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December 07, 2003
Did Jesus’ Heredity Matter?
Did Jesus’ Heredity Matter?
Psalm 89: 1-4, 19-37 / I Samuel 16: 1-13
Luke 2: 1-7
December 7th, 2003
Every year we remember that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the City of David. He was born there because His mother and Joseph were told to go there by a Roman governor. It was census time and no matter how inconvenient, if this was your birthplace, you had to go back home to be registered. Bethlehem was Joseph’s birthplace. He was engaged to Mary. Though they had not been intimate, Mary was expecting a child. It was a special act of God in her that was explained beforehand to them both. To be engaged in those days was equivalent to being married, legally speaking. Since Bethlehem was Joseph’s birthplace both of them had to go there to be registered.
So in a remarkable unfolding of the plan of God, a great good came from a great inconvenience to an unmarried young woman who was due to bring forth a child. Joseph, a kindly carpenter from Nazareth, had to be in Bethlehem be exactly at the time when Mary was about to give birth to a son. Bethlehem was called the city of David, but it was really only a very tiny little village. And so we are introduced to a very interesting and important byway in the story of the heredity of Joseph and Jesus. Or was it a byway?
The prophet , Micah, who lived 800 years before said something about Bethlehem as he longed for God to keep a promise He had made to King David. “O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” The attention focused on tiny Bethlehem. Why insignificant little Bethlehem, smaller than Otterbein? Because this was the little village in which a shepherd boy named David had been born a thousand years earlier. Here would be born a baby “whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” What an odd thing to say of a baby.
Lois read for us about the shepherd boy, David, and Bethlehem. God told Samuel, the great prophet to go to Bethlehem to choose a replacement king for King Saul. King Saul hadn’t the heart to lead Israel. God saw what nobody would have guessed, that in the fields outside Bethlehem a fine looking lad had a heart that pleased God.
This shepherd boy went on to be Israel’s greatest King, King David. We read in the 89th Psalm God’s promise to David. “I will establish your descendants forever, and build your throne for all generations . . . like the moon [your throne] will be established for ever; it shall stand firm while the skies endure.”
But after King David died, things didn’t go well for Israel. It was divided by civil war. Then both parts of the divided nation were taken into captivity, one after the other. While the descendants of David kept on coming, there was no king that anyone could see in Jerusalem. Surely most of David’s descendants had no idea their forbear was a great king. No one kept track of niceties like this in exile. What happened to God’s promise to David?
Time rolled on sadly for the descendants of King David. Joseph, a craftsman, the husband of the Virgin Mary, was born in the same city as his famous ancestor, King David. I wonder if he knew he was a descendant of the great king, or just from the tribe of Judah. If he did, it must have given him little joy when he traveled south from his home up near the Sea of Galilee to his ancestral village for the census. What good did royal heredity do him? He had no idea that a great plan was unfolding in his awkward situation. He mostly wondered, “How can Mary stand to be jostled by that donkey ride sixty long miles down to Bethlehem?” But they made it—in the knick of time. And a baby was born to her in a stable outside a little inn in Bethlehem. Matthew tells us that Joseph named the baby “Jesus.”
Part of the oddness and importance of this story is that Joseph was not Jesus’ father. Joseph was from the same tribe as King David, the tribe of Judah, but Mary seems to have been from the tribe of Levi. Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, was wife of a priest, and priests could only marry women from the tribe of Levi. So Jesus was not physically from the tribe of Judah. Legally he was from Judah, but by birth he was not. All of the promises of the Old Testament pointed to the man who was Jesus’ legal father, but Jesus physical descent did not come through King David. What’s going on? It is as though God is writing a mystery and is distracting us with a diversion in the plot. All eyes turn to the physical seed of David. No one guesses how God will bring the story’s plot to conclusion.
Two things are going on, I believe.
First, I remember God’s promise to an ancestor even farther back than King David, Abraham. “In your family all nations of the earth would be blessed.” God loved the whole world, and not just the family of Abraham or David.
Second, it was important to show how this blessing of the whole world was provided within a framework of God’s promise to King David. His legal family line carried the promise that would be fulfilled for the whole world.
The Bible tells us a lot about the family lines that led up to Abraham and then that came after him. Genesis 5 tells us about the family line between Adam and Eve, our first parents, and Noah. Then Genesis 11 tells us the line between Noah and Abraham. We then see how the family story narrows down to the descendants of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. It begins to seem that God only cares about one little fork in the genealogical tree from Adam, the children of Jacob, grandson of Abraham.
But as the story unfolds we see that things don’t go well with the descendants of Jacob. In fact, they are scattered from their homeland. Most people who were born from the Jewish heritage forgot what tribe they were from. This forgetfulness was a needful part of the unfolding story.
Really only one tribe was important to the story, the tribe of Judah. Why Judah?
We look back at the blessings Jacob gave to Judah on his deathbed way back when they were still in Egypt. Jacob said to his sons, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” All the sons gathered around their father’s deathbed must have wondered what that meant. It was an important thread in God’s weaving the tapestry of history.
