By Alex Florez
My grandmother has been sending me old family pictures in the mail. For years, she’s been promising to sort through the bins and boxes and drawers glutted with old photos and send me the good ones. Recently, the envelopes started arriving.
Many of the pictures are from my own lifetime, featuring various family members I remember fondly, and seeing them elicits a warm and fuzzy sense of home.
But she also included photos with people I don’t recognize. Just this week, she sent one of my great-great grandfather, Palmerinto Mancini. As unfamiliar as his face is to me, there is something in his countenance that resembles my mother. It’s like someone used AI to turn her into an 80-year-old Italian man. This facial correspondence makes me want to ask my grandparents a thousand questions about Palmerinto and the rest of our family.
We all have a family of origin that informs, in part, who we become. But looking to the future, we recognize that our own lives have the power to shape future generations.
The genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel says that “Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus who is called the Messiah” (Matthew 1:16), but I’m so curious about the way Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would have actually talked about family in the home—both in terms of the past and the future.
In light of what the angels had told them about Jesus’s birth, did they look at their family tree and wonder, “How could the promised Messiah possibly come from this imperfect orchard?” Were Mary and Joseph able to digest the enormity of the fact that all of creation had been longing for the arrival of the one whose swaddling cloths Mary changed in the cool dark of those silent Judean nights?
I imagine, on one hand, the incredulity about what God was doing in their lives, and on the other, what immeasurable hope for the future of humanity when the young couple would say to each other, “He’s the one we’ve all been waiting for; our kid is the Lord’s Messiah.”
In our own family trees, we can examine the tapestry of people God has woven together as the fabric of our own lives. Each of us has a complex heritage, a tangle of unique personalities, experiences, and stories which have shaped and informed who we are.
But there may be branches yet to grow within each of our families, which suggests a tremendous opportunity. Standing as we are in the present, we have the privilege and responsibility of sharing the story of Jesus with the next generation. When they look back at the old family tree years, decades, perhaps even centuries from now, we hope they will be able to say, “Thank God that my great-great-great grandma and grandpa built our family on the Lord Jesus.” This Advent season and always, let’s instill in our families the good news that the birth of Jesus inaugurated for all humankind.
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