Sin Lineage: On Jesus, Dysfunctional Families + The Ties That Bind

Last updated on: June 28, 2016 at 7:25 am by Kerry Connelly

Sin Lineage: On Jesus, Dysfunctional Families + The Ties That Bind 2016-06-28T07:25:41-04:00 Kerry Connelly

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I fall in love with Jesus, with God, over and over again the more I learn about Him. It’s why my soul longs to go get a degree in Bible studies — there’s just so much Jesus in the Bible, and Jesus is mind blowing. Even a simple list of names, a family tree, can inspire awe in just how thought-through this whole Messiah thing is, just how complete and far reaching salvation can be. Even, believe it or not, to the dark depths of the family cray-cray.

My family’s got its share of dysfunction. There are the stories of the crazy great-uncles, who roamed drunk and disorderly through the streets, letting their property go into states of horrific disrepair and IRS repossession. There are possibilities of other cousins, other siblings, born elsewhere, human evidence of transgression and betrayal, the proof right there in the DNA, walking around.

There are the gentle drunks, whose stories retain only the humor of their misadventures and not the pain their addiction attempted to cover, not the hurt their addiction imposed on loved ones. Those memories fade into the ones we’d rather remember, the ones that made us laugh in solidarity in the face of life. We of the alcoholic family systems do well to laugh at ourselves, as we know laughter is paramount to survival, and we might as well get something out of the ride.

Even more painful are the deep, silent divides that can arise, slowly and almost unnoticed, between family. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, cousins all, each with our own dysfunctions, our own hurts and angers. The silence can rise up between us to create a solid, insurmountable wall. Sometimes it feels like my wrists are bound by the family legacy of dysfunction, as if I don’t have a choice but to be unhealthy and bitter, mean spirited and angry.

Of all the things in this world that make no sense, I think a family who chooses to hate each other makes the least sense of all.

I wonder if Jesus wondered about his family tree the way I wonder about mine. I wonder if he identified with his ancestors and their stories, if he thought about the women and their silent shames, if he pondered the men and all their failings.

I wonder if Jesus sat at the feet of his elders, as I sat at the feet of my grandmother, and wondered. I’d study her soft, lined face, the cloudy grey eyes hidden behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses, and there were times I could see her reach deep inside her memory. She went someplace else on those afternoons I spent with her, and I wonder — was she reliving her old, deep pains? Was she reliving her sin lineage?

I was reading Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew last night. These books always take me forever to read because one paragraph can stop me in my tracks to ponder for days. Last night, it was a footnote that got me — a tiny little footnote about Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus.

Yancey points out that the list of names includes women — a rarity at the time. But Jesus — with his crazy Jesus love, with his subversiveness — wouldn’t allow the women of his lineage to go unnoticed and unnamed. And what I love about it so much is that, as Yancey says, these folks would be the bones in the coat closet you’d rather not mention, especially if you happened to be King of the Universe, the ultimate Royal. These might be the ones you’d work your ass off to not let The Daily Mail know about. But God — he makes sure that they get their name in the spotlight, in the book that would last forever, even if those bones are pretty dirty.

Because it’s that very dirt that makes Jesus so important. It’s the fact of their oh-so-human-ness, their complete and total cray-cray, their sin legacy that runs in the DNA of the God of the Universe.

It’s that the God of the Universe has DNA at all that’s freaking crazy.

It’s the fact that three of the four women in his lineage were of a different race, or “foreigners”. Jesus was Jewish, but he had gentile cells running through his veins. Even the crimson stream of the Son of God was not “pure blood”. We’d do well to remember this at the next refugee crisis we come across, the next time someone different than us stands in front of us. Jesus was part foreigner.

Jesus didn’t just love and forgive the prostitutes. He had them in his family. Rahab was a straight up hooker; Tamir just pretended to be so she could seduce an in-law. Bathsheba was raped by the manic-depressive King David, who despite both his deep and dark sin (murder, rape) and his crazy moodiness, God called him a man after his own heart.

It’s as if Jesus is saying Look, I am here to carry this cross, for now and all the future, but also your past too. I was born a human with a sin legacy, just like you.

I was born and I carry this crazy. I carry it, and I redeem even it — the sin legacy, the sins of the fathers passed down to the third and even the fourth generations, I redeem it all.

Even the sexual sins, the sins between families, the sins in your DNA, the alcoholism that streams through your genetic code. Those bones rattle in my closet, too. But I’m here to throw open the doors of your dusty closets and we’ll make those bones dance again in the streets like David, butt naked and unashamed.

The sins of the fathers, the brothers and sons, the daughters and mothers and the softly-lined countenance of grandmothers — these ancestral faces all redeemed through the DNA-carrying blood of Jesus, foreigner, redeemer, and holder of the cray-cray.

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