Vigils Reading

O ROOT OF JESSE

From a homily by Fr Geoffrey Preston

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Jesus does not come of a particularly good family. His family is in fact

particularly ungood for much of its past. In the Te Deum we sing to Christ “You

did not scorn the Virgin’s womb.” At first sight that seems rather strange

language to use about the Virgin when she is honored as Mary Immaculate. But

surely it is Mary’s ancestry which is in debate here. The hymn celebrates the

extraordinary condescension of Jesus in being prepared to take not the flesh of

Adam before the Fall but the flesh of all those generations stretching from Adam

through Abraham and David down to Mary.

So we pray to him: “O Root of Jesse.” This means praying to him as Son

of David, as son of all those kings after David, people like Solomon and Asa and

Manasseh and Jeconiah. If he was prepared to come to an Israel and a world

that had produced people like that, then we can fairly expect that he will be

prepared to come to our world and our hearts with all their accumulated weight

of sin. We can be confident that he will come to us as we are, coming through our

past and making it his own. In this way he will reach us where we are and

transform our past so that when we tell the story of our lives we will be able to

include all the mistakes we have made and all the blind alleys we have explored.

Not that we cease to regret. Not that we excuse ourselves for our mistakes.

Not that we become complacent about our evil deeds and thoughts and words. It

is not as though what was once bad has now become good. But if and when the

Messiah comes to us, then we can sing the story of our lives as the story of the

path which he took to come to us, leaping upon the mountains and bounding

over the hills as we hear in the Song of Songs. When he comes we can tell the11

story of our past all over again, as nations retell their history after a change in

their fortunes.

It is a mistake to brood over our past. It is a misunderstanding of what

Messiah means for us to worry about the past. That past is only the raw material

of a story. What matters is how we tell the story using the raw materials. If the

Messiah has come, then the story can be solemnly and gladly sung, to the

accompaniment of all that makes for rejoicing.