flesh & blood

Dec 17, 2024

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I suppose its inevitable that with my surname of O’Connor, Irish ancestry is presumed. But while many of my Great and Great-Great grandparents came to Aotearoa from Ireland, there is a significant Scottish connection and in my Sabbatical time earlier this year, in a road trip from Edinburgh with Kathryn my sister, we visited the town and church where my Great x 4 grandparents were married on 19 January 1793.

Their names were pretty pronounceable (Patric(k) and Margaret), terribly plain when placed alongside the lengthy genealogy of more than 40 generations which makes up today’s gospel reading.

Give a thought for the poor deacon or priest who has to read Shealtiel. Abiud, Eliud and Amminadab, a list of near-unpronounceable Old Testament names of the ancestors of Jesus.

This long family tree is hardly exciting reading.

We might wonder why at this important stage of preparation for Christmas an entire gospel reading, the first seventeen verses of Matthew’s gospel, is given to the genealogy of Jesus listing forty-two generations concluding with “Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born.”

Well it is all about flesh and blood, beginning with the promise to Abraham culminating in the fulfilment of the covenant with the birth of Jesus the Messiah.

This record of Jesus’ family tree reminds us in every name of a unique human person who lived and breathed and walked this earth, every one of them with their exits and entrances, playing many

parts from infancy to earthly death, that each human life a creation of God.

And, most importantly of all, God has used them all as God uses the good and the bad in each of us to sow seeds and mature and nurture faith that may bear abundant fruit only in generations to come.

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Take an initiative and send me a date time and place for a FFF cafe-catchups john@fff.org.nz. I’ll advertise these on each morning’s post throughout Advent.

TODAY Tuesday 17 December 10.30 with Catherine
Colombus at Mitre 10 MEGA
25 Bouverie St, Petone, Lower Hutt.

Wednesday 18th December at 10.00am with Liz
Milk and Honey Cafe, Kamo,
Whangarei

Thursday 19 December 10.00am with Joan
Stumble Inn, 200 Mangorei Road
Merrilands, New Plymouth

Sunday 22 December 2024 at 11.00am with Noreen
Topiary Cafe, Wals Nursery Bush Road,
Mosgiel, Otago

2 Comments

  1. Greetings John. There’s a small language in Papua New Guinea who finally believed that Jesus was who he said he was when the translator finally translated the Matthew genealogy. He had left it to the very last bit of the New Testament because he considered it not important. It became the difference of belief in Jesus as God’s son or not.

    Reply
  2. Jesus got his House of David family tree from Joseph who was not his biological father, though he was his father in every other way.

    Reply

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