“For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Isaiah 53:2-3). We could be forgiven for assuming that God might have watched carefully over the line of ancestors that eventually gave birth to Mary, the mother of the Messiah. After all, wouldn't it make more sense for one as pure and perfect as Jesus to have come from a similarly pure and impressive lineage? Through Mary, Jesus is descended from the Great King Solomon. Except, Solomon only exists because King David stole Bathsheba away from her husband and had him murdered so he couldn't complain. But David himself was descended from Ruth, who boldly and nobly forsook her homeland for the love she had for her mother-in-law. Only, Ruth was of the Moabites, a people descended from an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters. But Ruth married into the noble house of Judah. Only, the house of Judah only exists because Judah mistook his forsaken and grieving widowed daughter-in-law for a harlot. The point of all of this is that it could be easy to make the case that Jesus, the Messiah, the Chosen One, was planted in some pretty bone dry soil, but despite His somewhat earthy origins, He grew and flourished anyway. In the same way that Jesus has more than a few ugly spots in His family tree, we, as the product of a hundred different younger versions of ourselves, some of which were quite embarrassing or shameful, nevertheless have the potential to rise above the black marks of our past and do something truly amazing and wonderful with our lives. The Gospel has never been about where we have come from but where we are going to. We may feel that the things we have done have not only dried out our soil, but sown it with salt and poison and even dumped toxic sludge or radioactive fallout on it. It doesn't matter. With the miracle of the Atonement we can still grow a beautiful plant from even the most barren of soils. Christ could only be born a mortal because of a long and bloody history of coveting, lust, drunkenness, rape, incest, slavery, and murder. I am sure if each of us examined our own family trees we would find much the same. But despite Christ’s less than pristine ancestry, He still managed to live an amazing life filled with light and love and joy as well as incredible sadness and hardship and agony. He did not allow His humble origins to stop Him from performing the greatest miracle of all time my smashing open the gates of Hell and throwing down the doors of Death and giving every single one of God's children the opportunity, no matter how horrible their pasts have been, to become new creatures and make something amazing and beautiful of their lives. I am sure that in their darkest moments, Lot and Judah and David and all of the rest of Christ's ancestors who did things that they were not proud of shook their heads in despair and refused to believe that anything good could ever come of some of their darkest deeds. But God was able to take the ugliness of their mistakes and make something wonderful, and He can do the same for each of us. We can't yet see the end of all things, but if we could only glimpse what heartbreakingly beautiful things God is able to make from even our worst mistakes and our most unforgivable sins, we would weep tears of joy. I hope that we will all leave our pasts in God's hands and focus on loving and serving Him with all our hearts and trust that there is still time for our little plant of faith to grow and flourish no matter how dry our roots are.
