For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.
2 Corinthians 8:9 NIVUK
I have not heard these verses ever quoted at a Christmas service or during a Christmas meditation. So allow me to be the first.
Paul, in this teaching on generosity, summed up what makes Christmas so special for Christians. Christmas is something unique.
Among the other religions there may be tales of gods who walked the earth, but only Jesus Christ became fully and completely human. Only Jesus Christ was rejected by His creation and slain on a cross.
And, without any doubt, only Jesus Christ even made claims to rise from the dead, let alone actually do it.
The two main festivals we celebrate as Christians – Christmas and Easter – are what sets our religion apart from any other. They make us different. They make us unique.
The temptation is to rush from the other: to leap from the uncomfortable sight of seeing our Lord born into this world as a vulnerable baby to the day when He broke out of the grave in power and glory.
But that would be a mistake.
I firmly believe that what makes Christmas so special is not just that Jesus came to die for and save us from our sins – although that is of foremost importance. No, it’s also that He came down to earth and became human: He walked our walk, talked our talk, felt our pain, our sunshine and rain, long before He died and rose again.
There are times in life when we need more than a glorious and powerful Jesus. There are times when we need a Jesus who feels how it feels to be us; a Jesus who knows and a Jesus who understands.
And we have this Jesus because of Christmas.
As we approach this special time, we’ll concentrate on a number of ways in which the Incarnate Christ felt exactly what it was to be like us, because of Christmas.
The first of these is His Mixed-Up Heritage:
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
Luke 2:4 NIVUK
Due to the death of the British Queen and reforms being carried out in the Danish monarchy, there has been a lot of focus on royalty and aristocracy in 2022.
But that has never really gone away. Newspapers and magazines sell their wares based on a collective obsession with our ‘betters’. People travel from all across the world to watch events with people at the centre of them who have no other claim to fame than being born into often spectacularly inbred upper class families.
It is a bit of a nonsense really. Maybe it’s because I’m a cynical Scot, but, while I recognise the good and honourable character some of them have, I definitely subscribe to the notion expounded by our national poet Rabbie Burns: ‘A man’s a man for aw’ that’.
Did you know Jesus was born into aristocracy? That his family had blue blood pumping through their veins? That, were it not for an historic tragedy, he would have had some form of a claim to the Jewish throne?
Luke noted all this in an almost throwaway statement in Luke 2 that Mary and Joseph had to register in Bethlehem because Joseph was from David’s line – David being the greatest king Israel had ever known.
This fact should be a great encouragement to us.
Firstly, because there are many of us who come from high-achieving families, or families that have a ‘certain reputation’ among their peers. Such people find their heritage to be a burden – something they have to live up to at all costs.
Jesus knows how that feels. He was descended from His nation’s greatest ever king. The expectation from every Jew at the time was that the Messiah would come from David’s line, beat the Romans in battle and lead the Jews into some form of golden age.
Pressure doesn’t get much bigger than that.
And then there’s a second pressure: when our family’s heritage is not so special. When we find ourselves burdened by the ordinariness, or less-than-ordinariness, of our ancestors.
Jesus’ family tree had more than a few people in it that I’m sure many would wish weren’t there.
Jesus is descended from the royal line through Judah, whose line in sexual morality I’m sure we would wish our children never follow (Genesis 38). Jesus actually descended from the incestuous relationship Judah had with his own daughter (Matthew 1:3).
Then we reach the period of the judges, where Jesus’ heritage takes more than a few twists.
He is descended through Salmon, whose wife was a Canaanite prostitute from Jericho (Joshua 2:1-24; 6:1-26). Salmon is the father of Boaz, who marries Ruth, a Moabitess (Matthew 1:5; Ruth 1:4-5, 4:18-22).
Now, these might be two quite eyebrow-raising situation for us, but if we look into Jewish law, things get even more complex. You see, the Jews were completely banned from intermarrying with Canaanites (Deuteronomy 7:1-4).
And with Moabites it was worse. None of them were allowed to enter the Presence of God, even down to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3).
So what happens next?
Three generations later, the grandson of a Moabitess is born. And that grandson?
King David.
So in Jesus' line we see two intermarriages – one with a woman of highly questionable moral character, and another from a cursed nation.
And that’s not all.
We also have an adulterer and murderer:
King David himself.
What’s more, although Matthew can hardly bring himself to pronounce her name, it’s clear that Jesus’ line emerges through David’s relationship with Bathsheba that began in adultery (Matthew 1:6; 2 Samuel 11:1-4).
And then we head through the kingly line. Aristocratic, yes. But even a passive reader of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles will quickly tell you that this lot were a wayward bunch: sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes awful.
It all ends with Jeconiah/Jehoiakim and ‘his brothers’ (Matthew 1:11; 2 Kings 24 and 25), who were so bad that the king of Babylon sacked Jerusalem, took them and their aristocracy captive, destroyed the Temple, smashed down the city walls and reduced the Kingdom to abject subjugation and poverty.
And then we come to the post-Exile period, when Jesus’ forefathers were kings without a throne and aristocrats without power.
All the way to Jesus and His family.
So, you see, Jesus was born into a blue-blooded family, but one that knew its fair share of crises and black sheep. That's one of the things that makes His incarnation so wonderful: He bears the same pressures we do.
The BBC has a long-running series called ‘Who Do You Think You Are’, which takes stars of various levels and helps them to discover their ancestry, while the TV cameras are rolling, of course. It can be quite entertaining to see their surprise at finding out whether distant relatives were rich or poor.
But for some of us, our ancestry is no fun at all. We feel the pressure and the pain of either living up to a high-born family with a great reputation, or a low-born family where nothing is expected of us at all.
Due to a unique turn of history, Jesus knows these both intimately as the family He was born into was both high-born and poor. So He is able to understand fully the cross we bear.
Because He bore it from Christmas onwards.
Questions
What pressures do you feel because of your family’s history?
Do you see any characteristics of your family in Jesus’ chequered ancestors?
How does Jesus’ incarnation into a messed-up, but high-born, family help you to cope with the pressures of living with your family’s history?
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