The bad does not outweigh the good

A Reflection for the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Find today’s readings here.

Today’s readings for the birthday of Mary are not primarily about Mary: They trace Jesus’ lineage down through the ages, ending with Mary and Joseph. Scholars have spilled much ink about how unusual this accounting of Jesus’ lineage is. It is in turns both patrilineal and matrilineal and it seems to go out of its way to mention figures whom one might not necessarily want named in the lineage of their savior. One illustrative example: “David became the father of Solomon, whose mother had been the wife of Uriah.” The author could have left it at “David became the father of Solomon” or simply named Bathsheba as Solomon’s mother. But the phrasing “the wife of Uriah” reminds the reader of David’s affair with Bathsheba and his role in orchestrating the death of her husband, Uriah.

But these unusual and even unsavory inclusions are the point, as we see underlined in the first reading. In it, Micah prophesies that it is from the inconsequential town of Bethlehem, “too small” even to be one of the clans of Judah, that the savior will come. God, as Scripture insists again and again, loves to work through the broken, poor and discounted, even turning original sin into a “happy fault,” as the Easter Exsultet so memorably exclaims.

Lately, I’ve been learning more about the work of the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University, which for the last 25 years has looked into how much children know about their family histories and how that knowledge affects them. Their standout finding is a correlation between resiliency and awareness of family history: As reported by The New York Times, “The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.”

The stories that correlated most with a teenager’s resiliency were those that fit what researchers called the “oscillating” narrative—stories of how the family had made it through both good times and bad. Those stories helped teens weather life’s ups and downs, even subconsciously.

I think Matthew’s account of Jesus’ unusual family tree and the findings of the Family Narratives Lab combine to paint an important picture: We each come from a long line of humans with checkered pasts—some “good people” and some “bad people” (really, people who were created good but have done both good and evil)—but the evil does not outweigh the good. God still finds a way to accomplish great things; he has done so over the generations, and he can do so with us, no matter where we have come from or what we have done. “God,” Pope Francis loved to remind us, “never tires of forgiving.”

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