Gospel: Matthew 1:1-16,18-23 

 

Today, September 8th, Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, the Gospel gives us the genealogy, or birth certificate, of Jesus. 

 

God is “the Lord of history” and also of “patience”. He “walks with us”: for this reason, the Christian is called not to fear great things and to pay attention also to small things. God made things — each one — and he let them go with the interior, inward laws which he gave to each one, so that they would develop, so they would reach fullness. Thus, the Lord gave autonomy to the things of the universe, but not independence. Precisely because God is not a magician, He is Creator.

 

When on the sixth day of that narrative, comes the creation of man, God gives another kind of autonomy, a bit different, but not independence: an autonomy which is freedom. And God puts man in charge of Creation so that he can exercise stewardship over Creation and bring it to the fullness of time. Fullness of time is what God had at heart: the coming of his Son.

 

And this is how history continued, as is also seen in the passage of the Gospel, which lists the genealogy of Jesus. In this list there are saints and also sinners; but history goes on because God wanted men to be free. However, the day that man misused his freedom, God drove him out of Paradise. 

 

The Gospel, which constructs this history for centuries, ends in a tiny thing, in a small village, with this story of Joseph and Mary: she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the God of the great history is also in the little story, there, because he wants to walk with each one. 

 

Today we are in the antechamber of this story: the birth of Our Lady. We can look to Our Lady, small, holy, without sin, pure, chosen to become the mother of God, and also to look at this history behind her, so long, for centuries. Having gone through all the ancestry, and ended in Joseph, St. Matthew adds “the husband of Mary” thereby declaring that is was for her sake that he was included in the genealogy.