In the genealogy of Jesus that we see in Matthew chapter one, we know that Matthew is divided it into three chunks of 14-ish generations,

and that all of this leads us up to Jesus himself.

But we've been wrestling with the question of why.

What is he going for?

Why has Matthew arranged it this way?

And part of the answer is, well, these are the names

that you would expect to see in here.

But I think part of the answer is that these aren't just names.

All of these names tell a story.

Every single one would conjure an entire narrative in the mind of Matthew's original audience and

those narratives would have all these nuggets of theology and frankly all of these loose ends where the story and the theme isn't quite resolved and like all of the Old Testament it is begging for completion or resolution.

The Old Testament both at a micro and macro level is basically

done da da da da da da da da da da da. I'm not gonna do it. And it's missing the dot dot

well Jesus according to Matthew missing the dot, dot. Well, Jesus, according to Matthew, is the dot, dot of the Old Testament.

And so when we start off in block number one that runs from Abraham to David in verses 2 through 6 of

Matthew chapter 1, what we see is a block of

Jewishness now they weren't called Jews back then but Hebrewness a block of

the the chosen people, the descendants of Abraham,

and there are all these little narratives in here that leave you scratch in your head

when you read them in the Old Testament, and they feel like this arc being thrown forward into history

indiscriminately like that's going to land somewhere and it's going to mean something eventually later on

we're going to get the but but we don't know exactly when it's going to happen.

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