Terrible Freedom

The first seventeen verses of the opening chapter of the Gospel of Matthew seem like a bad way to start a good story. There, Matthew gives us a genealogy of Jesus--dozens of names recited without color or commentary. I have often wondered how many new readers of the gospels we lose before the end of this first chapter.

A little background helps with the tedium. Students of the Hebrew Bible will recognize that the list includes kings and commoners, men and women, heroes and minor villains, the famous and the obscure. But, even if you know the players, it does not make for exciting reading for most of us.

And yet something important must be going on here. So commentators have identified a variety of compelling reasons Matthew may have begun his narrative this way.

They point out that through this genealogy Matthew, the most Jewish of the gospel writers, links Jesus to numerous titans of the faith, such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ruth, Solomon, and, of course, David.

They note that the line of descent underscores a mathematical continuity within God's plan: fourteen generations from Abraham to David, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, and from the deportation to the birth of Jesus. Fourteen holds a special meaning because it is the numerical value of David's name in Hebrew and because the number seven is charged with symbolic significance. Still, this continuity is not without its problems since Matthew has to leave a few ancestors out in order to get the math to work.

Commentators also observe that Matthew uses this genealogy to set the stage, to give us a sense of historical momentum, to signal the working out of a grand, unfolding plan--the grandest of all plans throughout all of time.

This is a familiar literary device--beginning a story by using the past to tell us something about where the narrative starts and where it will go.

The great author Gabriel Garcia Marquez commences his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude this way, with one of the most famous sentences in all of literature: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The device taps into a truth we all know and experience: where we come from matters. It matters to the now. It matters to the next.

We find this truth in William Faulkner's wry statement that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" and in Fitzgerald's closing remark that we are like boats against a current, borne "ceaselessly back into our past." And endless everyday canards and banalities remind us of it. As we all know, objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.

But, in the gospel that follows this introduction, Jesus's lineage ends up playing a puzzling and not always consistent role.

Of course, the narrator continues to allude to Jesus's connection with David. But almost all of the other names fall away. And members of Jesus's community seem to have little interest in any part of his past, except to the extent that they question how the son of a local carpenter could make any credible claim to messianic status. As saviors of humankind go, they muse, it does not seem like much of a resume.

And the words and actions of Jesus himself seem stunningly dismissive of his immediate and distant family connections. When he is told that his mother and brothers are waiting outside to talk to him he asks "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" He then points to his disciples and declares that his family consists of those who do God's will. And when the Pharisees and Sadducees invoke Abraham as a source of their authority Jesus replies: "Do not presume to say to yourselves 'We have Abraham as our ancestor.' (Something Matthew has told us Jesus could himself say in the most literal sense.) I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham."

Reasonable people can differ about how we should interpret this tension within the text--on one hand, pulling us toward the past and signaling the importance of lineage, on the other hand, severing the connection to the past and stressing the importance of the individual and how he or she lives here, now, at this very moment. We can fairly conclude that the text leaves us room to find truth in both of these messages--as I think it does and as I think we do. But it is the latter message that probably keeps us up at night.

After all, a message that frees us from our past also pulls us in conflicting directions. The message liberates us, allowing us to cast off burdens and baggage that could slow us down or crush us as we journey through the complexities of life. But the message also challenges us, making clear our dreadfully personal responsibility for our own decisions and our own behaviors and our own willingness--or unwillingness--to be a present and palpable manifestation of God's heart and hands. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre did not believe in God, and yet there is an unsettling resonance between what Jesus tells us here and what Sartre meant when he declared that we are "condemned to be free." It is a glorious freedom we have; and it is a terrible freedom as well.

The question of how we use and manage that terrible freedom is among the central questions of our existence. We have to decide what we will allow to limit that freedom. We have to decide whether to view those claims on our freedom as limitations. We have to decide what parts of that freedom we will give to our neighbor. We have to decide whether, in the end, we can justify holding any part of it back. We have to decide whether service to others curtails our freedom--or is the very essence of it.

It would be pretty to say that our intuitions, our cultural norms, our moral philosophy, the advice of friends or family or mentors, or something else will provide us with clear and precise guidance about how to proceed in making those decisions. But it would not be true. Our untidy lives resist tidy directives. And, even when we have the evident good fortune to get one, we still have to decide whether to pay any attention to it. It falls to us to decide what we will believe, what we will do, what we will refuse to do. Period. Full stop.

If I have made this sound like a daunting, sometimes overwhelming, occasionally terrifying, and frequently lonely process, well, then, I guess I got it right. And getting it right matters here because when we delude ourselves about the terribleness of our freedom or the almost impossible nature of our task then we can convince ourselves that we don't need any help working through it. But if we honestly and unblinkingly stare at the momentous nature of our responsibility and our choices, then we will humbly realize that we need all the help we can get.

The good news--the news that follows in all the verses after those first seventeen--is that help is available to us. We can find it by looking backward to that very first parent, the one who made us free, the one who whispers to us and nudges us and sometimes even gives us a bit of a shove. This is no distant ancestor, looming in the past. This is the most imminent presence in our lives, watching how we spend the gift of our terrible freedom, helping us to see and revel in the joy of its sacred surrender.

Amen. And amen.