Mt 1,1-17 – Feria proper of 17 December
A long genealogy fills the entire story of today’s Gospel. Names, generations, intertwined stories. It seems like a cold list, and instead it is the most human story we could have received a few days after the memory of God becoming man. Because God, before being born, chose to have a history.
Jesus does not rain from the sky like a divine parenthesis that ignores everything. Enter into a story made of lights and shadowsof loyalty and betrayal, of greatness and fragility. In this genealogy there are holy kings and disastrous kings, right men and wrong men, courageous women and complicated stories. It is as if God wanted to tell us, from the beginning: I am not afraid of your humanity.
The Novena prepares us for a God who does not choose perfection, but reality. God is not looking for an ideal family, but a real family. It is not born in a straight line, but within a crooked, wounded genealogy, as ours often is. Yet right there God writes salvation. This means that nothing in our history is useless, not even what we would have liked to erase.
Each name holds a promise, each generation carries the weight of the previous ones. And when we get to Joseph, everything seems to stop: he does not generate Jesus, but gives him something even greater, the name. It is the act with which he recognizes him, welcomes him, protects him. This is how salvation enters the world: in the responsibility of a man who chooses not to escape. In this wait for Christmas, the Gospel invites us to reread our genealogy too. Not only that of blood, but that of choices, encounters, wounds, forgiveness. God is born right there, where our history seems most fragile. Our story, such as it is, can become the place where God makes himself present again.
Wednesday 17 December 2025 – (Feria propia of 17 December)
