The Multi-Ethnic Jesus
Last June, our arts team at Chico Grace Brethren started planning Advent, the season when Christians remember the first coming of Jesus Christ and anticipate his return. We took inspiration from an unlikely source, Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew 1.
Then our nation had a summer of racial violence and a campaign season that put the animosity front and center.
In September, the arts team realized that our unlikely source of Christmas drama was quite timely. Matthew emphasizes that Jesus’s human bloodline was not ethnically pure.
It’s hard to keep the Bible’s ethnic groups straight. They’re bewildering. Still, we understand biblical characters by tracing where they came from. We see, for example, that the nations of Canaan and Moab were enemies of Israel. When we find out how deep those ethnic antagonisms were, ancient history seems less ancient.
Jesus came from the Israelite tribe of Judah. Matthew underlines that the mother of that tribe was Tamar — a Canaanite. He names a second woman in the ancestry of Jesus — Rahab, another Canaanite. Then he names a third one — Ruth, a Moabite.
Jesus was multi-ethnic. Israel’s enemies were in his DNA.
Why would Matthew be so emphatic about this? His account of Jesus’s life was written for Jewish people. It seems like poor salesmanship to start with a genealogy that’s so pointedly impure.
The gospel message, both in Matthew and throughout the whole Bible, is that all nations have sinned. Every culture is stained by oppression, violence, lying, and pride. Matthew documents that Jesus’s body hanging on the cross had the DNA of all peoples, and that he paid for sins committed in every language. That same body rose from the dead and gives life to all nations, uniting them in one citizenship.
This Christmas, our society needs a comprehensive humbling. No ethnic group can claim superiority. There is no righteous heritage. We need our sins bundled in the body of Christ, who is not just the Son of Man but also the Son of God, who came to die, and who will come again to reign with justice.