From a dramatic standpoint, the opening verses of Matthew’s Gospel leave a lot to be desired. Basically, it’s just a list of names—fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian Exile, and then fourteen more from the Babylonian Exile to Jesus.

Unless genealogies send your heart all aflutter, most people skip the first seventeen verses and move straight to the story of the angel Gabriel visiting Joseph in a dream. Even the Common Lectionary never calls for preachers to explore this long, rather tedious list of tongue-twisting names.

But in recent years, scholars have started questioning whether Matthew might have been up to something far more profound than simply diagramming Jesus’ family tree. Some have suggested that this genealogy actually illustrates one of the dominant themes of the gospel—namely, how God works in mysterious ways.

For example, most genealogies list the father, followed by the firstborn son. But this one doesn’t. We are told that Abraham begat Isaac; but there is no mention of Ishmael, who was, in fact, Abraham’s firstborn. Then Isaac begat Jacob; but of course, Esau was the eldest, not Jacob. Then Jacob begat Judah; but again, Judah is not the firstborn (that would be Reuben).

Stranger still are the women that Matthew includes. Nothing is said about Sarah, Rebekah, or Rachel—the upstanding patriarchal wives of Israel. Instead we get Tamar, a Canaanite, who disguised herself as a prostitute and seduced her own father-in-law; and Rahab, another Canaanite and a real prostitute this time; and Ruth, the Moabite, yet another foreigner; and Bathsheba, who is named only as the wife of Uriah, whom King David had killed so that he could marry her himself.

In other words, the circumstances of each of these women are somewhat scandalous, including the fifth and final woman named in this genealogy: Mary, the mother of Jesus, with her—let us say—unconventional pregnancy.

Moreover, this genealogy contains some names that are a total mystery to us. Who was Azor or Achim? Who was Eliud or Eliezar? What did they do? What kind of men were they? Your guess is as good as mine, because other than this passage, their names do not appear anywhere else in Scripture.

So what does all of this say about God? Well, for starters, it says that God can work through scoundrels as well as saints, through children of the covenant as well as complete outsiders, and through lots of other folks, who are obscure and otherwise undistinguished. And if that’s the case, then it is a pretty safe bet that God can use even the likes of us, with all of our individual gifts and flaws.

The bottom line is that the genealogy of Jesus is more than just a list of historical names. It is an illustration of the mysterious and miraculous way that God works. Indeed, if you were so inclined, you could keep adding to this list, because eventually Jesus reaches out to Paul, and Paul reaches out to Timothy, and Timothy reaches out to someone else, and so forth and so on … until someone reached out to you!