Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, the forefeast of the Nativity as well as the Sunday of the Holy Fathers. As was the case last week, today we remember all of the righteous of the Old Testament.

On this, the last Sunday before Christmas, we always read the first lesson from the Gospel according to Matthew – the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Out of the four evangelists, two of them wrote down the genealogy of our Saviour – Matthew and Luke. Matthew, who wrote the Gospel that was addressed primarily to the Jews, notes that Jesus was the son of David and then begins the genealogy starting from Abraham – the father of the Jewish nation. In such a way, he underlines the royal lineage of Jesus and His citizenship among the chosen people, the Jewish nation. Luke, who wrote his Gospel for the Christians of gentile descent, takes a different tack. It’s natural that for the gentiles it was not so important that Jesus was a Jew or that He was the Jewish Messiah. What was important was that He was the Saviour of each individual person, both of Jewish and gentile stock. Therefore, Luke begins his genealogy from Christ and goes back in time to Adam, everyone’s first ancestor, and finally to God Himself, the Creator of the world.

Today’s reading contains the names of many different people. Of course, some of these names are familiar to us. We can even remember something about some of these people. About the others, perhaps the majority, we know or remember nothing. Some of these names are even hard for us to read, because they seem odd-sounding to us. Let’s take this as a reminder that we should try to read the Holy Scriptures more often and study them more carefully.

Today let’s note that among the people included in the genealogy of our Lord are many different characters. There are the righteous as well as sinners. There are those who sinned, but later repented from the bottom of their hearts. In this category we can include David, Solomon and Manasseh. Most of the people listed were born and lived in the Promised Land, but not all. Although the Jews had a custom of tracing their lineage through the male line, Matthew includes several women in his list. It’s interesting that these women (Tamar, Rahab and Ruth) were not Jews, but gentiles. Among them were those born in wedlock and those born outside of wedlock. We could say that the genealogy of Christ holds within itself all of mankind’s experiences (both the good and bad moments). Let’s emphasize that Christ came from – He took His human flesh from – these peculiar and diverse people.

Our own spiritual lives in some way resemble the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Each one of us has good, kind and even saintly qualities. At the same time, everyone has bad habits, sins and passions. We try to repent of these bad aspects of our character, we try to change. Sometimes we are successful and sometimes we are not. At times, it seems that there isn’t much reason for continuing our spiritual battles because of the many times we fall back into the mud of our sins. Today’s Gospel reading should encourage us. Although Christ was born from the all-pure Mary, many of His ancestors in no way differed from us in the spiritual sense. Christ, in His human nature, came from such people precisely to show that He came to save everyone, including us sinners. Therefore, let’s not be sullen or melancholy, even in these difficult times. Instead, let’s make our way towards Christ step by step, knowing that if we do this He Himself will begin to come to us.

priest Alexis