Luke begins his gospel with the famous story of Christmas. His story includes the angels, the shepherds, the wonder and awe of the well-known Christmas story. Mathew, by contrast, begins the Christmas story with (wait for it), a genealogy. What many of us pass over as dull and tedious was anything but dull when Matthew’s original audience read his story, because they knew the backstories of the people in the family tree of Jesus. In fact, Matthew seems to go out of his way to allude to the scandalous lives of the people who made up the family tree of Jesus. Matthew didn’t include them in spite of his gospel story. Matthew included them because they were the point of the gospel story.