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scripture from the heart of the church. Hi this is Scott Hunt and I want to welcome you to the Road to a

Mayus a podcast from the St Paul Center. We find ourselves close to Christmas just

days away and so I thought it would be good to focus close to

focus on the genealogy of Jesus that we find in the Gospel of Matthew.

First of all because we're going to be hearing it in the next few days second of all because we're going to be ensconced in the gospel of Matthew for the next year. This is year A in the cycle and so let's get to be comfortable with Matthew. Rob I want to welcome you.

It's good to be here. Yeah so you know the questions that arise with Matthew's

genealogy of Jesus. They go back, of course, to the fact that this is a genealogy

like many others except for a few exceptions. So let me just point out the obvious.

First of all, the opening of Matthew's Gospel reads the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ,

the son of David, the son of Abraham. So what's the big deal with that?

Well, I mean, first of all, I think most people think it begins kind of kind of lame.

This is most novelist would tell you, you know, don't start with just a list of names, like give us some action here. But, you know, the son of David, the son of Abraham points us back to the Old Testament and it kind of in some

ways pre-figures all of what Matthew is going to do for the rest of his whole

gospel. That's right. So it points us back to the Old Testament, but to two mountain peak moments that are clearly the single most momentous in all of salvation history. And what are they? Well, the test of Abraham in Genesis 22 where he was called near the end of his life to offer his long-awaited

only beloved son Isaac as a Holocaust. This was not child sacrifices people recognize because the boy is the one who carried

the wood at the top of the hill and so late teens, early 20s, kind of the rabbinic consensus.

And at the end of it after he passes the test

both the father and the beloved son God swears an oath to bless all of the nations

through Abraham's seed that is momentous perhaps more than we realize because we don't really appreciate

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