The Unholy Family

Good morning Family Cow folks,

This is your farmer Edwin and I have a Christmas Story for you. It’s not the typical story, but it’s a Christmas story nonetheless. Stick with me for a moment and I’ll explain.

Note: At the end there is a special Christmas Bonus message so don't skip out too soon!

The story I'm about to tell was nudged to memory by the scripture art my wife Dawn does for our farm store.

The piece that joggled my memory was a compilation from Isaiah 61 and Luke 4. Dawn aptly titled it “JESUS CAME: ” and then highlighted seven declarations which outline Jesus' official mission statement.

I was musing on this beautiful list when I had a flashback of the following true story…

It started one early morning a few years ago.  

I was reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter one. You Bible scholars recall that the first long section of Matthew is the genealogy of Joseph, the husband of Mary, the soon-to-be-Mother of Jesus.

Now I must admit, I really don't enjoy genealogy. Not genealogy of today and not ancient genealogy either. It's just not my thing. But still, I was reading this because I do truly believe that God put everything in His Word for a purpose and every passage has a message... It's up to us to prayerfully search that message out and be open to it.

So I was reading down over this long list of hard-to-pronounce names, most of them people of which even the Bible says very little, and meditating on the fact that this was the family line of Jesus. (Yes, I know it's not His bloodline, because Jesus was miraculously conceived as the Son of God, but this was His earthly family line. Everyone listed here from Abraham to Joseph were 'the people' of Jesus.)

As I read, I was powerfully stuck with how imperfect this family was – How unholy and needy they were. You don't really get all that from Matthew's list, but being familiar with the Old Testament where the stories are recorded, I knew the background.

Seriously. There was a lot of brokenness in this family tree! A lot of dysfunctional relationships. A lot of wrong choices and selfishness and sin. A lot of messiness! This family had a past! And it was not pretty.

My mind quickly ran down over the list and the further I went the more amazed I was.

For starters, Abraham was a man of faith, yes... but his story was far from perfect. He tended to take things into his own hands 'to help God out' you know. Sometimes it was lying and deceiving to get himself out of tight spots. Another time he all-too-willingly agreed to father the son that God had promised with his wife's servant girl rather than with his wife, Sarah, as God's plan was. Abraham made mistakes, committed sins and yet Abraham is in the family.

Isaac, Abraham and Sarah's son, also was a man of faith and sometimes an outstanding example of peacekeeping and surrender to God. But there was a lot of brokenness and pain in his family too. He and Rebecca had a beautiful romantic start to their relationship, but they grew apart. They each selfishly took sides against the other, each with a favorite son — caught in a web of craftiness, lies, deceit and disguise of truly biblical proportions. 

The conflict escalated between their sons until finally, Jacob fled for his life because his brother Esau was in a rage and plotting revenge by murder. Yet Isaac and the rest of this mess are in Matthew's list of the people of Jesus.

Within Jacob’s family, the brokenness, rivalry and fighting and cycle of hurt and sin seemed to worsen. Dirty trickery was the name of the game. Everything from Jacob's father-in-law disgustingly tricking him on his wedding day to unknowingly marry Leah, the older sister of Rachel, the girl he truly loved and thought he was marrying... to the two sister-wives constantly bickering for the love of their husband and offering their maid servants to Jacob to help them in their pathetic struggle to outdo each other to conceive and bear more sons than the other... to the eleven jealous, conniving, lying sons of Jacob cold-heartedly selling their conscientious brother Joseph into Egyptian slavery because his respect for their father made them look bad.  And then to top it off, the brothers conspired to an elaborate plan of deception using the blood of a kid goat to deliberately and heartlessly mislead their grieving father to think that Joseph had been killed by a wild beast.

I’m not making this up... And it does not stop with this.

Judah, one of Jacob's most prominent sons in the direct line of Jesus, fathered a child with his aggrieved daughter-in-law, Tamar who secretly played the harlot to intentionally trap her father-in-law and to force him to comply with a family agreement. The son that resulted from the shameful trickery and unfaithfulness and sin was Phares... and yes, the linage of Jesus runs right through Phares.

Rahab, the notorious Canaanite harlot of Jericho, was a link in this line and is listed in Matthew chapter 1.

Boaz the son of Rahab, married another non-Israelite woman from idol-worshiper-background, Ruth the Moabitess, and the line of Jesus runs through her.

