What it Really Means to be Special – Part II

Luke 3:23-37

The other day my car was in an accident. OK, so was I. When the tow truck showed up, a brown-skinned man got out of the cab and introduced himself with a toothy smile as Mohamed, a native of Pakistan. He’d been in the USA for over 20 years, about the same time span as I lived in Asia.

We got to talking about ourselves and before long we discovered that we hadn’t lived that far from each other. In fact, I’d been as close as a couple hundred miles from his home town, give or take a hairpin turn or two in the road.

From then on, he treated me like a long lost cousin. We had established connectivity.

The old saying is “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” Travel anywhere in the world to even the most remote village and you will find that people size you up before relating to you. They want to know where you’ve come from, who you are related to, what connections you have in life. We form our opinions of people based on what we know about these connections.

One time I tried to impress this guy as an insider to his area only to hear him say with more than a hint of suspicion, “You’re not from around here, are you?” I knew I was doomed.

Connectivity makes us special in the eyes of others. Thus, we spend a lot of time polishing our credentials.

As Luke writes about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, he takes pains to note Jesus’ connectivity. In proper Jewish custom, he lists the genealogy of Jesus’ family. Such a listing established tribal identity. He was a child of Abraham, thus a Semite. He was a child of Jacob, thus a Jew. Even more specifically he was of the tribe of Judah and a descendent of David. All this was very important.

For some people, anyway. But it wasn’t all that important to Luke, who was, after all, not Jewish. But you can sense Luke doing the customary thing with tongue firmly implanted in his cheek. Jesus, he wrote, was the son, “or so it was thought” of Joseph.

Years ago I had this fascination with researching my family history. There was one vague connection I could never establish beyond a shadow of a doubt, but if it were true, I could then trace my lineage straight back through the kings and queens of England to some obscure mythical figure in the British Isles around 500 A.D.

I pointed this out to my kids who were struck by the potential relationship with royalty – at least for five minutes. When I tried to explain that I wasn’t at all confident in the connection, one of them answered. “Doesn’t matter, Dad, we’re still related to royalty.”

That’s what I hear Luke saying. It doesn’t matter whether Jesus was actually the genetic son of Joseph. He has the human DNA (through his mother Mary at least) and is therefore a son of Adam. But that is not where Luke completes the genealogical search. For he ends his litany with these words “the son of Adam, the son of God.”

In the end all that matters is that Jesus is firmly established as a child of God. This is what is most significant about Jesus’ connectivity. And so the declaration that Jesus is God’s son appears like bookends around Jesus’ family history. Doesn’t matter who you are related to or where you are from. As long as you are related to God, you have all the significance in life you need.