I once got into a “Your Mama!” shout out with a guy in my squad in the Army. What I thought was good fun actually was no laughing matter to the guy I was sparring with. I did not take his insults seriously because he didn’t know my mom, but after a few minutes he was ready to get into fist-to-cuffs with me after I said something derogatory about his mother being in the male oriented services. (Maybe I unwittingly hit too close to home?) So when I write the following statement I do so without meaning to be insulting but because of the truth I may just be.
Jesus’ Grandma was a Hooker.
This fact makes
me wonder how much compassion Jesus had on the woman at the well[1] (John
4) or the woman caught in adultery[2] (John
8) because of the skeletal remains of his own family heritage. Too many of us see the skeletons in our
closets and try to conceal them. Either
shame or pride keeps us from embracing the reality of our pasts.
Personally
I am comforted to know that my lord came from low beginnings. (Heck, he was literally born in a barn.) But despite that fact Jesus was God’s chosen,
the redeemer of the world, the salvation for us all, and his personal humanity
was marred with the reality of his Grandmother’s once impure social status. However, God used him to redeem the likes of
us all with skeletons in our own closets too.
What is
the skeleton in your own closet that you think God cannot (or would not) redeem? It could be our own sin or maybe the sin of
our mamas. No matter what we believe, the
blood the Jesus shed on the cross defeated sin and death[3] (1
Corinthians 15). Our Lord redeems our
pasts and his blood did so whether we like it or not. This then is the state of the power of sin and
death – it lost.
The question then is do we understand this?
Do we acknowledge that Jesus has redeemed our pasts and defeated the power of the skeletons
in our closets? Do we acknowledge
Jesus as the only Redeemer and Hope for our lives? If not, we will always have skeletal remains
that keep us from embracing our pasts and keep us from moving toward our future.
Today, sin and death
have been destroyed. How then shall we respond[4]?
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