Jesus, Son of Mahalaleel; or Have You Loved a Genealogy Today?
Luke 3:21-4:1 and Isaiah 62:1-5
January 17, 2009
We skip parts of the Bible. There is little doubt about it. We prefer some passages to others; and I would venture to say that the genealogies are the sections that we hop over most often. They are kind of like commercials that rudely interrupt our favorite TV programs. If the Bible were broadcast over the airwaves most of us would DVR or Tivo it, just so we could fast-forward through the genealogies in a blaze of blurred pixels.
And who can blame us? In Luke’s genealogy there are 77 names. Seventy-seven! And most of them are close to unpronounceable for those not trained in the fine arts of vowel pointing, accent marks, and pronunciation patterns of the Hebrew and Greek languages. When I ask people to read Bible passages out loud in our Bible studies, Sunday school classes, Wednesday Night programs or worship services, the first question I usually get from you good folks is this: “The passage doesn’t have a bunch of biblical names in it, does it?”
And after many of us have waded waist-deep through one of these passages a singular feeling usually rises to surface: survival! We made it through! We are okay! It’s as if we’ve traversed a jungle and have at last found a river that can take us to some sort of civilization. We have fought off an enemy armed with spears of syllables and have been wounded by the weapons of words and lived to fight another day.
And if we feel this way about genealogies, at least we’re still fighting with them! Because the next step is to admit defeat and to describe these litanies of names with the ugly, nasty, horrific curse word no pastor, historian, or scholar ever wants to hear: Boring!
I feel it is my duty today to try and glean some fruitful harvest from this neglected text in Luke today, if for not other reason, than I feel sorry for it. This passage is always the last one picked and the first one out in dodgeball. It is the one left alone at the lunchroom table. It is Pigpen in Peanuts, stumbling about in a cloud of dust that no one wants to be around. So let us boldly face Luke’s litany of names, let us bring it into the fold, let us gather it to us, comfort it, understand it, and give it a lovable hug, because without it, the Gospel of Luke is incomplete.
One of the reasons our passage today suffers from so much neglect is because of where it is situated. It lies between two of our favorite stories in Luke—the baptism of Jesus and his subsequent temptations by the devil in the desert. We love happy stories, we love God breaking into the world, we love the heavens miraculously opening, we love the dove descending to earth.
And we also love nefarious characters. Without Lord Voldemort Harry Potter would be boring indeed! Without Darth Vader, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker have no competition. And without a supernatural struggle with Satan, Jesus only must compete with humans and we who have read the story know Jesus will easily outwit them all.
So the genealogies are stuck in the middle of good and evil, of good guys and bad guys and are thus overlooked. But this placement is more than arbitrary. In fact, it is critical to understanding the passage itself.
The genealogy is a segue, a connector between two parts of Jesus’ life. Before the list of names is the life of Jesus before his public ministry. In these brief 3 chapters Luke is trying to convince us readers of the legitimacy of Jesus. That he is the son of God. That he is the one predicted by the scriptures. That Jesus is upright, righteous and holy.
For Luke, Jesus fits the mold of a good and faithful Jew. He was born with connections to the Jewish Temple in his uncle Zechariah who was a priest. He was circumcised on the eighth day. He was dedicated to the Temple. He was even in the Temple learning with priests and elders. This proof is critical for Luke, because anyone who was crucified by the Romans would have been seen in utter disrepute by the most observant Jewish people. Luke is redeeming Jesus by bringing to light how holy and righteous he was.
And the genealogy is the apex of Luke’s argument. Far from being unimportant, it is the climax of Luke’s system of proofs. In a courtroom today, the genealogy would be the closing argument, proving to the jury Jesus’ holiness by connecting him through his ancestors all the way back to Adam, the very son of God. If God is holy, then Jesus has the highest of honor, because he is God’s son two ways—first through his human genealogy and secondly through his physical birth where God was the direct father of Jesus through the virgin mother Mary.
After the genealogy, Jesus will begin his public ministry and will not appear so pure and perfect. He will first be rejected in his hometown of Nazareth and then the rest of his life will be filled with bitter arguments with scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, until he is ultimately crucified as a political rebel. The genealogy is the transition point and thus is crucial in our understanding of the purity of Jesus that is transformed into dishonor and death by blind and vengeful political and religious leaders.
This was most likely the main reason Luke included the genealogy of Jesus: to prove who Jesus is in the timeline of God’s history of salvation.
However there is a subtlety to the genealogy that eludes its most direct meaning; for the genealogy of Luke’s Jesus not only establishes who Jesus is, but it also grants us an intimate look into the personal life of Jesus.
