WISDOM OF GOD GUIDING ALL HUMAN HISTORY


17 DECEMBER

Gen 49:2,8-10; Ps 72:1-4,7-8,17; Mt 1:1-17

The Ancestry of Jesus Christ

Today, the Church starts her novena, leading to the Christmas celebration. She arranges special readings and prayers to prepare us for the celebration of one of the greatest events in human history, namely, the human birth of the Eternal Word of God. The readings for today consolidate what we read and reflected on yesterday about the blessedness of the children of Israel because God chose them to be the privileged people from whom the Son of God would assume human flesh. By extension, the human race shares the same blessedness because of our common nature that the Son of God decided to share with us. The choice of God blessed the Hebrew race and not by anything they have done. We are equally blessed, not by our race as the Hebrews, but by the choice of our nature from origin. God created our human nature in his very image and blessed it with the privileged ability to participate in the life of God and with the grace of being the temple of his Holy Spirit and the throne of his only Begotten Son.

Subsequently, we can state that the blessedness of the Hebrew race derived from the general blessedness of our common nature. Their ancestry is the source of their blessing, but we share the same blessedness by our common nature because their ancestors received the blessing in the nature they have in common with us. Jacob’s prophecy contains the specific blessing of Judah and the whole Hebrew race. “Gather round, sons of Jacob, and listen; listen to Israel your father. Judah, your brothers shall praise you: you grip your enemies by the neck, your father’s sons shall do you homage, Judah is a lion cub, you climb back, my son, from your kill; like a lion he crouches and lies down, or a lioness: who dare rouse him?” Thus, Judah and the tribe that came from him received blessings because of the Son of Man who would be born of him. Israel and all his children and the tribes that came from them received blessings because of the Son of Man, who would be born of the tribe of Judah. In the same understanding, Abraham, with all his descendants, is blessed because of the Son of Man who will be born of his lineage. The knowledge of the transmission of the Messianic blessing down the bloodline is what Saint Matthew showed in the Gospel by tracing the genealogy of Jesus Christ from Abraham, the historical receiver of the promise of the said blessing, to Jesus Christ. He concluded with the summary: “The sum of generations is therefore: fourteen from Abraham to David; fourteen from David to the Babylonian deportation; and fourteen from the Babylonian deportation to Christ.

The Evangelist especially mentioned David because he had a tie or connection to the Messianic prophecy. The kingdom and Messianic aspects of the promised blessing came to the fore with David. The power and the associated kingdom prophesied by Jacob for Judah took a concrete turn with David. “The sceptre shall not pass from Judah, nor the mace from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs, to whom the peoples shall render obedience.” God re-enforced this all-important aspect of the blessedness of Abraham, actualized for the first time with David, with the prophecy of Nathan. Matthew the Evangelist highlights the importance of the Davidic aspect of our common blessedness by the title of the genealogy: “A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” This title opens up two ways of inserting the whole human race. The first is through the backward extension of the genealogy to Adam, which makes it possible for all peoples and nations to enter the original blessings coming from the Incarnation of the Eternal Word. Saint Luke did this in the third chapter of his Gospel. He started with Jesus Christ and traced his bloodline to Adam and Eve, our first parents. The second is the universal kingship, foretold for Judah, promised to David, and actualised in Jesus Christ. The everlasting kingdom belongs to us, not just to Israel, for all peoples everywhere enter it by the obedience of faith, as prophesied by Jacob, promised to David, and realised in the Church of Jesus Christ. Let us pray for grace to enter the mystery of Jesus Christ.  

Let us pray: O God, Creator and Redeemer of human nature, who willed that your Word should take flesh in an ever-virgin womb, look with favour on our prayers, that your Only Begotten Son, having taken to himself our humanity, may be pleased to grant us a share in his divinity. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. 

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