NOTES for Luk 3:23-38

Genealogy is a very ancient literary genre, and at first glance it seems dull and strange to today's reader. The Gospel genealogies are made still more difficult to understand by the differences between the genealogy the evangelist Luke gives in today's reading and the one we find in the evangelist Matthew. Nevertheless, genealogy as a genre, and the Gospel genealogies in particular, carry a quite definite meaning and occupy an important place in the structure of the biblical narrative.

The principal ideas expressed by genealogies in Holy Scripture may be called continuity, unity, and historicity. Listing ancestors and descendants directly reflects what we would now call the genetic connectedness of people, for example, inheriting the promises made to one's ancestors and their characteristic standing before God. But because ancient literatures, and probably ancient vocabulary as well, had no abstract concept of genetic continuity, many different authors, not only in biblical narratives but throughout the literatures of the ancient Near East, expressed this idea by presenting genealogies.

Furthermore, a genealogy expresses the participation of those included in it in a certain common nature, a single phenomenon. In modern language we would say, “All people are brothers and sisters, descendants of Adam.” An ancient author expresses this idea by giving the genealogy of Adam's descendants.

Finally, the life events of those mentioned in a genealogy are understood to belong to a single flow of shared history, in which one phenomenon follows from and succeeds another. Symbolic numbers of generations, as in the genealogy in Matthew's Gospel, emphasize the historical rhythm and pattern of events. In this way, the events of people's lives acquire their historical ground and context within a genealogy. This is especially important in the biblical narrative because history is its living fabric.

The genealogy of Christ presented by the evangelist Luke, unlike Matthew's, is entirely subordinated to the main point. Its key word is the last one. The evangelist lists: “Jesus... was, as was supposed, the son of Joseph... the son of Adam, the son of God.” By intentionally concluding the long list with an impossible comparison, the evangelist clearly emphasizes the symbolic character of the entire genealogy. Adam is God's creation, not His son in the strict sense of the word. Therefore, Jesus' belonging to the whole sequence of generations listed becomes relative and depends entirely on the fact of the Incarnation.

Furthermore, the law of levirate marriage operated in Israel: a relative of a man who died childless married his widow, and the firstborn of that marriage was considered the deceased man's son. Unlike the evangelist Matthew, the evangelist Luke presents the genealogy in accordance with this law, which also emphasizes its conventional character. Yet despite all this, Jesus' genealogy expresses unambiguously the fullness and reality of His belonging to our human race. The principal thought the evangelist wishes to convey to the reader through this literary device may be stated briefly: Jesus is the Son of Man and the Son of God, Whose coming became the culmination of all sacred history.

To understand the story of the temptation of Jesus Christ, we need to remember the story of Adam, to whom the evangelist points in the last words of the previous chapter. In the biblical account of Adam's temptation (Gen 3), he was offered the chance to become "like God" by breaking unity with God and eating the forbidden fruit. As He begins His ministry, Jesus, as the "new Man," must pass through the same trial: Jesus is offered the chance to become King by using "traditional means" - bread, spectacle, power, and wealth. He chooses another path, the one that will lead Him to Golgotha.

By placing two examples before the reader - Adam and Christ - Scripture also awaits the reader's choice, since every person has a great goal, and everyone has the freedom to use devilish means to reach it.

Why is the Savior's genealogy so important to us? He was born of the Holy Spirit, but nevertheless the evangelist places it in his text, though he could have chosen not to. Moreover, he begins with the words: "He was, as was supposed (!), the son of Joseph." If this is simply a misconception that existed among the people, why write about it? But we know that there is not a single accidental letter in the Word of God. This means that we must understand what exactly the Lord is telling us through it. Perhaps He needs to show that in coming into the world He came to humanity not as the higher to the lower, but as one of our own, our kin, in order to erase the last boundary that hinders the love of human beings for God and of God for human beings. For who was Joseph? One of the line traced back to Adam. Yet he is entrusted with care for God. In the image of Joseph pressing the infant Jesus to his breast, all people, through the genealogy, receive the fullness of communion with God.

But this line is not traced simply back to Adam: "...Seth, Adam, God," writes the evangelist. God is at the beginning and God is at the end. He is the alpha and omega of this genealogy. And this genealogy becomes a prototype of the genealogy of all humanity. The final point of this genealogy becomes the summit of humanity's genealogy, which has not yet reached its own end. "Christ is the head of the Church", the Apostle tells us. The head, the summit... this is something deeply connected with everything else; it is its completion, its fulfillment, not something separate, given from outside. This is exactly what the Savior's genealogy is meant to remind us of.

Genealogies, lists of ancestry, are a thoroughly traditional biblical genre. And they are almost never used for their straightforward purpose. Of course, the Saviour's family tree would interest us in its own right, quite apart from any other literary aims. But it seems that, for the evangelist, precisely these other aims mattered more than history itself.

We can judge his attitude towards history at least from the undeniable fact that Jesus' genealogy in Luke differs from His genealogy in Matthew. Commentators have devoted much effort and proposed many profound and ingenious explanations for the discrepancies between the different versions of Jesus' genealogy in the Synoptic Gospels. Some of them may explain the matter correctly. Yet, whatever the case, the main question remains: what can such a genealogy actually give us in understanding Jesus' person and the meaning of His earthly ministry? Whatever Jesus' ancestry may be, He remains who He is in any event.

And yet, why do we need to know about the Saviour's earthly ancestors? On the one hand, to avoid the spiritualism that was already beginning to emerge in circles close to the Church when the Synoptic Gospels were being written. Some people were already regarding Christ not as a human being, but as something like an angel who had no earthly history and could have none. Here genealogies provided a kind of historical anchoring, without which one could not speak of Christianity in its true sense.

