Jesus’ dysfunctional family

It's Good News that Jesus was born into a dysfunctional family.

Or so says Peter Wehner of the Trinity Forum in a Guest Essay in the New York Times on Christmas Eve (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/opinion/jesus-christmas-dysfunctional-families.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kU4.3n7s.NiYjGQJTSUMG&smid=url-share). The Bible backs him up on this, and so do I.

I've always been particularly distressed about the sanitizing of Jesus, from the fictitious "Silent Night" of His Birth to the words of "Away in a Manger," which says, "the little Lord Jesus no crying He makes," to the notion that His Immaculate Conception accrued partly from that of His very human mother, viewed as sinless herself.

When one reads the Nativity Stories in Luke and Matthew, they are rife with the dysfunction of human life, which affected, if not the Character of Jesus, then His understanding of the reality of our dysfunction.  In His Conception, His very human Mother was deemed to be an adulteress, and He was considered a bastard.  He was born in a refugee crisis brought about by a capricious decree of Caesar Augustus and delivered in the squalor of a stable.  His genealogy contains those who committed murder, adultery, sex-for-hire, incest, and idolatry, with each generation begetting the dysfunction of the next.  Though John's "Nativity" gives us the big picture of God's very Functional Plan in all of this, it was nonetheless God entering into our planless dysfunction since, as one prayer of confession reads, "apart from Your Grace, there is no health in us."  Though Jesus didn't possess that dysfunction, our healthlessness, nonetheless, He lived in it, came to comprehend it, and saved us who are possessed by it.

So, having just emerged from encountering both the sanitized version of the Nativity and the dysfunction of you and your family, you may be tempted to ask, "Where is God in all this?"  The answer, from God and His Word, is, "Right here, in the midst of it, ready to save."

Thanks be to God!