24 the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph, 25 the son of Mattathias, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Esli, the son of Naggai, 26 the son of Maath, the son of Mattathias, the son of Semein, the son of Josech, the son of Joda, 27 the son of Joanan, the son of Rhesa, the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri,
Why in the world have I tortured my brain and your ears with this list of names so early in the morning? Is there any purpose to it? Luke thought their was, and many people in our society that has come through the melting pot mixing our backgrounds together think it is. The question is: Can Jesus really be traced back to David, about a thousand years before. We see all sorts of names here that are common to Jewish heritage, but they are not the characters we know from the Old Testeament, like Levi, Joseph, Amos, Nahum - these are all other people with the same name. Until we get to the last phrase: Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri. We know him from the post-exilic accounts of Ezra, Nehemiah and Haggai. In this list, his name takes us back part of the way, to the return of God's people to Israel. The line of the Messiah had not been lost, even during the last four hundred years when the prophets had not been speaking and Israel seemed to be on the back burner. This is a great stopping point to reach in Jesus' ancestry and to take a breath from all those names.
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