Where Are You From, Jesus?

+ Enlarge

On Sunday we begin sweeping the hearths of our souls to prepare to receive the Christ Child. We are to clear away the sins and attachments of this world to make room for the savior who came not as a king clothed in armor but as a swaddled babe, who wielded not a sword of vengeance but rather words of love. Is it any wonder that the Jews of Jesus’s time, who expected salvation in the form of a warrior-king like David, failed to recognize the dusty preacher from Nazareth as the Messiah?

This is particularly true because the Jews knew Jesus as a carpenter, son of Mary – they knew his family as ordinary people, they knew his upbringing was common, they knew nothing good could come out of Nazareth. The long-awaited messiah, they knew, would fulfill the prophecies: He would secure the safety of Judah and Jerusalem, he would judge between the nations, he would slay the wicked with the breath of his lips, as we will hear in the readings during the first week of Advent. How could a lowly Nazarene carpenter do all of that?

The answer to that question, for the writers of the Gospels, lay in Jesus’s origins.

To establish Jesus’s provenance, St. Matthew offers a genealogy that begins with the patriarch Abraham and continues through 14 generations to King David, then another 14 generations to the Babylonian exile, and a final 14 generations to Jesus. Abraham and David were key figures in Israel’s history: of Abraham YHWH had promised that “all nations shall bless themselves by him,” and the Lord promised David that “your throne shall be established forever.” The Babylonian exile seemed to refute these promises, but through the prophets God assured his chosen people of a messiah from David’s lineage who would restore the kingdom, bless the whole world and forgive sins.

The Gospel of Luke recounts Jesus’s ancestry in the third chapter, following an infancy narrative that begins with the story of the parents of John the Baptist, who like Abraham and Sarah were elderly and barren and yet were visited by an angel who foretold the birth of their son. Isaac, son of Abraham, went on to father Jacob, whose 12 sons begot the tribes of Israel. John, son of Zechariah, went on to baptize the Lord in the River Jordan.

It is with the adult John the Baptist that the Gospel of Mark opens, drawing attention to his fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy that a voice in the wilderness would cry out, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”

For John the Evangelist, John the Baptist was a man sent from God to testify to the light that enlightens everyone, and the first to say of Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

Unlike our Jewish forebears in faith, we modern Christians profess to already acknowledge that Jesus is the Messiah, the one sent by God in fulfillment of the prophecies. This is why we celebrate his birth at Christmas, believing that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, anointed by the Father as the Son of Man who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as ransom for many.”

The question of where Jesus is from is inseparably linked to the question of who he is, as Pope Benedict XVI points out  in the first chapter of Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. If we today do not wonder at Jesus’s origins, perhaps during this Advent we should ponder who he is, and how, as Pope Benedict says, “it can be said of us that our true ‘genealogy’ is faith in Jesus, who gives us a new origin, who brings us to birth ‘from God.’”

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic.