Ever since my daughter turned 2, our family has attended the 4 p.m. Vigil rather than our usual Midnight Mass for Christmas. The first year we made the switch, I was surprised when our pastor decided to read the full text of the Gospel, which begins with the genealogy of Jesus: “Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers…”  With little ones squirming in the pews all around me, I wondered why he hadn’t opted for the shorter form.

But this Gospel offers us far more than a list of names. Amid the patriarchs and their male descendants, we hear of several women: Tamar. Rahab. Ruth. “The wife of Uriah” (Bathsheba). Really? I thought, with eyebrows raised. Of all the women in the Bible, these are the ones Matthew decides to mention by name in the genealogy of Jesus? These women all had compromised pasts. But despite the circumstances of their lives, they became the highly respected mothers of some of the most influential figures in Jewish history. More importantly, they prepare us to recognize that it is God’s handiwork when a young woman named Mary is pregnant with a child that is not her fiancé’s. While Mary’s conception is of divine origin, Matthew’s point is that God often acts in the most surprising of ways.

Also, for being matriarchs of the Jewish people, I find it interesting that these women have Gentile origins: Tamar may have been an Aramean or Canaanite (though she may also have been an Israelite – it’s unclear from the text); Rahab was a Canaanite. Ruth is a Moabite, and Bathsheba was married to a Hittite. Even outsiders, it seems, have a place in God’s family.

As the Gospel goes on, we hear that there were 14 generations from Abraham to David, and 14 generations from David to the Babylonian exile, and 14 generations from the Babylonian exile to the Christ. The Hebrew language, it turns out, assigns numeric values to letters, and David’s name (rendered DVD in Hebrew) has a numeric value of 14: dalet = 4, vav = 6, dalet = 4; 4+6+4 = 14. The text is revealing to us that Mary’s child is the promised Son of David (see 2 Sam 7:13) who would sit on the throne forever, just as the angel Gabriel had revealed to Mary: “He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever.” (Lk 1:32-33) As the chorus of Handel’s Messiah proclaims, he is truly “King of kings and Lord of lords.” Even the counting of generations proclaims what – or rather – Who it is we’re celebrating this night.

There’s only one problem: Astute readers will notice that there aren’t actually 14 generations mentioned in the final set, the list of descendants from the Babylonian Exile to Christ. “The third and final set contains thirteen names, which may suggest that the fourteenth and final generation is that of the Church.” (The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed. p. 11)

As it turns out, God’s math isn’t off. He has simply made room to count us as members of his family.