Over the past number of years there's been a remarkable interest in researching family trees.  Services like ancestry.com have become very popular and a number of TV programs have featured public figures and celebrities as they've search to uncover their ancestral roots.  While I've not taken on this quest myself, Al, my spouse dedicates a lot of his time to genealogical pursuits and often tells me with great excitment about another link he's discovered in his famly tree.

 

Finding out more about our past can be exhilarating and often deepens our understanding of family traits or values. Suddenly some things begin to make more sense - 'That's why Uncle Norman is so artistic!' or 'That's why our family has always valued higher education'.

Of course just as genealogical research can uncover ancestors whom we are proud of because of their wonderful achievments or their significant contributions to society; the research can also uncover skeletons in our  family closet.  Perhaps we've had an ancestor who committed a crime, or one who upheld values or a way of life that we now find to be embarrassing or reprehensible.  In every family tree, there are both the saints and the sinners, the esteemed and the disparaged. 

 

Both Luke's and Matthew's gospels include genealogies of Jesus.  You can find them at Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38.  Each is unique, offering a different perspective on Jesus' family tree.  By emphasizing that Jesus' family tree goes back all the way to Adam, Luke underscores the universality of Jesus as the Saviour of the whole world. Matthew, on the other hand, emphasizes Jesus' Jewish lineage by tracing his family tree through various kings and prophets.  Because he was writing for a Jewish community, Matthew wanted to portray Jesus as the fulfilment of the Jewish hope for a Messiah.

 

However, if you look even more closely at Matthew's genealogical account of Jesus' ancestors, he also includes some rather controversial figures.  Here, Jesus' ancestors include those like Jacob, the son who stole his older brother's birthright; Tamar, the woman who tricked Judah, her father-in-law, into getting her pregnant; the son of Boaz and Ruth, (Ruth was a non-Jew and in today's terms would have been considered an an illegal immigrant); and King Solomon, the offspring of King David and Bathsheba.  In a despicable act of betrayal and abuse of his power, King David procured Bathsheba for his 'pleasure' (in other words, he raped her) and then arranged for her husband Uriah to die in battle to cover up his crime.  What on earth does ancestral lineage say about Jesus?

 

In her book, Grounded: Finding God in the World, Diana Butler Bass responds to this question. 

His genealogy tells readers that Jesus's ancestry is the human story of faith and faithlessness, of good deeds and wicked ones, of saintly actions and dubious intentions, of marital fidelity and sexual duplicity.  In other words, Jesus may be a "king" in the royal line of David, but his family is pretty much the same as everyone else's...Other biblical genealogies are the same, full of stories of relatives you would rather forget.  But they also underscore one of the great spiritual insights of human experience:  pettiness, sin, evil and suffering are somehow passed through generations, but the graciousness of God's blessings overcomes what seems an insurmountable and inherited curse.  God's mercy flows, apparently, through the actions and despite the choices of our ancestors.

 

How good to know that no matter how little or how much we know about our roots or our genealogy, God's love is woven through it all.  While we cannot escape our ancestral roots, we are not bound only by that lineage; we are ultimately bound through God's spacious and gracious love to a greater lineage as children of God.  

 

Peace, Kathy Toivanen