NOTES for Luk 3:23-4:1
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.