of Israel’s Scriptures misses Matthew’s lesson. The Gospel presents a figural reading of Jesus’s life as the master discourse.6 Through images and metaphors, he shows how Jesus walks in Israel’s shoes while also bringing them to their destination. The genealogy instructs readers that the content of Matthew’s Gospel is contained in its form. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, “The content [Gehalt] does not lie behind the form [Gestalt] but within it. Whoever is not capable of seeing and ‘reading’ the
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