The celebration of Christmas in the Catholic Church has four distinct Masses - the Vigil, the Mass during night, the Mass at dawn, and the Mass during the day, each with its own set of readings. The Gospel for the Vigil Mass starts with the genealogy of Jesus. Some might want to skip over those lines, not wanting to bother with the difficult biblical names.
But we can learn a great deal already from the genealogy. The people of Israel had waited many years for the coming of the Messiah. Indeed, the entire Old Testament period was a time of preparation for Christ. The Israelites were waiting for a great king, a powerful military conqueror, who would subdue their enemies and usher in a new age of glory for Israel. But when he arrived, the Messiah was much more than what they had hoped for, beyond, in fact, their wildest expectations, as we shall see below.
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Photo Credit: The Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard from Wikimedia Commons.
