At first glance, the Gospel we have just heard seems dry and uninspiring, a long list of names, difficult to pronounce, easy to ignore. Many of us are tempted to ask: Why begin the Good News with a genealogy? Why open the story of salvation with a record that looks more like an old census than a proclamation of hope?
Yet, dear brothers and sisters, this genealogy is not a list of perfect people, it is a list of wounded lives. And that is precisely why it matters today. God enters history as it is, not as we wish it to be. Matthew traces the lineage of Jesus not through saints alone, but through sinners, failures, outsiders, and the forgotten. We hear names like Judah, who betrayed his brother; David, who abused his power; Solomon, born of scandal; and women like Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, each bearing painful, complicated stories.
This is not a sanitized family tree. This is a bruised genealogy. And in this, we see a powerful truth: God does not wait for history to be clean before entering it. Today, when we look at the sorry state of our nation, marked by corruption, injustice, widening poverty, moral confusion, and leadership that often forgets the poor, it is easy to feel disillusioned. We ask: Can anything good still come out of this? Has God abandoned us? The genealogy of Jesus answers clearly: No. God is still at work, even in broken histories.
The genealogy moves through fourteen generations of struggle, exile, and restoration. It passes through moments of greatness and long seasons of collapse. At the center of this list stands the Babylonian exile, a national catastrophe, a time when God’s people felt defeated, humiliated, and abandoned. And yet, Matthew insists on naming it. Why? Because hope does not begin when suffering ends, hope begins when God enters suffering. Hope is born in the midst of ruins.
Our nation today, too, feels like it is living through an exile: families trapped in poverty, workers burdened by injustice, young people confused and restless, truth distorted, and faith tested Still, the Gospel whispers to us: “The story is not finished.”
The genealogy ends not in despair, but in Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of God’s promise. Hope was quietly growing while everything seemed lost. This is what it means to hope against hope: to believe that God is still writing His story even when we can only see ruins.
The Church herself today is not without wounds. We carry scars, of division, of scandal, of weakness, of fatigue. Sometimes we are tempted to hide these wounds, to pretend we are stronger than we are. We are a bruised church, yet a chosen people.
But the genealogy of Jesus teaches us something liberating: God works not despite our wounds, but through them. We are a Church born not of perfection, but of mercy. Like the ancestors of Jesus, we are chosen not because we are flawless, but because God is faithful.
This is why synodality is not optional for us. A bruised Church cannot walk alone. We are called to walk together, to listen to one another, to carry one another’s burdens, to discern together where God is leading us. Synodality is the Church saying: no one is too wounded to belong, no story is too broken to be redeemed, and no voice is too small to be heard
Dear brothers and sisters, the genealogy of Jesus did not end in Matthew chapter one. It continues in us. We are now part of the genealogy. We are now the names God is writing into history, in how we choose honesty over corruption, compassion over indifference, unity over division, and hope over despair. The future of our nation, and of our Church, will not be changed by grand speeches alone, but by faithful lives quietly lived in hope. mLike the ancestors of Jesus, we may never see the full fulfillment of God’s plan, but our faithfulness prepares the way.
The genealogy of Jesus assures us of this unshakable truth: As a wounded nation and a bruised Church, let us continue to walk together, listening, discerning, hoping, until the day comes when God completes what He has begun. And that day will come. Because Jesus Christ stands at the end of every broken story. Amen.