Bathsheba, the stolen wife of Uriah, despite the adultery, lying, deceit and even the murder of Bathsheba's rightful husband, which King David had slickly orchestrated in a desperate attempt to cover he and Bathsheba’s sin, bore a son, Solomon, who was also a part of the line of the people of Jesus.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The family line of Jesus, all of them named in Matthew 1, was tragically messy, sadly broken, and very human in so many sad, sad unholy ways. It’s actually heart breaking to read if you really put yourself into the story and allow yourself to feel what it must have been like to be there. It’s not really the kind of people you'd expect to be the line leading up to the special family in which God would choose to place his Only Begotten Son.

As I meditated and wiped a few tears, I had to wonder, "Why did God plan to have His Son born into all this messy, shameful brokenness?" I mean, God is God! He could have easily planned and orchestrated to have His special, beloved Son Jesus born into a perfectly unbroken pure line of wonderful people who always did what was noble and who were righteous and faithful always. What a great example that would have been! Why did he bring His Son Jesus into the line of all this messy imperfection and corruption?

Why?

So I kept reading. After the first seventeen verses of genealogy, Matthew takes a more interesting turn and breaks into the story of Joseph and Mary and the soon-to-be-born-Baby-Jesus.

In verse 21, the angel Gabriel is comforting Joseph in a dream and says this:

"Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

Their sins! His people's sins!

As I read those words, two truths struck me hard and I just let the inspiration and the tears flow and the truth penetrate.

The first truth that hit me; No one said, "His people? What sins?" They all knew! They knew his people! They knew the sins!

His people needed someone to rescue them. They desperately needed a Savior! Their sins, even though they were likely no worse than others of their day, their sins still had His people in bondage and they were not getting free without help. Here, in Jesus, was help and hope! Someone to save them. Divine help and divine love sent by a divine Father of love!

The second impact was that Gabriel announced specifically that Jesus' mission was to save His people from their sins.

Gabriel did not announce that Jesus came to save His people from hell.

Gabriel's exciting news, his 'good tidings of great joy' was not that Jesus came to take His people to heaven. 

Both of these were true as a side benefit of course, but that was not the main point.

Jesus came to save His people from their sins!

The significance impacted me.

The saving mission of Jesus is so much more than just helping his people avoid a future hell. It's so much more than just getting his people to a future heaven.

Jesus came to liberate His people from the bondage of the sins that gripped them in their lives right now on this earth; The sin that was hurting them, the sin that was ruining their peace, stealing their joy, causing brokenness, and wounds and dysfunction and pain and heartache in their families right now on this earth... he came to save them from that sin, that binding power, that oppressive darkness.

I think it is clear that God allowed His Son to be born into a family with a sinful broken past because that was the whole point. God wanted his people to know they needed help.

The sad neediness of the people of Jesus was (and still is) the same sad neediness for everyone all over the earth. Sin and the effects of sin were everywhere. The powers of darkness were insurmountably strong. The news was not good. There was no peace on earth. There was no good will toward men. There was no joy to the world. The need for someone to save them from their sins was unquestioned.

So with all this 'bad news' in the backdrop we can better catch the thrill the shepherds felt when the angel excitedly announced the really 'Good News' a few months later?

"And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, (the shepherds) and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them,

"Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord!...

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men!" ~ Luke 2:10-14

Jesus, a Savior, The Savior had come! ... to save His people from their sins!

And today, in December 2025, Jesus is still saving. He's still offering Hope. He's still offering freedom... It's real and it is for today right now... not just for the future. And that is Good News! Because without Him, my family, my story – your family, and your story is all bad news!

Praise The Lord! Glory to God in the Highest! Jesus came to save His people from their sins.

And the amazing thing is, he's truthfully inviting each of us to be adopted into his family! Unholy us joining his family to be made free from sin and Holy by the price he paid!

Jesus still saves his people from their sins!

Your Mennonite Christian farmer friend,
Edwin Shank

P.S. Feel free to share this post in any way you want. If you’d like more of these inspirational meditations, feel free to explore more Food for the Soul blog posts. Also feel free to send your questions. I’ll be glad to help in any small way that I can.

⭐ Christmas Bonus ⭐


Have you ever wished you could eves-drop on a Mennonite church service? The following sermon by Brother Melvin Burkholder "The Amazing Love of Jesus" will give you a bit of that experience. And of course that subject fits the Christmas theme too.

Enjoy and God bless your Christmas and wishing you a happy new year too!

Your farmers,
Edwin and Dawn for the whole Shank Family