A chequered past:
That’s what they call it in polite company.
In our memories, four portraits last,
swaying some to scorn, some to sympathy.
First tricksy Tamar, jilted by the “just,”
but in the end, through subterfuge
receiving seed that would give rise to One who must
alone undo the Fall, the death, the sin-deluge
that inundated all.
Then Rahab of the window, rope, and wall,
who spied the might of that yet-foreign LORD,
and by her craft and faith eluded what would soon befall
her city, not her kinsmen. For spies’ word
and then the camp of God’s own host
became their fortress, and her boast.
Next Ruth, in nomad insecurity,
had faith beyond her station, moved by love
first of a mother aged, who saw beyond impurity
to plan a startling tryst, designed by One above.
Into the line of David, goy blood would move!
In time, there was the bashful one he spied,
seized from her Hittite home, and made a bride
to birth wise Solomon—after she cried
for the child that God had laid aside.
Like all the rest, her life seemed fully bound
and shaped by menfolk, natures black and white—
“Chequered,” they say in company polite!
Came thence the Christ: His earthly fathers borne,
then nurtured by those matriarchs forlorn,
who lived and gleaned the margins of the field
of Israel, whose history at last would yield
the King of all the nations.
Unlikely matriarchs, they show
divine incursions in our muck below,
when God blessed wombs of alien women for that Blessed Line.
He, long before His coming, did entwine
His fleshly fate with woman and with Gentile,
transforming into faith what once was guile.
Then He took on all the black and white we see
and lifted up—so shocking!— our humanity.
(A bonus blog for the season: my poetic musings on Matthew 1, which we always read the Sunday before Nativity)
Edith M. Humphrey 