URC Daily Devotion 3rd January 2019

Alternatively, this is one of those passages you relish giving to someone to read when you want your revenge.

All those names! Not a full-stop in sight until you get to the very end. It’s a minefield. But what names! There they are: some we recognise, some we don’t, but tucked away in the genealogy of Jesus are the stories we have been reading and reflecting on in these Devotions – such celebrities, such heroes of the faith, all bearing testimony to the extraordinary experience of humanity’s experience of God’s grace, over-arching our lives like Noah’s rainbow. There they are: Joseph the carpenter, David the king, Jesse the father, Boaz the loving husband of Ruth, Judah the brother of another Joseph and the son of Jacob whose name became Israel, Abraham, Noah, Methuselah who lived for centuries and Enoch who walked with God, and at the end Adam, our ancestor who was son of God. The whole amazing story wrapped up in a list of names. It’s humbling to read it and reflect that you and I have a place in it. It is the story of the family of the God whom Jesus called “Father”.

There are omissions, of course: it’s all men; there’s no Marys or Elizabeth, no Ruth or Rachel or Sarah, no Miriam or Deborah – but men are notoriously bad at making lists, and you can be sure that this was a man’s list. Whether his name was Luke or not doesn’t really matter. It is the knowledge that we are all children of God which matters, and share that one same story which runs through all our experience. It is the story of our homeward pilgrimage back to the Creator’s love.