But there was also something else, something deeper: strange as it may seem, without genealogies there could be no complete understanding of the Kingdom the Saviour brought into the world. It is, of course, in His own words, ‘not of this world’. But that does not mean it stands outside history. On the contrary, it is precisely within history—so deeply within it that, after Christ's coming, after His death and resurrection, after Pentecost, history is determined entirely by its presence in the world. It is itself now history; the whole meaning of Christian history comes down to the history of the Kingdom entering the world.

Its ‘not being of this world’ consists in its existing according to its own laws, not those of the fallen world. The Kingdom is alien not to the world, but to the sin in which the world lies; not to history, but to the evil within history that is sometimes confused with history itself. And genealogies are meant to remind us of this. To remind us that both the Kingdom and the One who brought it into the world were part of history from the very beginning: the history of the world, the history of His people, the history of humanity. And this is no accident: this was God's intention from the very beginning.

The evangelist notes that Jesus was baptised together with all the people, which means that He does not separate Himself from them or set Himself against them. Sinless and having no need for sins to be cleansed by baptism in water, He is willing to share with people the consequences of the evil we commit.

It is precisely at His baptism that heaven opens, having been closed to humanity since the Fall. It opens not at the moment of the sacrifice on Golgotha, when sins will be washed away by His blood, but already now, when in the waters of the Jordan He takes upon Himself the consequences not only of the sins of the many repenting that day, but of the sins of all humanity, a vast part of which still finds the very idea of repentance absurd. The step into the waters of the Jordan became one of the most important steps towards Golgotha.

The genealogy of Jesus in Luke's Gospel is constructed differently from that in Matthew's Gospel. Matthew's Gospel emphasises Jesus's belonging to the people of Israel, so the genealogy begins with Abraham and proceeds through the centuries and generations that make up Israel's Old Testament history. Luke's Gospel, by contrast, emphasises Jesus's universal mission; starting from the reality of His unique person, the evangelist therefore traces the genealogy back into the depths of the ages, to the beginning, to the ultimate Source—the One who is the same at both beginning and end.

As he moves into the main part of his Gospel, Luke weaves into a single narrative the continuation of John the Baptist's story, the beginning of Jesus Christ's ministry, and His two genealogies. Two indeed! In this paradox the joyful Good News is revealed: Jesus is called the Son of God twice—within human history, that is, in the genealogy proper that ascends from Joseph to God, and in divine revelation, when the Father's voice sounded from heaven during His baptism. This means that history and revelation merge into a single whole in the life of one Man, and now God's word will sound from human lips. It also means that the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, which the reader will encounter in the following chapters, truly reveal God: He is found in the very midst of earthly events, on the streets and plains of Palestine and—in the reader's heart.

Today's reading brings us back once again to the figure of John the Baptist. Here again we encounter the different visions of the evangelists Matthew and Luke, this time regarding John's ministry. Unlike Matthew, Luke, in addition to the general content of the prophet's preaching (vv. 3-9), also mentions the advice John gave to people of different professions and social groups (vv. 10-14). This advice differed in different cases, but it also had something in common: all of it, in one way or another, was connected with the question of keeping the commandments given by God. Clearly, when John recalls Isaiah's words about the need to "prepare the way of the Lord" (v. 4), he has in mind first of all the importance of following the Torah. It would seem that there was nothing fundamentally new in such an appeal: all the Old Testament prophets spoke about this. Yet there was also something unusual in John's activity.

It is no accident that the evangelist's account mentions tax collectors ("publicans") and soldiers (vv. 12, 14). Both groups were outcasts in Jewish society in Gospel times. Publicans were seen as collaborators, working with the occupiers and robbing their own people. As for the soldiers, the reference here is probably to Roman soldiers who were either pagans, which is improbable, or proselytes, former pagans who had converted to Judaism. The social position of such proselytes was rather ambiguous: they were not considered full members of the Jewish community, only their children became such, while to their fellow tribesmen they were outsiders, and often traitors.

John, however, evidently accepts everyone regardless of social or religious status. He obviously did not think that the coming messianic Kingdom would be given only to orthodox Jews. The way was open even to those whom the people of God considered lost, and lost forever: the publicans. For they had committed their sin consciously and freely, and from the consequences of such a sin, it was believed, one could not be cleansed, even if later the sinner sincerely repented of what he had done. God could accept his repentance, but the defilement left by the sin would rest forever on him and on his descendants.

Meanwhile John did not push away even the publicans, requiring only that after the cleansing washing ("baptism") they should no longer violate the norms of the Torah (v. 13). For him, evidently, cooperation with the Roman authorities was not as terrible a sin as it was for most of his contemporaries. But of course that was not the only point. For John, as no one else, understood that the Messiah whom he awaited and whose coming he testified to would bring into the world the Kingdom where everyone would be given the chance to begin life with a clean slate. And his own task was to prepare the people of God for this new life. A life in which, after repenting, even the most terrible sinner can share, if only he is able to accept the chief gift of the Kingdom: the gift of God's love.

The word “repentance” has become familiar to us. We repent simply because we are supposed to. We repent of many sins, but does our life change as a result? If we bear no fruits of repentance, we may safely apply to ourselves the Baptist’s words about a “brood of vipers” and the “axe laid to the root of the trees.” It is clear what fruits tax collectors and soldiers should bear. But what if we belong to neither group? What are we to do?

To understand this, we need to work seriously on ourselves, pay attention to our lives, and resolve to live differently. Then the possibility opens before us of being baptized with the Spirit and fire and of following the beloved Son, and we may hope to hear the cherished words: “In you I am well pleased!”