Son of Abraham, Son of David

By Chuck White, Catholic Evidence Guild of Guam

As we finish the season of Advent this week and prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth, it might be fruitful to become acquainted with His family history.  Here’s a list of Jesus’ ancestors as recorded in Matthew 1:1-17, which we heard at Mass last Wednesday (Dec. 17) and which we might hear again at the Christmas Vigil Mass.  Be warned, though:  some shocking deeds lie behind some of the names on this list.  Jesus’ ancestry contains both saints and sinners, some scandal and some holiness.  Let’s look.

Abraham, lived about 4000 years ago in a city called Haran.  While his friends were busy worshipping the moon and sacrificing their children, he was worshipping the real God of the Universe, who promised to make him the father of millions.  He was a man of great faith.

Jacob was a trickster who once tricked his brother Esau out of his Father Isaac’s blessing by putting on sheepskin and pretending he was Esau.  He had two wives and two concubines, and became the father of twelve sons.  God renamed him Israel, which means, “Ruling With God” and his descendants are called Israelites.

Judah was Jacob’s fourth son, and he was the one who came up with the bright idea of selling Joseph his brother as a slave to the Ishmaelites.  He dipped Joseph’s coat into goat’s blood and told Jacob that a wild animal had eaten him!

Tamar was Judah’s daughter-in-law who pretended to be a prostitute and had sexual intercourse with Judah when he was on his way back from shearing his many sheep.  She got pregnant.

When Joshua sent to spies to Jericho, Rahab the prostitute helped them escape.  In return they saved her family when Joshua attacked the city.  She acknowledged that the God of the Israelites was the true God.

Ruth was a gentile married to the son of a woman from Bethlehem.  To make a long story short, her father-in-law died, and her husband too.  She went back to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law and caught the attention of a man named Boaz.  They got married and lived happily ever after.

David got the wife of one of his soldiers pregnant and covered up his misdeed by having the soldier, Uriah, sent to the front line to die.  David then took Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, as his own wife.

His son Solomon was a very wise King.  When he first became king, God told him to ask for anything, and God would give it to him.  He asked for an understanding heart so that he could rule his people well.  But Solomon loved women too.  In fact he eventually had 700 wives and 300 concubines.  And his heart eventually turned from God and he worshipped the idols of his many wives.

A long line of kings followed Solomon, some holy and some not so holy.  Rehoboam, Jehoram, Ahaz, and Amon were all evil kings.  Rehoboam was so cruel that the kingdom split into two:  the kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.  Jehoram killed his brothers upon taking the throne.  Ahaz burned his son alive as a sacrifice to his false gods.  Amon was so evil that he was assassinated by his advisors.

But there were some holy kings in Jesus’ lineage too.  Consider Asa, who got rid of the temple prostitutes.  Or Hezekiah, who, when Jerusalem was under siege by the Assyrians, went to his room and fasted and prayed.  The next morning, 180 thousand Assyrians lay dead outside the city walls, and the rest had run away.  Hezekiah’s name, by the way, means, “God is my Strength”. Another man on the list, Josiah, became king when he was only eight years old.  Josiah reestablished the celebration of Passover which had been abandoned by one of his predecessors.

We see some women on this list, and there is scandal associated with four of them:  Tamar and Rahab were prostitutes, Ruth was a foreigner, and Bathsheba was an adulteress.  The final woman on the list is Mary, the one we look up to as our spiritual mother and the perfect example of a Christian.

This genealogy shows us that God can “write straight with crooked lines”.  He can and does bring great good out of evil.  After all, God raised up good and godly kings to help undo the damage caused by the evil ones.  And weren’t the women on this list the very same kind of women that Jesus befriended and redeemed?  Of course, the greatest good to come out of this somewhat scandalous genealogy is that God brought about an awesome revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus, and made Himself known to us.  Have a happy and holy Christmas!  (More information on this topic may be found on the CEG web site at http://www.cegguam.org)