In honour of that fact that it’s Father’s Day next Sunday—sorry if I’ve spoilt the surprise!—here is the first in a series of five very short posts reflecting on aspects of human fatherhood in Matthew’s gospel. (There’s also a lot in Matthew about God’s fatherhood, but that would be another whole series…).
The first thing to get straight about human fatherhood, according to the gospel of Matthew, is that God doesn’t need it.
Matthew begins his account of “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” with a genealogy that is all about fathering: sixteen verses about who was the father of whom, all the way from Abraham down to Joseph, as God put together the family line of the seed of Abraham and the sons of David. And then, having laid out that long chain of human fathers and sons, God suddenly snaps it at the very last link, and causes Jesus to be born of a virgin.
The virgin birth is never explained in Scripture as some sort of device to avoid passing on original sin—as if the sin gene were carried on the Y chromosome. But it is explained, right back in Isaiah, as a sign of judgment on faithless, blustering, self-reliant, fearful men, like Ahaz and the house of David. (Have a read of Isaiah 7–8 and you’ll get the picture.)
At the very centre of the story of how God chose to save the world is a man who was conceived without a human father and who never became a father himself. For Christians like us, following Christ in a time of culture wars and broken families and Hallmark celebrations, that has to have implications.
St. Joseph’s dream, by Philippe de Champaigne
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