get you there. Reason alone will never reveal to you that this poor son of a carpenter from Nazareth – there and nowhere else – is the very God – the Lord Almighty, the Creator of all things. It will never reveal to you that this descendant of Abraham was before Abraham ever was – that this son of Adam is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The only way we can realize our salvation in Jesus Christ – in Jesus of Nazareth – is by this revelation, which is a scandal to unaided reason.

The genealogies wonderfully place our Lord in a particular time and place and of a particular people. God does not have a genealogy – but God become Man must and does have a genealogy and to us who believe, this particularity is the very means of our salvation.

God entered into human history. This genealogy in a sense describes for us the origins of the unoriginate God, which is rather like many of the paradoxes we sing in the Akathist hymn – such as that Mary is the space of the spaceless God. Our reason cannot fathom this paradox, but our faith knows it to be the source of our salvation. God has become Man – with all the particularity that entails – in order that you and I, with all of our particularities, can become one with God.