I started reading Matthew. The genealogy seems to flout social boundaries and strata, but more than that it includes women and further the likes of Rahab and Ruth (A Moabite), and on it goes a list of names that tell of God’s dealings with people in time; a selecting that places Jesus as central to God's purposes in time. I think it also asserts the peculiar, odd and dare I say alen identity of Christ and his followers, which sets them directly at odds within society. Does it tell of how God works against all the odds and evidence in the face of death ? I find parts in this genealogy that are less than neat and tidy historical reading, nevermind the morality of some and the failures listed. Like most family trees!
A gospel that is concerned with forming identity and shaping of lifestyle of a community of disciples, a small, yet distinctive community set in an urban, hierarchical society with clearly defined social boundaries and practices, Matthew seeks to give guidance to a community looking for identity in its critical situation on how it should understand its calling and mission – its particularity, which is found in this Christ, identified in this line.
As David Bosch says,
In Matthew’s view Christians find their true identity when they are involved in mission, in communicating to others a new way of life, a new interpretation of reality and of God, and in committing themselves to the liberation and salvation of others. A missionary community is one that understands itself as being both different from and committed to it’s environment; it exists within its context in a way that is both winsome and challenging. In the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Matthew’s community is driven back to it’s roots, to the persons and experiences which gave birth to it, so that it can rediscover and reclaim those persons and events, come to a more appropriate self-understanding, and on the basis of this discern the nature of its existence and calling.
(Bosch, Transforming Mission, p83, my bold)
It seems to me that the temporal/historical discovering and (re-) interpretation becomes a catapult into the new. In another way, the coming of ‘this’ Jesus placed as he is within the genealogy the identity and understanding of ‘Israel’ is ruptured and the new eschatological community is revealed in time/history.
Which parts then are we being driven back to in remembering. In some ways it is back to the Christian mystics, celtic Christianity, Monastic, and so on to rediscover ‘spirituality’ as language, practice and so identity forming. This is surely the semper reformanda demanded of us in these times and urged by the reformation itself, upon which we have rested for too long. Is our concern for the now, present time, too valued, too absolute, taken too seriously that we have been in the way of forgetting?