When I visit you, our congregants at Southminster, in your homes one of my enjoyments is looking at the portraits and pictures invariably scattered about—some on walls, others on mantles and tables, some hung in precise order, others in delightful disarray. These scatterings of family and friends show that we are not isolated creatures.
Instead, we live in community with one another and these relationships are so important to us that take the time to take photographs of important people and moments, develop them, matte and frame them and delicately place them around our houses in meaningful places. Our individual humanity is never ours alone; because we individuals are always part of a greater whole. We not only have pictures of loved ones in our homes, but pictures of us hang on other people’s walls.
We rarely think of this, do we not? We are adored so much that each one of our faces hangs on someone else’s wall somewhere. Perhaps even at this moment someone you know and love is gazing at a photo of you at family reunion, of you as a naked infant in a bathtub, of you as a precocious five-year-old, of you on your first day of school, of you at the old house where you grew up, of you in a sports uniform, of you with gobs of food stuck to your face, of you in really bad clothes with a really embarrassing hair-do that you once thought was cool in high school, of you hugging your grandkids, of you at the beach on vacation, of you with your grandfather and grandmother. You are a picture hung on someone’s wall somewhere, and that person loves you. What a remarkable life we live.
While I must admit that I have not always been overly excited myself about reading the genealogies of Jesus, I have begun to enjoy them more by thinking of them as Jesus’ version of a hall of portraits. They are a way, perhaps, that Jesus and Luke peer into the past to remember the struggles and triumphs of Jesus’ family history.
And if we think of biblical genealogies this way, then the placement of this particular genealogy in Luke—after the dramatic baptism of Jesus and before his devilish temptations—then it becomes more emotionally significant than we might first believe it to be.
Imagine, for a moment, yourself in the place of Jesus. You have just come through a turning point in your life. You have been publicly ordained by John the Baptist and God has descended from the heavens implying great things for your life. You have much to live up to. Great expectations thrill and haunt you. Who will you look to for comfort and guidance?
Now imagine your own life’s turning points—your graduation from high school or college, deciding upon taking the next step in an intimate relationship, your acceptance of a new job or the loss of an old one. Who do you look to for comfort and guidance? Someone anonymous, or someone you love, trust, and care for? Do those pictures on the wall give you strength that those who have gone before you are with you in your struggles today?
As Jesus was walking out to the desert to face his spiritual foe, perhaps this genealogy was racing through his mind. As he steeled himself for his first battle after being baptized by John, maybe rather than fast-forwarding through his history he was actually slowing down, and like an epic warrior, like Beowulf, or Odysseus, remembering the trials of his ancestors and bolstering his own mind and heart for the troubles ahead.
“I am Jesus, son of Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi…son of Zerubbabel. I am Jesus, son of Boaz, son of Nathan, son of David. I am Jesus son of Judah, of Jacob, of Isaac, of Abraham. I am Jesus son of Noah and Methusaleh, son of Mahalaleel and Seth, son of Adam, I am Jesus son of God.”
One inspiring aspect about the genealogy of Jesus is that the characters that play a part are not all memorable, nor are they all perfect. Aligned with Abraham is also Mahalaleel. Alongside Jacob is also Hezron. Our own lives are quite similar. It is not always a famous or particularly strong and wise relative that gives us great council, but often our average everyday families and friends that comfort and guide us in times of need.
Nor does the love and comfort of family and friends require perfection. Those who are closest to us are often the ones we can fight most bitterly with. The same is true in Jesus’ genealogy.
Abraham, a beacon of faithfulness, also in fear tried to pass off his wife as his sister to two different kings. Jacob, remembered for strength and vitality, stole his own brother’s birthright and blessing. Judah, patriarch of the largest tribe in ancient Israel, also helped sell his brother Joseph into slavery. David, writer, musician and king, also had a man killed so he could marry the man’s wife, Bathsheba.
The genealogy of Jesus, the collection of ancestors he perhaps looked to for comfort and strength, is far from perfect, but perfection is not needed for inspiration.
If the genealogies in our Bible serve no other purpose, perhaps they can always help us to reflect on our own important relationships. Maybe they can inspire us to slow down our lives and consider those people who have gone before us and who we still carry with us, in photos on the wall or within our hearts and minds.
Perhaps they can help us in our moments of loneliness and uncertainty to realize that we are not isolated, that we are part of a larger community, that we were never meant to struggle through on our own, that our humanity is bound to the lives of others, that we are loved, cared for, even adored by others.
And if genealogies can do this, then perhaps they will become more dear to us than we ever thought possible. Amen.
