“Why It Matters That Jesus Came From a Dysfunctional Family”, The New York Times

By Peter Wehner, Dec. 24, 2024

Mr. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, is a contributing Opinion writer.

One of the forgotten facts of the story of Jesus’ life is that he came from a profoundly dysfunctional family.

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I was reminded of this while listening to a sermon this month at Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. Chris Davis, the pastor of the church, took as his text the first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, known as the genealogy of Jesus. Those verses, a long list of names that ties one generation to another, are often skipped over in favor of the story of Jesus’ birth. To the degree that they have any meaning at all, it’s usually because for Christians it establishes Jesus as the heir to the promises God made to Abraham and David.

But as the pastor pointed out, Jesus came down to us through broken families: “one generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation.” There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters.

Jesus may have been sinless, but those in his lineage were not.

Just as remarkable is that the Gospel of Matthew didn’t hide this troubled family history. According to Michael S. Keller, senior pastor at Redeemer Lincoln Square Church in New York: “These genealogies were an ancient type of résumé. It’s Jesus’ DNA — because your family, your lineage, was your résumé.”

So why was this material there in the first place? Perhaps it’s to show that what could have been a source of shame for Jesus wasn’t — and therefore that it need not be for those of us whose families and histories have shadow sides.

Someone once described churches as being places where we present highly edited versions of ourselves. We want to project to one another, and to the outside world, that we have our lives all put together, that we are “shiny happy people,” even when we’re not. This is Potemkin village Christianity. What Jesus seemed to have had in mind is the church being more of “a field hospital after battle,” in the words of Pope Francis. Heal the wounds, he said. Then we can talk.

Churches ought to provide a place for people to share their struggles, sorrows and traumas, not with everyone, of course, but with a few wise and trusted people. We all long to be more fully known and yet still loved. And among the greatest gifts churches can provide is to help us become good stewards of our pain.

What might this mean? “At its best the church is a place where the ‘beatitude people’” — the merciful and the gentle, the peacemakers and pure in heart, those who thirst for justice — “are the heartbeat of the congregation,” Shirley Hoogstra, president emerita of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, told me.

The disreputable lineage of Jesus reminds us of something else as well: Past is not prologue. If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., told me, “then there is hope for all of us. He’s a cycle-breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don’t have to be predictive of future events. Cycles can be broken. Systems can be replaced. Families — and therefore whole nations — can be healed.”

Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, put it to me this way: “Many people believe that they are destined to live out and to carry forward whatever awful family characteristics shaped them. A Jesus whose family tree was distinguished and revered would have suggested that maybe they were right. A Jesus who showed up from nowhere, fully grown and without ancestry, might have too. The actual Jesus, though, shows us something different. We are not our bloodlines or our family histories. In Christ, as we sing of Bethlehem: ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.’”

But Jesus’ awareness of broken lives wasn’t restricted to his family tree; it defined his ministry. He identified with the least and the lowliest, not just those in his lineage but those in his life. “Jesus did not stand aloof from our human brokenness but dove into the very depths of it,” Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific University, told me. “From the very beginning, Jesus entered into solidarity with even the most disdained and marginalized of people.”

Jesus was drawn to the social outcasts, to those whose lives were most fractured and fragmented, those who were considered unclean, unworthy and reviled. Men and women in need of love, forgiveness and a healing touch. It was the religious authorities and the self-righteous, the enforcers of purity codes, people eager to condemn and judge whom Jesus called “hypocrites” and “whitewashed tombs.” They hated him for it; and their kind still exist, in large numbers, not just in the world at large, but in buildings with steeples and crosses, pulpits and pews.

The genealogy of Jesus is also a story of radical inclusion. Several of the women listed in the first chapter of Matthew are Gentiles. This incorporation has significance, according to Craig Barnes, a former president of Princeton Theological Seminary. “The church has always struggled with insiders and outsiders,” he told me. “Ironically, we Gentiles keep trying to make others into outsiders.” The irony Dr. Barnes is referring to is that it was the Gentiles who were once the outsiders. Yet today, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in blatant, many who claim to be followers of Jesus are holding up Not Welcome signs to others.

If you enter our church doors, the message is, you do it on our terms. It’s not “come as you are” as much as it’s “come as we want you to be.” Sometimes the signal sent from church leaders and congregants is that first you have to clean up your life; other times it’s first you have to clean up your doctrine, meaning that you have to embrace the “right” set of Christian teachings. Doctrine matters; it’s why we have creeds that are essential to faith communities. But doctrine can so easily harden and rigidify. It can promote an “us v. them” mentality.

This is antithetical to the ministry of Jesus. We see it in his parable of the good Samaritan, in which the man who helps a wounded traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho isn’t a respected religious figure but a despised foreigner. The Apostle Paul said in the Book of Ephesians that Jesus has broken down “the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile. And yet there is a strong impulse of human beings, within my heart and perhaps within yours, to build up new dividing walls.

There’s an aphorism that says that God writes straight with crooked lines. Translation: God can use even imperfect lives to achieve great purposes. So yes, there were a lot of broken vessels in the genealogy of Jesus, but as the Christian writer Philip Yancey told me, God uses the talent pool available. Before his conversion, Paul was, by his own account, a persecutor of Christians; after his conversion, he referred to himself as the chief of sinners. And yet he managed to write some of the most important and profound religious epistles in history, including an extraordinary meditation on love.

We read in the Gospel of John that Nathanael, in being recruited as a disciple, is told about Jesus of Nazareth. “Nazareth!,” Nathanael responds. “Can anything good come from there?”

“Come and see,” Philip says in response.

Nathanael could just have easily asked, “Jesus’ genealogy! Can anything good come from there?”

To which many of us would respond, then and now: Come and see.