One generation begetting brokenness of another generation

December 25, 2024 2:23 PM

But as the pastor pointed out, Jesus came down to us through broken families: “one generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation.” There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters. Jesus may have been sinless, but those in his lineage were not. Just as remarkable is that the Gospel of Matthew didn’t hide this troubled family history. from Why It Matters That Jesus Came From a Dysfunctional Family [New York Times; ungated]
posted by chavenet (31 comments total)

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity:

(again, sorry)

There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones. That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth: He seemed to attract "such awful people." That is what people still object to, and always will. Do you not see why? Christ said '"Blessed are the poor" and "How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom," and no doubt He primarily meant the economically rich and economically poor. But do not His words also apply to another kind of riches and poverty? …

Often people who have… natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are "rich" in this sense to enter the Kingdom.

It is very different for the nasty people—the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following—or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them.

They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the "poor": He blessed them.

posted by Lemkin at 2:44 PM on December 25, 2024 [5 favorites]

(Ungated not working for me, and the Internet Archive only has the start of the article.)
posted by paduasoy at 3:03 PM on December 25, 2024 [1 favorite]

Alternative ungated version
posted by chavenet at 3:20 PM on December 25, 2024 [3 favorites]

I'm deeply confused by the point of view of the article. Am I to assume that the author's bible only has a New Testament, because that's a very odd way to characterise the Old Testament prophets, who are indeed shown warts and all*, but also, surely the reason for having the genealogy of Christ in the gospels is about showing that he fulfils the prophecies of the Old Testament. And indeed a big part of the Old Testament is showing man's imperfection and redeemability.

*as a famous ultraprotestant Christmas banning autarch once said.
posted by ambrosen at 4:00 PM on December 25, 2024 [7 favorites]

Sigh. Cromwell did not ban Christmas. That was Parliament well before he was Lord Protector. This is your Christmas fact for the year.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:25 PM on December 25, 2024 [15 favorites]

Huh, if it really mattered to the NYT how or why or what jesus was, they might every once in a while pont out the outrageous hypocrisy of xtians in this country, and more importantly the politicians who wrap themselves in the cults based on him. I guess once a year on a holiday they can bother to reflect, or whatever, but after the past few decades of basically ignoring the bad faith of the religious right in this country in the service of their both-sides-ism it warrants a resounding 'so what'.
posted by OHenryPacey at 4:25 PM on December 25, 2024 [20 favorites]

But as the pastor pointed out, Jesus came down to us through broken families: “one generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation.” There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters.

The pastor was plagiarizing a rather famous sermon by the Dominican priest Herbert McCabe, which ends: 'Jesus belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers, and liars—he belonged to us and came to help us, no wonder he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope.'
posted by verstegan at 5:02 PM on December 25, 2024 [11 favorites]

if it really mattered...

I know you know this, but for clarity:

Of course it doesn't matter, and never has.
What matters is why Those People are wrong, and why it is correct that They receive less.
If They can be hurt, well, so much the better.
posted by aramaic at 5:18 PM on December 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

I don't want to favorite what you posted, aramaic, yet here we are ....

I, for one, am grateful to have been able to have any Christmas at all this year. Thanks to TFG, as Tuberville reminds us. All hail!
posted by BlueHorse at 5:48 PM on December 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

I still don't get how Jesus had a dysfunctional family from reading this?
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:53 PM on December 25, 2024 [3 favorites]

Absent Father.
posted by biffa at 6:00 PM on December 25, 2024 [38 favorites]

This article depresses me and so does this thread but biffa, biffa you make me happy. I snort-laughed.
posted by Wretch729 at 10:42 PM on December 25, 2024 [5 favorites]

I still don't get how Jesus had a dysfunctional family from reading this?

Not the nuclear family, but the family line. And to be fair, murder and idolatry need not prevent good parenting, but in a more general sense, this is not a family to be proud of or to impress with.
posted by demi-octopus at 12:19 AM on December 26, 2024 [1 favorite]

surely the reason for having the genealogy of Christ in the gospels is about showing that he fulfils the prophecies of the Old Testament

Wait, who do you think the prophecies came from? God could have given Jesus an impressive family tree, and prophecies to match. He didn't, and that mirrors Jesus' behavior during his life on earth: reaching out to outcasts and welcoming sinners.

(Think of how the author of a fantasy book writes not just the main story, but also the prologue and the prophecies and signs - God does the same, but with reality.)
posted by demi-octopus at 12:33 AM on December 26, 2024 [2 favorites]

Christianity in the US seems to be a whole other religion than the one here, more like what we would describe as a cult. And I'm not only thinking about the evangelicals. Hence the gatekeeping. I do get the context this is written in, and the grief and fear of it, but I don't think gently worded exegesis is going to change anything at all.
posted by mumimor at 3:27 AM on December 26, 2024 [4 favorites]

Not to abuse the edit window, I was trying to say the same as ambrosen above. The real bible is full of complexity and contradiction, crimes and sins. It's the selective reading that makes a lot of US Christianity so weird and cult-like.
posted by mumimor at 3:31 AM on December 26, 2024 [6 favorites]

The cornerstone that was rejected might be relevant here.
posted by DJZouke at 5:04 AM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth: He seemed to attract "such awful people." That is what people still object to, and always will. Do you not see why?

I see that awful people claim to be good people because of Christianity all the time. But they are still awful.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:26 AM on December 26, 2024 [4 favorites]

I still don't get how Jesus had a dysfunctional family from reading this?

