Your Kin Aren’t Anywhere Near As Dysfunctional As Jesus’ Family
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(OPINION) Occasionally, events flow together in a kind of confluence. It’s nice when that happens. Plus, I like saying the word “confluence.” It trips off the tongue.
The other day, I rediscovered another article I’d saved on my laptop for further thought or as column fodder — and then promptly forgotten. That’s been happening a lot.
This one, an essay by Peter Wehner, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, was titled, “Why It Matters That Jesus Came From a Dysfunctional Family.”
Wehner focused his essay partly on the genealogy of Jesus that opens Matthew’s Gospel in the New Testament.
Unrelated to this, I also happened to be studying for my church’s adult Sunday school class, which I lead. We always discuss the podcast “Bema,” hosted by Marty Solomon and Brent Billings, about whom I know almost nothing except that they’re based out West and that they produce some of the more insightful biblical exegesis I’ve ever encountered. Sunday after Sunday, we never fail to get a rousing conversation going around a “Bema” episode.
As it turned out, this particular week Solomon and Billings were holding forth on the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew.
Finding Wehner’s essay and the Bema guys’ podcast reminded me that I, too, have written multiple times across 30 years about the curiosities and, you might almost say, monstrosities found in the family tree of Jesus Christ — and in all biblical families.
As I said, a confluence.
Why does an ancient genealogy matter? Because Matthew, and the Bible writ large, dish dirt about biblical heroes to make a larger — and profoundly more hopeful — point:
All humanity is royally screwed up. As a result, your family is screwed up. Likely, you are screwed up, too, and your family may have contributed to that screwed-upness.
But your ancestry doesn’t have to define your destiny. With God’s help, you can break the cycle of dysfunction, no matter how far back it goes.
And even if you never manage to escape the cycle altogether, God will still use you to accomplish great things. God works with messed up people, because they’re the only kind available.
Back to Matthew’s Jesus.
In biblical times, a person’s genealogy was sort of his or her resume. You cited your family tree to prove your bona fides, to establish your worth. As a result you played up the shiny parts and where possible omitted, or at least played down, the bad actors.
Except that Matthew opens his Gospel — he leads — with a genealogy that does exactly the opposite. For instance, he throws in several women, in a tradition where women generally aren’t considered worth mentioning.
And what a list of women! Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute in order to sleep with her father-in-law. Rahab, a gentile and a sex worker. Ruth, a wonderful person but also a member of the despised Moabite tribe. Bathsheba, King David’s partner in adultery.
The men in the list are no prizes, mind you.
Among my favorites is King David, who in addition to war-making, womanizing and murdering his mistress’ husband, may have been the world’s all-time worst father. One of his sons raped his own sister. Then another son killed the rapist brother and led a revolution against David, his dad. The best of David’s sons, Solomon, ended up as an idolater.
“Jesus might have been sinless, but those in his lineage were not,” Wehner observed pithily.
The “Bema” podcast guys argued that Matthew went out of his way to emphasize Jesus’ checkered lineage partly because Matthew was sensitive about his own spiritual baggage.
He’d been a tax collector before Jesus called him as a disciple. In the first century Middle East, tax collectors were Jewish collaborators with the Roman occupation government, and were considered by other Jews to be traitors, sellouts and reprobates of the lowest order.
By highlighting the crooked, broken limbs in Jesus’ family tree, Matthew is saying, “Look, God loves losers.”
This epiphany lies at the heart of Matthew’s understanding of the Good News. For him, Jesus has turned everything upside down. Those who used to be considered outside God’s good graces actually are in. Those who think of themselves as insiders, as the “approved,” are now outside because of their smug self-righteousness. Up has become down, and down is now up.
According to Wehner, there may be yet another reason this startling information about Jesus’ dysfunctional family is highlighted.
“Perhaps it’s to show that what could have been a source of shame for Jesus wasn’t — and therefore that it need not be for those of us whose families and histories have shadow sides,” he wrote.
Handled rightly, this candor ought to give us hope.
“Past is not prologue,” Wehner said. “If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, told me, ‘then there is hope for all of us. He’s a cycle breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don’t have to be predictive of future events. Cycles can be broken. Systems can be replaced. Families — and therefore whole nations — can be healed.’”
In short, if God could take somebody from Jesus’ troubled family of origin (I haven’t even talked about the pettiness and pushback he endured from his immediate family in his own lifetime) and use him to redeem all mankind, then surely God can redeem something positive from the likes of you and me.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.