Thoughts for the Day

Luke 3:23-38 Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry.  He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of … the son of Adam, the son of God.

Matthew, writing especially to Jewish readers, opens his gospel with a very symbolic genealogy going back to Abraham.  In this way he puts Jesus firmly in the context of the history of the Jewish nation and sets the scene for highlighting how Jesus fulfils so many prophesies.  In total contrast, Luke validates Jesus’s identity through the astonishing scene at his baptism culminating in the audible words of God’s affirmation.  Then he brings us back down to earth with a record of Jesus’s age and Joseph’s genealogy.  Having just previously asserted that Jesus was the Son of God, Luke’s statement that Jesus was “… the son, so it was thought, of Joseph …” naturally leads us to expect him to say something like “but of course he wasn’t”.  Instead, Luke painstakingly lists Joseph’s previous 75 generations, and it differs from Matthew’s genealogy pretty much all the way from king David to Joseph!  What’s going on?  In a culture in which ancestry was important and record keeping meticulous (whether oral or written), the least likely explanation is that it is a mistake.  More likely they were, confusingly, recording different things for different purposes.  I sense that Luke’s purpose was to contrast Jesus’s divine Sonship affirmed by God with his earthly heritage.  Yet he ends his list with ‘ … Adam, son of God’.  Is that theologically sound? I’m not sure!  Perhaps Luke is being intentionally provocative, looking forward to the prospect, as Paul later writes, of our ‘adoption to sonship’ through the ‘last Adam’, Jesus.