With Your Judgment Endow the King, and with Your Justice, the King’s Son

December 17, 2008

Wednesday of the Third Week of Advent

By Melanie Rigney

Jacob gathered his sons and said: “You, Judah, shall your brothers praise—your hand on the neck of your enemies; the sons of your father shall bow down to you.” (Genesis 49:8)

O God, with your judgment endow the king, and with your justice, the king’s son; He shall govern your people with justice and your afflicted ones with judgment. (Psalms 72:1)

(T)he total number of generations from Abraham to David is fourteen generations; from David to the Babylonian exile, fourteen generations; from the Babylonian exile to the Christ, fourteen generations. (Matthew 1:17)

Piety
Lord, I honor my ancestors and all they did so that I might have Your life in me today. Help me to understand and value my place in the genealogy of the Body of Christ and endow me with Your love that I might share it today and with future generations. Amen.

Study

My sister called recently with a question about her nine-year-old son Matt’s history project. “I know we all belong to Daughters of the American Revolution,” she said, “but I’m not clear. Were all our ancestors from that time on the colonial side or did we have Tories as well?”

I quickly assured her that all eighteen were indeed pro-Revolution (at least until the Constitution came along and several of them moved to Quebec, but that’s another story) and noted that Matt also may be the fourteen great-grandson of a Mayflower passenger, but that proving it out would require a lot more time and effort than either she or I have right now.

The conversation came back to me as I read the Gospel for today. The daughter of our possible Mayflower ancestor, Thomas Rogers, was born in England, lived in Holland as a child, then came to New England after her father died that first brutal winter in Plymouth. We’ve been quite the traveling tribe ever since: Connecticut to Rhode Island to New York State and back to Massachusetts; Wisconsin to Illinois and back to Wisconsin; then to South Dakota and, in Matt’s mother’s case, to Illinois, then to South Carolina and back to Illinois. Four hundred years of family history and while our exterior lives are very different, I daresay our internal struggles probably have looked very similar.

As an amateur genealogist, Matthew 1:1-17 troubles me a bit. I mean, Jesus claiming lineage to King David through Joseph, his adoptive father? And only three names listed for the Egyptian exile period that lasted more than two hundred years? But I’ll let scholars and genealogists smarter than I explain those issues and reconcile the differences between Luke’s and Matthew’s genealogies. (Check out http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt131.html if you’d like their takes.)

I’d rather think about the people in each of those generations that preceded Mary and Joseph: great kings and depraved ones. Great leaders and weak ones. People who lived in the lap of luxury and those who struggled for their daily bread. The one commonality was that as descendants of Abraham, they were promised in Genesis 22:18 that “all the nations of the earth shall find blessing” in them.

Did they wonder whether it would be their particular line through which the Messiah would come? Perhaps. But I’ll bet most were more concerned about asking God to help them and their loved ones get through daily life, as David does in today’s Psalms reading and as we do centuries later by helping with history projects, Giving Trees, food pantries, and the like. Like Jacob’s sons in today’s first reading, none of us has the exact same gifts. But like those sons and David and his son, each of us is called to make the most of what we’ve been given.

Action
Think about one of your family faith-based Advent or Christmas traditions: lighting candles, crafting wreaths, or going to Mass together. Share with one of your loved ones today your memories of how this tradition began.