Begot

Last Sunday, I sat in church and listened to Matthew 1:1-16. If you can't recall those verses, then I can remind you with one word: "begot." That was the word used when I was a girl. To quote a little: "Jeconiah begot Shealtiel, and Shealtiel begot Zerubbabel." It's the genealogy of Jesus Christ going back to Abraham - lots of generations, endless names.

As I watched my children squirm in the pew, I wondered who on earth chooses these readings. We are supposed to be preparing for Christmas, but how does this help? I had to sympathize with the children. I remember trying to listen to those readings as a child - a long list of names neither the reader nor I could pronounce - names that meant nothing to me. And what did "begot" mean anyway?

But as I listened to the list of names as an adult, it was different. First, the pastor read, "Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel." "Father" I can understand - much better than "begot!" And then four years of teaching Sunday School and taking Old Testament classes kicked in. The names weren't just words on a page anymore. I could associate a person with many of the names.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob - well those are given. Their stories are well documented.
Judah and Tamar - now there's a quirky little episode. Judah, one of the great forefathers, popped into a roadside shrine (to some other god) on a whim to have sex with an unknown prostitute. Fortunately, God bends even whims and sins to His will. The prostitute was really Tamar, long-suffering widow of Judah's son, Perez. After waiting years for Judah to provide her with another husband from among his other sons, as he had promised, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She waited at a place where Judah would pass and pretended to be a prostitute. It worked and she had his son. That was the great-great (and several more greats) grandfather of Jesus Christ.

Salmon and Rahab? I don't know if that was an arranged marriage or they fell in love. But I can imagine their story was quite something either way. Here was Rahab (another prostitute), her and her family the only survivors of Jericho amongst an invading force of fierce Israelites. Yet God protected and rewarded her trust: she not only kept her life during the invasion, but received a husband and at least one child, becoming one of the great...grandmothers of her Saviour.

Boaz and Ruth - that's a great love story. True, their dating customs were a bit different from what we are used to - uncovering feet, covering with cloaks, removing a sandal... (you can read all about it in the book of Ruth), but what an example of care and compassion! And we have another outsider - Ruth the Moabitess - join the ranks of Jesus' grand-mammies.
I don't need to tell you about King David - how many books tell about David, a man after God's own heart (despite his sins), Bathsheba, the wife he stole from a poor private in his army, and Solomon, his sometime-wise son?

Then there's a list of kings - Rehoboam, the proud idiot who caused the permanent rift in Solomon's great kingdom; Abijah, rotten, but not surprising considering his Dad; Asa and Jehoshaphat who did right in the eyes of the Lord; Ahaz, rotten - even sacrificing his son in the fire; Hezekiah, for whom God swept back time; Manasseh, who "filled Jerusalem from end to end" with innocent blood; Josiah, the eight-year old king whose servants uncovered the Book of the Law in some dusty Temple storage room where it had lain for some 70 years; and Zerubbabel, grandson of the last king of Judah, who led exiles back from Babylon to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

The other names I still didn't recognize. But then, I don't know how many people can trace their ancestors back more than 39 generations and know each one. I think I can trace my family back 3 or 4 generations without doing any research. And beyond my grand parents, I don't know anything about each person other than a name - their stories are lost and no one remembers their lives anymore. So it's pretty amazing that Mary and Joseph could not only list their genealogy back to Abraham but reference a written history about so many of Jesus' human ancestors.

By the end of the reading, I had reviewed the path of Jesus' ancestry through slavery, wars, kings, exile, the return. With each name and each story recalled, I saw God's hand forming, guiding--so everything would be just so for when He sent the Messiah. This he chose to do in a little country village, to a carpenter and his wife, before an audience of animals and shepherd.
In the end, the reading did help me prepare for Christmas. Now I just have to pass all this understanding to my children.