None of us can see the thread of God’s work. We always see outward things. God’s work takes place usually behind the scenes.
More than a thousand years later the pertinence of that cryptic promise came about. In a tiny village in the south of Palestine, a baby was born to a young Jewish woman, engaged to a man born into the family line of Judah. And this baby boy was Jesus. The Apostle Paul looked at Jesus and remembered the words of Isaiah the prophet, “To him every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that he is Lord.” He held the scepter of which Jacob spoke, a scepter with gracious authority over all nations, not just over Israel.
One of the reasons we keep track of genealogies is to find out where we come from. But there is another aspect to keeping track of bloodlines. If you happen to come from a distinguished bloodline, there is an element of pride you have in it. When the royal family of England checks out potential wives and husbands for its children, they look to see their ancestry. Prince Philip of Greece was suitable for Queen Elizabeth II because he was descended from Queen Victoria. If you or I have a famous ancestor, we may casually bring it up in a conversation. We’re proud of it.
But nobody can claim Jesus as her ancestor, and everyone can. Because his Father was not from one family, but from the One who created all families of the earth. In a way the birth story of Jesus is a commentary on John 3: 16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever trusts in him may have eternal life.” Jesus was Mary’s firstborn son, but he was God’s only begotten son. That is, Jesus was the only person on earth born by a special act of God. So Jesus could be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. No nation, not even the Jewish people, can lay special claim on Jesus. Every nation can. Jesus came to be a blessing to all people. John writes in his Gospel, those who receive Jesus are born [spiritually], “not of bloods . . . but by the will of God.” Jesus was born the same way physically.
Whereas a lot is told us about Joseph’s ancestry, nothing is written about Mary’s. Both Matthew and Luke give Joseph’s descent, Matthew from Abraham, and Luke from Adam. But none of the Gospels tell us anything about Mary’s forbears. One of the Apocryphal Gospels tell us her mother was Anna, and her father, Joachim. But this is only legend.
There is a reason for Jesus’ mother being this otherwise unknown girl who happened to live in the town of Nazareth. Isaiah, the prophet, asked, “As for his generation, who shall declare that he was cut off from the land of the living?” He wrote of Jesus, who would bear in his body the sins of the world. He was related to everyone and nobody that anyone could identify.
He was like the mysterious King Melchizedek mentioned in the Book of Genesis. He is called “priest of the God Most High.” The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament quotes the psalm that refers to this mysterious king, without genealogy and without descendants, and tells us that this was none other than Jesus, who came to Abraham at a weary moment in his life. These things sound strange and mysterious to us, but face it, how could God’s blessing of the inhabitants of this troubled world seem anything but mysterious?
But the point is not mysterious that you and I are to understand. God used the people of Israel, and one family in this nation in particular, to carry the blood line by which the promise to Abraham would be fulfilled. But when the time came to give this blessing, to give us Jesus, suddenly the human heredity mysteriously disappears. Why? Because if Jesus’ heredity didn’t disappear, then God’s blessing could have been uniquely claimed by the Jewish people. The blessing was for everyone, not just for the Jews.
The blessing of Jesus plays out for everyone in many ways. Paul tells us, “In Him all things hold together.” What does Paul mean by “all things?” I believe Paul is writing not just about great things, like the universe, but about the very details of your life and mine. Your life, whoever you are, whether rich or poor, of noble birth or of humble birth, regardless of your race, regardless of whether life is easy or hard for you now, holds together in Jesus.
Jesus could not be claimed by Mary’s family in any unique way. Furthermore, the reason why Jesus did not get married, as a recent popular novel has proposed, is that if Jesus had got married and had children, they could claim special favors as descended from him. Instead, God has adopted you and me, if we have trusted in Jesus, so that God sees you and me as brothers and sisters of Jesus. Nobody can claim Jesus as father, but in Him, all have the right to call Him “brother.” We are, as Paul puts it, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
We sometimes hear the plea, “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Folks, you can’t keep Christ out of Christmas, try as you may. How wonderful it would be, if at this Christmas time, when your heart is tenderized by the beauty of sights and sounds, that you would pause and humbly begin to acknowledge all of your life holds together in this Jesus. Trusting in Jesus means seeing all of your life’s importance in terms of this Jesus whom your Creator mysteriously sent to make your life hold together. If this is true, give your life to finding and doing what pleases Him.
Your life and mine is like a vapor, a bit of steam that arises from a teakettle and dissolves in the air. But if your heart, the center of your life finds its deliberate focus in Jesus, there is purpose to your vaporous life. You will not dissolve in the thin air.
As we gather around the Table this morning that commemorates the purpose of all of this of which I’ve been speaking—that this child of Mary and God should die in order that we may live, bow and quietly, humbly open your heart and determine to make Jesus become the focus of your life. Let us pray: O Lord God, our Creator and friend, thank you for sending us Jesus. Help us to receive him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at December 7, 2003 09:30 AM