The Family Tree of Jesus

The PBS program Finding Your Roots traces the genealogies of celebrity guests to reveal their origins. The popularity of this program is an example of a growing desire to find out more about who we are and from where we came--a process made easier with websites like ancestry.com.

In the time of Jesus, family records weren’t as readily available, so it was much more difficult to trace one’s roots. Both Luke and Matthew include genealogies of Jesus that are based not as much on historical records as on key points each author was trying to convey to his particular audience. Luke, writing to a community of Gentiles, stresses the divine origin of the human race and so he traces the lineage of Jesus all the way back to Adam. Matthew, writing to a Jewish community, stresses that Jesus was the intended Messiah and the legal heir of the throne of David, Joseph’s ancestor.

According to Jewish belief, the Messiah had to be a descendant of both Abraham and David. But not everyone in the lineage were kings or patriarchs. Many are unknowns and perhaps that’s Matthew’s point. God not only remembers the faceless and the forgotten; God included them in his saving plan. No one is too insignificant for God’s purpose. It is also interesting to note that the people on Jesus’ family tree were far from perfect. David, for example, committed adultery, murder and theft. Solomon, David’s son, had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines. The women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy committed incest, betrayal, and prostitution, yet all of them prepared the way for the birth of Christ. Matthew is telling us that the most unlikely characters are often used by God to give birth to a divine purpose. God isn’t concerned with who deserves God’s love, only with who needs it.

Perhaps these are the reasons why Matthew’s genealogy, rather than the genealogy written by Luke, appears in our lectionary. Matthew’s genealogy is proclaimed on the weekday of December 17 and at the liturgies on Christmas Eve.