New York Times Op-Ed:  Why It Matters That Jesus Came From a Dysfunctional Family, by Peter Wehner (Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center; co-author, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era):

One of the forgotten facts of the story of Jesus’ life is that he came from a profoundly dysfunctional family.

I was reminded of this while listening to a sermon this month at Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. Chris Davis, the pastor of the church, took as his text the first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, known as the genealogy of Jesus. Those verses, a long list of names that ties one generation to another, are often skipped over in favor of the story of Jesus’ birth. To the degree that they have any meaning at all, it’s usually because for Christians it establishes Jesus as the heir to the promises God made to Abraham and David.

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. According to Michael S. Keller, senior pastor at Redeemer Lincoln Square Church in New York: “These genealogies were an ancient type of résumé. It’s Jesus’ DNA — because your family, your lineage, was your résumé.”

So why was this material there in the first place? Perhaps it’s to show that what could have been a source of shame for Jesus wasn’t — and therefore that it need not be for those of us whose families and histories have shadow sides. …

The disreputable lineage of Jesus reminds us of something else as well: Past is not prologue. If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., told me, “then there is hope for all of us. He’s a cycle-breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don’t have to be predictive of future events. Cycles can be broken. Systems can be replaced. Families — and therefore whole nations — can be healed.”

Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, put it to me this way: “Many people believe that they are destined to live out and to carry forward whatever awful family characteristics shaped them. A Jesus whose family tree was distinguished and revered would have suggested that maybe they were right. A Jesus who showed up from nowhere, fully grown and without ancestry, might have too. The actual Jesus, though, shows us something different. We are not our bloodlines or our family histories. In Christ, as we sing of Bethlehem: ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.’” …

There’s an aphorism that says that God writes straight with crooked lines. Translation: God can use even imperfect lives to achieve great purposes. So yes, there were a lot of broken vessels in the genealogy of Jesus, but as the Christian writer Philip Yancey told me, God uses the talent pool available. Before his conversion, Paul was, by his own account, a persecutor of Christians; after his conversion, he referred to himself as the chief of sinners. And yet he managed to write some of the most important and profound religious epistles in history, including an extraordinary meditation on love.

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