Day 10 of Embracing Your Creative Gifts: We Have a Cultural Heritage

 

 

And Jesus himself was beginning about the age of thirty years; being (as it was supposed) the son of Joseph, who was of Heli, . . . (The genealogy continues in Lk 3: 23-38)

In Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling, Andy Crouch points out that “Jesus is the one person in human history for whom a patrilineal genealogy makes no sense. Why would Luke include it at all?” The reason is that, like all of us, Jesus was born into a particular family and community. “To be human is to have a cultural inheritance, to be part of a tradition of making something of the world . . . [Jesus] was a cultural being.”

We do not often think of Jesus as a first-century middle eastern Jew living in a particular location, growing up as a child of Joseph and Mary. One of my favorite paintings shows Joseph holding baby Jesus while Mary takes a nap in the background. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to discover the artist, but I love the image because it shows the Holy Family as human. There are no conspicuous halos over their heads. They are real people who worked, cooked, cleaned, and got tired. They were part of a larger community that they gathered with at the synagogue to hear the Word of God and to pray. They had friends and neighbors.

A culture is the cumulative creative activity of a group. Jesus ate certain foods, wore a particular type of clothing, and engaged in certain religious traditions because of the time and place that he lived. While he would ultimately change culture more than anyone who ever lived, he began life as a person with the gift of Joseph and Mary’s cultural past. He was from the house of David.

Each one of us is also part of a larger culture. We have had a creative heritage passed on to us by our parents, extended family, and larger community.

Prayer

Dear Jesus, thank you for the heritage those who came before me passed down to me. Please help me be a good steward of culture and to take an active part in passing creative traditions on to those who come after me.

Action

Think about the creative traditions that were passed on to you by your family. Did your father show you how to tend a garden? Did your mother teach you to sew? What skills are you passing along to those younger than you? Can you make a more deliberate effort to share your creative gifts? 

This is an excerpt from The Work of Our Hands. (Amazon affiliate link)