The People In The Book Had Mothers

He had read it for twenty years and he had never once skipped it deliberately. That was the strange part.

It was a Tuesday, a hotel room, a work trip, and the little travel Bible he took because his wife put it in the bag. He opened at the front of the New Testament the way you do when you have decided to start again, and there it was, the list, and his eye did what his eye has always done, which is slide down it looking for where the story starts.

Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob.

He had a thought he had never had, and it arrived sideways, the way the real ones do.

These are somebody's grandparents.

Not a literary device. Not a run up. Fourteen generations and fourteen and fourteen, which is a family keeping count of itself, which is what a family does when it has been somewhere long enough to have a memory.

And he sat on the end of that hotel bed and tried to picture one person from the book he has been reading for twenty years, one, as somebody's son. In a house. With a mother who called him in for food.

He could not do it.

He could quote them. He could tell you what they taught and where they went wrong and which letter came after which. And in twenty years he had held the whole thing in his head as a set of positions floating in a white room, and not one of them had a kitchen.

You know that white room.

Maybe you were handed the faith as doctrine first, which is a real gift and it is not the villain here. Maybe you came up through a good building with good teaching and every person in the story arrived to you as a lesson with a name on it. Maybe you have simply never been told that the men and women in those pages were from somewhere, and that the somewhere was not vague.

Nobody hid it from you. It just never got said, and a thing that never gets said becomes a thing you did not know you were missing.

The first sentence is a family record

Here is what the New Testament chose to do with its opening line, and it is not what a book invents when it wants to sound eternal.

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.Matthew 1:1

Read what that sentence is doing. It is putting an address on the front of the story.

Son of David. Son of Abraham. Two names, both of them from an older half of the book, both of them belonging to a people with a land and a language and a long history with God going back centuries. The very first thing you are told is not a doctrine. It is a lineage, which is the most ordinary and most human way a person is ever introduced anywhere on earth.

You are holding a book with ground under it, and the ground was laid centuries before the first page you have ever quoted. That is not my flourish; it is written into the first verse, which introduces Jesus by naming His ancestors (Matthew 1:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that verse at the front of the book so that nobody could ever start the story in a white room.

And notice what this is not. It is not an argument. Nothing here is going to tell you that your church got something wrong, or that anybody's tradition failed, or that you have been sitting under a corruption for twenty years. That is not what is happening on this page and it never will be.

It is smaller and it is better than that. Something was always yours and nobody ever put it in your hand.

Why a list is the least religious thing in the book

People skip genealogies because they read as filler. They are the opposite of filler, and the reason is worth two minutes.

A list of who begat whom is what you write down when your family is real and has been somewhere a long time. Nobody invents fourteen generations to make a point. You keep that record because your grandmother kept it, and hers did, and the keeping is itself the evidence that these were people in houses and not ideas in a book.

So when Matthew opens that way, he is not clearing his throat. He is telling you the address before he tells you the story, the way you would say, before anything else, whose son the man is.

You have been given a faith with a history, not a philosophy with a founder. Scripture says that of Israel came the fathers, and of them, as concerning the flesh, Christ came (Romans 9:5), and it is the same Spirit who inspired that sentence who is standing beside you now while a list you always skipped stops being filler.

There is a particular relief in this that people do not expect.

If the faith is a set of ideas, then it stands or falls with how well you hold the ideas, and on a bad Tuesday in a hotel room the ideas are thin. If the faith has a family history, then it was standing before you and it will be standing after you, and your grip on it this week is not what is holding it up.

You are joining something ancient rather than starting something new, and it does not depend on the strength of your Tuesday. The word says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever (Hebrews 13:8), and His Spirit is the one making that a comfort in a hotel room rather than a line to agree with.