Grandparent Stories

Grandparent Stories

Matthew 1:1-17

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David the son of Abraham. Matthew 1:1

The late New Testament scholar Doug Adams contrasted parent stories to grandparent stories. Parent stories tend to clean up and prettify their own youthful years in order to claim the moral high ground. “When I was a child, I never talked to my parents that way.” 

The grandparent version of the same story might be: “No, you did not talk back to me but instead gave me a grin that dripped with sarcasm and disrespect.”

The Bible, said Adams, is full of grandparent stories. Matthew’s Ancestry.com construction of Jesus’ sometimes-shady relations provides examples. 

• Judah’s sons by Tamar. Tamar was Judah’s daughter-in-law, who after her husband’s death seduced her father-in-law posing as a woman-for-hire on the side of the road, and Judah hired her. 

• Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab. Did Matthew mean for his readers to recall the only Rahab in the Bible who was the sex worker who hid the spies prior to the destruction of Jericho?

• Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth. Ruth a Moabite woman. A foreigner in Israel, from whom both David the great king and shameful actor and Jesus were descended. 

And those examples are merely from the first third of the genealogy. Included in the rest of the list are persons of low moral stature and unwise decision. And, of course, at the end of the list Matthew names Joseph, who Matthew is about to tell us is not Jesus’ biological father.

To paraphrase Adams: biblical grandparent stories are told with love rather than to establish moral superiority. Why? Because we need love in order to embrace, yet not to be determined by, our own stories.

Dr. Gary Peluso-Verdend

President Emeritus and Executive Director of the Center for Religion in Public Life

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