Advent | A Family ReflectionSample

Jesus’ Knotty Family Tree
by Joy-Elizabeth Lawrence

And Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.

Matthew 1:16

Matthew 1:1–17 is one of the dreaded genealogies, with hard-to-pronounce names and no storyline (or so it seems). Yet behind the sometimes unfamiliar names, this text is jam-packed full of stories of how God worked through the messy lives of women and men. This genealogy is a little different, as it sprinkles in a few mothers in the long line of fathers: Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law, Judah, by pretending to be a prostitute; the Canaanite Rahab who actually was a prostitute; the Moabite Ruth; Uriah’s wife, whom we know as Bathsheba; and Mary, the mother of Jesus. Here are these five women, standing out amid all the fathers, with a long back story packed into each of their names. Matthew 1 is an embarrassing genealogy—embarrassingly glorious in the way God worked in and through these lives.

Consider the story of Rahab (Joshua 2): A woman with little power, no prestige, and no future was given power and the opportunity to serve God’s people. And she did. Rahab resisted her culture: She saw something within the story of the God of the Israelites that compelled her to fear God and pledge her and her family’s lives on her promise of silence.

The story of Rahab is the story of one woman’s act of resistance. Rahab’s story contrasts greatly to the kinds of stories our culture tells at Christmastime: stories of happiness, of material success, of glitter and glamour. Matthew is clear that the family tree of Jesus was not a symmetrical, pristine fir. It’s knotty (and naughty) and complicated. This was the family Jesus entered, the world Jesus entered, and when we’re honest, it’s the world in which we all live.

Advent isn’t just a Christian word for the days leading up to Christmas. The other-worldly call of Advent is to a life of resistance to the gods of this age as we wait, with 2,000 years of Christians before us, for Christ to come and finish his new creation.

Taking time to notice God’s work within Matthew 1 may provide us opportunity to recognize God’s work within our own genealogies, our spiritual and biological family trees. This Advent, invite the Holy Spirit to reframe your past, allowing you to revisit your own story in a way that enlightens and demonstrates the beauty of asymmetry, the grace of twisted trees.

Contemplate Matthew 1:1–17. What significance do you find in the “messy” stories and lives included in Jesus’ genealogy? 

Joy-Elizabeth Lawrence is the pastor of spiritual formation at Hinsdale Covenant Church. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and children.