another column, this one on the sly

[Two of my columns didn't get posted online.  Christmas and New Year's excitement and all.  So I've copied and pasted my Christmas Eve column below. -Erin]

[One more thing: I often forget how Jesus came to earth to reach the sad, the lost, the weak.  I get so caught up in learning more about Him and His laws and the wisdom in the Bible that I forget the obvious stuff: He chose disciples who were mere commmoners; He sat with a habitual adulteress at a well and promised her eternal life; He forgave a thief and promised him eternal life, even in the midst of His own suffering.  Our Jesus is so good.  And as Christmas drew near I thought about Jesus' genealogy: He was born through the line of Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, and David, the greatest king in all of Israel.  It makes since that Jesus would choose to be born through their lineage.  But a closer look at the first chapter of Matthew shows the outcasts He also chose.  It makes me tear up, thinking of His love and outreach to the least of us. -Erin]

The outcasts that He chose
By Erin Fox
 
In the book of Matthew–the first book of the New Testament–Matthew (through the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit) gives the genealogy of Jesus. And in this catalogue of names Matthew lists mostly the fathers in the bunch; after all, he was writing the book to the Jewish people, and theirs was a patriarchal society. But about a quarter of the way down, Matthew tells of three women: Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah’s wife. Or a prostitute, a foreigner and an adulteress. All outcasts.
 
For a long time I have been fascinated that our benevolent God loved David, a man who we’re told was “after God’s own heart,” but who was also an adulterer and a murderer. Yet God chose to bless David’s family line and bring the Messiah through his offspring.
 
Not until recently did I see the connection with Rahab, Ruth and Uriah’s wife (Bathsheba). And Matthew putting only those three women specifically in the midst of all those men’s names means something to me. Not only did He forgive the prostitute and the adulteress as He forgives all of us sinners, but He wrapped them in His loving arms, blessed their lives and brought His Son from their descendants.
 
How great is His love and His forgiveness!
 
Then when His Son, the King of the World, is born in a stinky barn, God sends His angels to tell the good news. And He does not send them to the politicians or the businessmen or the popular; no, He continues His streak of reaching out to the unwanted and tells the lowly shepherds of Jesus’ birth.
 
I am thankful that Jesus chose to come to Earth through a lineage of ordinary and sinful men and women, to live a life filled with temptation and hardship and grief but remained sinless so that He could be our perfect atoning sacrifice. As the worship leader at Memorial Drive Church of Christ in Tulsa said this weekend, I am thankful that “we can relate to Him through His humanity, and that He may relate us to God thru His divinity.”