🌟 Christmas Reflection: An Imperfect Lineage, A Perfect Savior
At Christmas Mass, we often hear the opening of Matthew’s Gospel: the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:1–17). At first, it may sound like a simple list of names, but it’s far more than that. It’s a family tree—Jesus’ family tree—and like any family, it’s filled with both good apples and bad apples.
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🍎 A Lineage Like Any Other
• Heroes of faith: Abraham, David, Ruth—figures who trusted God and shaped salvation history.
• Flawed and broken: Judah’s scandal with Tamar, David’s sin with Bathsheba, kings who turned to idols.
• Outsiders: Rahab the Canaanite, Ruth the Moabite—Gentiles woven into the line of the Messiah.
• The culmination: Mary, chosen to bear Christ, showing that God crowns imperfection with grace.
This genealogy reminds us that Jesus didn’t descend from a spotless line of saints. His family tree looks like ours: a mix of faith and failure, courage and compromise, insiders and outsiders.
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✨ Perfection Through Imperfection
Why would Matthew highlight this? Because it shows us that God’s perfection is not about avoiding imperfection—it’s about redeeming it.
• Grace shines brighter against brokenness.
• God’s plan works through both the faithful and the flawed.
• Jesus enters a world of opposites—light and darkness, obedience and rebellion—and transforms it.
It’s the universal law of contrast: without imperfection, we wouldn’t recognize perfection. Without sin, we wouldn’t grasp the depth of salvation. Without Satan’s opposition, we wouldn’t understand the fullness of God’s love.
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🎄 The Christmas Message
Christmas proclaims that perfection can exist in the midst of imperfection.
• Jesus’ lineage was imperfect, yet He is perfect.
• Our families are imperfect, yet God works through them.
• Our lives are imperfect, yet Christ redeems them.
The genealogy is not a blemish on Jesus’ story—it’s the stage on which God’s grace shines. Through 42 generations of saints and sinners, God prepared the way for His Son.
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🌠 Closing Thought
This Christmas, let’s take comfort in knowing that our own imperfect family stories are not obstacles to God’s plan. Just as Jesus’ lineage carried scandal, outsiders, and brokenness, yet produced the Savior, so too can our lives—imperfect as they are—become places where God’s perfection is revealed.
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