Over the weeks of Advent I have been listening to the daily Pray-as-you-go meditations - an excellent Jesuit resource for daily prayer. This morning the reading was the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew 1. At first I thought it was a very strange reading to feature - who wants to listen to a string of names about who "begat" whom! But what struck me as I listened was how, in the very lineage of Jesus, God made sure that the outcasts, the lost and the broken were given a crucial role. The women that are named or alluded to (in the list of mainly male names) each have a poignant history:Tamar - a widow, abandoned by the father-in-law who should have cared for her, whom she then deceived into having sex with her which produced the child in Jesus' lineage. (See Genesis 38)
Rahab - a Canaanite prostitute who saved the Jewish spies (and her own skin!) by hiding them when they were checking out Jericho before the Israelites destroyed it. (See Joshua 2 and 6:22-25)
Ruth - another widow, who left home and travelled into completely unknown territory (where she would be considered an alien) to support her mother-in-law. Her courage is recorded in a whole book named after her!
"The wife of Uriah"- not even named - 'used' by a so called godly leader and then her having true husband murdered to hide the adulterous deed. (See 2 Samuel 11-12)
And finally Mary - a teenage single Mum from a poor family.
The way these women are carefully woven into the genealogy says we are meant to take them seriously, to know their stories, to see that they were essential to the coming of Jesus.
Yes, shocking as it sounds, without the part played by women whose lives included incest, prostitution, alienation, adultery and poverty we would not be celebrating Christmas.