I dunno. Being repeatedly you’re not you dad’s kid but told you’re the only son of The God by your Mom will do a number on you.
posted by thivaia at 6:24 AM on December 26, 2024 [4 favorites]

… but told you’re the only son of The God by your Mom will do a number on you.

Meh. They manage to cope eventually.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:49 AM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

Christianity in the US seems to be a whole other religion than the one here, more like what we would describe as a cult. And I'm not only thinking about the evangelicals. Hence the gatekeeping. I do get the context this is written in, and the grief and fear of it, but I don't think gently worded exegesis is going to change anything at all.

I am a devout Christian who grew up Southern Baptist, and my feeling is that this is absolutely true. Christians need to get more comfortable calling this "Christianist" movement heretical, because it is.
posted by billjings at 8:19 AM on December 26, 2024 [7 favorites]

(Oh, and if it weren't perfectly clear - very much not Southern Baptist anymore!)
posted by billjings at 8:20 AM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

I still don't get how Jesus had a dysfunctional family from reading this?

Same. Not a single example. Over and over we're teased with "There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters." but not a single specific mention of the specific relatives that did any of this. I guess I'll have to read the "first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew". Religion: All Assertion, No Proof.
posted by achrise at 9:47 AM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

It's possible for Matthew to be doing two (or even three!) things at once. It's clear he's trying to position Jesus as at once a second Moses and a fulfiller of Messianic prophecies, but it's also obvious that it's important to him that Jesus is fulfilling those in a particular way. So later he has Jesus on a mountain proclaiming the law (like Moses), but giving it a particular take which centres society's outcasts as those most well positioned to adhere to it.

In the genealogy there's no particular reason that Matthew needs to include, for example, mentioning the four female ancestors he does. Luke's alternative (and conflicting) genealogy is strictly a list of patrilineal ancestors. So Matthew seems to be doing something by including Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba as opposed to, say Sarah and Leah. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that what he's doing is signalling to the way the Hebrew Bible includes a lot of grafting marginal people (especially women who lived in the grey zones of what was morally acceptable in order to survive) and outsiders into the central storyline.

As has been noted here, Matthew's identifying Jesus as a Jewish Messiah means he gets some of the moral complexity for free. What makes the Hebrew Bible interesting is that it's full of characters whose motivations are mixed and whose actions swing between admirable and despicable, often within a few chapters. But even this identification is a choice by Matthew and his community. Pretty quickly in Christian history there were sects that wanted to ditch the whole Jewish Messiah thing and the Hebrew Bible more generally for a Jesus that better suited their tastes. That the Matthean community leaned into positioning Jesus in a story in which outsiders tainted by moral ambiguity and failure can be incorporated into a larger narrative of redemption, and that that's the move which survived as long-lasting religion, is something worth reflecting on.
posted by nangua at 12:31 PM on December 26, 2024 [4 favorites]

murderer/adulterer: David;
prostitute: Rahab;
incest: most likely Tamar, who pretended to be a prostitute to get pregnant by her father-in-law (for solid reasons, actually);
liar: let's go with Abraham, who pretended his wife was his sister;
schemer: Jacob, the trickster;
idolaters: Solomon (and several others)
posted by demi-octopus at 12:57 PM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

I heard that when he was much younger Jesus’ dad drowned just about everybody and later on he blew up a whole city and after that he got like a ton of kids killed in Egypt. There’s a lot more. Guy is totally sus.
posted by house-goblin at 2:16 PM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

God could have given Jesus an impressive family tree, and prophecies to match. He didn't
demi-octopus

But...He did? Being a descendant of the royal house of Israel is kind of an impressive lineage, isn't it? I'm genuinely asking because I just don't understand what you're saying here.

To use your own fantasy literature example, the main character secretly being the descendant of royalty or the like is a pretty common trope but it is emphatically not employed to establish that character as just a regular guy.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:04 PM on December 26, 2024 [2 favorites]

Also, this is reeeeeeeally stretching the concept of a broken or dysfunctional family. Usually people use that to mean one or more parents was a raging alcoholic or neglectful or abusive or the like and not "if you trace my lineage back several centuries some of my ancestors did some bad things".
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:09 PM on December 26, 2024 [4 favorites]

Well, my perspective is permanently warped but

"16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved."

The kid sacrifice thing is a theme and being created to be crucified to pay for the sins of the world is pretty unfun. But to be fair I don't think that's where this article was going. And arrogantly, I do think that Jesus as described in the Bible would be throwing all kinds of prosperity gospel people out of temples.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:28 PM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

One last thing: thinking on this:

(Think of how the author of a fantasy book writes not just the main story, but also the prologue and the prophecies and signs - God does the same, but with reality.)

It's actually kind of a perfect example against your point. When a single author plants the seeds of "prophecy" in a story they are eventually revealed and resolved in a coherent and purposeful way instead of the haphazard, inconsistent, "oh right, also Jesus did X because something in the Old Testament called for it" you see in the Gospels.

It's almost as if this were a large number of vaguely-connected (if that) works by a large number of different authors from many different places and times from various, sometimes competing, groups or ideologies that were (much) later retroactively bolted together and awkwardly made to fit with one another.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:49 PM on December 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

For some reason this reminds me of that long term effective altruism moral theory. A long series of apparently short-sighted and bad decisions yields a redeeming good.
posted by SnowRottie at 8:15 PM on December 26, 2024 [1 favorite]