Matthew is keen to stress Jesus’ inherited legitimacy. He lists generation after generation of Jesus’ forefathers to confirm his identity. It comes to an end with:
“…Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.”(Matthew 1:15-16)
It’s one way of telling the story.
Baroness Lola Young, an actor, an academic, and an activist for social justice, had no inherited legitimacy. She grew up in care. At the recent Booker Prize presentation, she told of how she was saved by the power of words. She told of how she read, anything and everything, under the bedclothes with a torch, so as not to disturb the four other children and their foster mother Daisy in their basement bedroom. Daisy died when Lola was fourteen. Lola had come to terms with her parents abandoning her at eight weeks old and returning to Nigeria. But Daisy’s death and being sent to a children’s home in Hertfordshire was, in her words “unthinkable”.
It was books that saved her, helped her to cope. To cope with being defined by her colour, by people in authority who hardly knew her, by a precarious domestic situation. It was the power of words that helped her to relate, to survive and to imagine a society where people were free to be who they were.
To underline Jesus’ legitimacy, John too turns to the power of the word – the ultimate word:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
Chris Dawson