NOTES for Mat 1:1-17
From the very first line, faced with the need to enter into a list of relatives, we can be puzzled: why do we need this? After all, if Jesus Christ is the Son of God incarnate on earth, what do Abraham or David have to do with it? And in general, for the consciousness of the modern person, torn out of the bond between times, the need for genealogies has faded away.
But they are important, and not only because they bind centuries and generations together. After all, God, by being born as a human being, entered into kinship with His creation, and therefore accepted a human genealogy. He accepts human flesh as it has become over many generations, with its heredity and the traces of centuries of transgressions. Yes, He Himself was born sinless; He will take the sins of the world upon Himself later, in the opinion of many interpreters, when He accepts John's baptism. But from the very moment of His birth Jesus accepted into His body human genes bearing information about the brokenness of human paths. Remaining sinless, He rejected this brokenness, but He did not avoid the consequences of sin and shared them with us. And therefore His acceptance of an earthly genealogy became one of the steps toward Golgotha.
And there is another important meaning of genealogies: thanks to them we see that the Lord entered into unity with all humanity by becoming incarnate in one quite specific people. The unity of the eternal and the temporal, of the universal and the unique, was manifested here as well.