When Christmas comes around, most of us jump straight to the manger. The straw, the animals, the wise men, the baby wrapped tight, Mary and Joseph looking tired and stunned… It brings familiarity and gentleness. Maybe that’s why we like to start there. But the Gospels don’t rush us to the manger quite as fast as our Christmastime nativity decorations do.
Matthew opens with a list of names. Luke does too, just not right away. And if we’re honest, genealogies feel like speed bumps in the Christmas story. We see a long list of people with hard to pronounce names. They’re easy to skip over. But God doesn’t skip over them. They’re there because they certainly matter!
Between the last page of the Old Testament and the first page of the New, about 450 years pass. No prophets. No “Thus says the Lord.” Just generations being born, growing old, and dying while holding onto promises that didn’t seem to be moving anywhere. During this time, empires came and went. Persia gave way to Greece, then Greece gave way to Rome. The language changed along with the politics. And there was so much tension! And still, God was quiet.
But quiet doesn’t mean absent.
Those long genealogies are proof to us that something was happening the whole time. Children were being born into families who remembered Abraham. Sons were being named after kings like David. Mothers told their children stories about the exile and the return, about promises and hope. The silence wasn’t empty – it was full of waiting and wanting.
What I personally find interesting is that Matthew tells the story one way. He starts with Abraham and walks forward, name by name, until he lands at Jesus. It’s almost like he’s saying, “See? This didn’t come out of nowhere.” Every promise God made to Abraham, and every promise He made to David – has been walking toward this manger moment in Bethlehem. Even through mess, the failure, and ultimately the exile, life continued and the line kept going.
We talked a few days ago about how awkward and uncomfortable some of the Old Testament stories in Scripture are. Matthew doesn’t try to clean it up either! He leaves the awkward stories in. People with complicated pasts, people who didn’t seem like obvious candidates for God’s plan… people like Tamar and Ruth and Rahab and Bathsheba. It’s like Matthew wanted us to know right away that the Messiah didn’t come from a perfect family tree… He came from a real one.
But Luke’s genealogy? He waits a bit. He tells us about angels and songs and shepherds first. Then, almost subtly, he drops the genealogy later in chapter 3. And instead of starting in the past and moving forward, he starts with Jesus and walks backward – all the way to Adam. Not just to Abraham, but Adam. And another interesting thing is that Luke’s genealogy of Jesus doesn’t include a single woman! (P.S. > I don’t think he was making a statement there that men were more important than women, because he talks about Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna.)
Anyway… it may seem subtle to us, but I think the difference is significant. While Matthew’s genealogy account seems to tell us “This didn’t come from out of nowhere,” Luke seems to be saying, “This child belongs to all of us.” Not just Israel, not just royalty. But all of humanity is wrapped in this story.
When Luke writes that Jesus was “the son, so it was thought, of Joseph” (Luke 3:23, NIV), there’s already a hint that this birth is different. Jesus is fully human, anchored to real people and real history – but also something more. The genealogy ends with “Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38, NIV), almost inviting us to think back to the beginning. Creation. Breath. Life. And now, a kind of new beginning.
That’s what makes the manger so surprising. After centuries of silence, after all that waiting and wondering, God doesn’t arrive with thunder or powerful armies. He arrives as a baby with a family history. A baby who needed to be fed and held, a baby whose story was already tangled up with generations of hope and heartbreak.
The manger isn’t disconnected from the past. It’s anchored to it.
Every name in those genealogies represents someone who lived without seeing the end of the story. They trusted promises they never watched come true. And somehow, their ordinary lives carried the story forward anyway!
I think that’s part of the invitation this Christmas. To slow down and reflect about what God has done and what God is doing now… to remember that He works patiently and quietly over long stretches of time. To trust that even when heaven seems silent, something is still unfolding that we cannot see.
The manger didn’t appear out of nowhere. It arrived exactly the way God designed. History anchored to future promise. We call that Hope!
Former Blackout Artist 