As part of my daily Bible Reading Plan I’ve started reading through the New Testament. And as I’m someone who is tracing my own family tree I am astounded at the amount of detail contained within the genealogy of Jesus. It is more than just a list of names of people related to Jesus, it shows the importance of past generations.
The list in Matthew 1 shows a snapshot of his ancestry which stretches back many hundreds of years. It is a historical account of over 40 generations, with some hints thrown in about some of the names to ensure we get the Big Picture connections. And it reinforces the fact that we have to know who we are and where we have come from, to know where we are going.
Within New Zealand at official meetings by Māori they have what is called a pōwhiri which is a ceremony of welcome. In many ways it is a spiritual or religious journey where gods, heaven and earth are acknowledged, ancestors remembered and kinship ties reinforced; they recognise where they have come from acknowledging that without their ancestors they wouldn’t exist today…
I’ve only been able to trace back 7 generations at this stage and part of the problem lies in the fact that within the western world we don’t tend to keep an accurate account of our genealogy and census information is a bit sparse at the best of times the further back we go…
In this day and age I wonder if we neglect our past to the detriment of our future, often children don’t know who their grandparents or great grandparents are or just don’t seem to care. I guess in part this is further complicated by the fact that for some of them they have a number of parents / step-parents and even step-grandparents…
The life and times of Perry... 