Genealogy Pt 2

Since writing the previous entry on genealogy (on April 19) I’ve been thinking about why so many of us are fascinated with our roots. In spite of all the letters and diaries my family has pertaining to our ancestors (or perhaps because of them), I still find myself wanting to understand more of what life was like for them. I wonder what it would be like to reach across the generations and compare our lives with one another. And then to think that I carry within my genetic makeup a little bit of each one of them. Could it be that my grt-grt grandfather Loren Webb’s affinity for journalism came down through the line to me? But that’s a subject for another time.

In the opening pages of the Phillips’ genealogy book this poem is offered as a reflection on the study of our family trees:

Come walk with us,
Back through the vista of the years
Which our ancestors knew. We seek
The trails which they once trod
To find the spots where they once dwelt.
And while we search abandoned haunts,
Read wether’d stones and turn the musty pages
Of the past, their spirits come alive
And walk with us. We learn of them;
Their lives, their loves, their hates,
And with this knowledge learn
To understand ourselves. For each of them
Has given unto us a part. We owe them this:
That they shall be remembered for that gift.
Fern Stokes Eller

And then there are all those "begats" in the Bible, now stated in contemporary language... "Abraham was the father of Issac..." and so on. An online concordance lists 139 begats in the King Jame Version. Undoubtedly the most astounding genealogical record in the Bible is Matthew’s account of Jesus’ ancestry. He opens his book with an accounting of names for each of 42 generations. Being that he was formerly a tax collector he must have had an affinity for numbers, so he sums it all up in saying there were "...fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian exile, and fourteen from the Babylonian exile to the Messiah." (Matthew 1:17 NLT).

Genealogy was a big deal to the Jews of the day. They took pride in being a descendant of Abraham. Their scriptures said that their coming Messiah would descend from the line of David. Matthew (a tax collector turned disciple) basically wrote this book to his fellow Jews to prove that Jesus was the Messiah.

Just like all of us, Jesus’ family tree had within in it some "characters," the kinds of folks that most of us would gloss over in recording our own family histories. There are so many accounts in scripture of how folks messed things up but it wasn’t as if God had to keep adjusting his plan accordingly. His plan just kept marching on through all those generations in spite of, and especially because of their failings.