Begotten, not Created

I can picture the woman now: I think she was a character in a TV play many years ago. She said, in a cockney accent, "Don't ought to be allowed, all that begettin'; 'tain't natch'ral." She was referring to the opening verses of St. Matthew's gospel. Although, of course, it is natural, the most natural thing in the world, until recent years the whole question of procreation was taboo in polite society. You just didn’t talk about such things, so why should they appear as a long list at the very start of the New Testament?

In common with many others, over the last decade or so I've been tracing my family history. In so doing, I have realised one possible reason for these Biblical genealogies. In the course of my researches I have made contact with a number of cousins, many of whom, in addition to being distantly related to me, are distantly related to each other, and also live thousands of miles apart. What is it that links us all?

All of my findings are faithfully recorded in a computer program, a database which holds the key dates and relationships of almost 3,000 individuals, some stretching back several centuries. Many times I've tried to show on one sheet of paper the linkage, over six or seven generations, between my distant cousins and myself: to see, if you like, how we all hang together. I soon discovered that it needed to be a very large piece of paper if all the names and dates were to be read.

This effort was in response to a desire to bring these names to life. Although in one sense the people named were quite real, having sent me an e-mail or Christmas card, yet in a strange way they were no more than business contacts, or fellow townspeople. Until I had spanned the generations and seen those links, they didn’t have that special feel: that they belonged to me; that they were part of my family.

I suspect that Matthew, as he wrote his Gospel for Jewish readers, felt a similar need to explain that Jesus was not just a character in another historic epic.  He needed to demonstrate Jesus’ roots as one from the family of Israel, part of their own history and tradition, as well as being divinely conceived to be the means of God;s redemptive plan.

Just as my cousins are special to me, so Jesus is special to us all, as individuals, and we to Him.  In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that we are all children of God; heirs with (and so spiritual brothers of) Christ (Gal. 3:26-29.)  While I have to resort to e-mails and letters to communicate with my faraway cousins, we can all be assured of Jesus’ presence with us – not just at Christmas time, but always – in the form of the Holy Spirit that He has placed in our hearts.