O radix Jesse: Long ago you taught your people

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is ‘Long ago you taught your people’ by Martin Leckebusch, to the Welsh hymn tune Hyfrydol. 

There’s no obvious direct connection, in fact, with the third of the ‘O Antiphons’ which is ‘O radix Jesse’ (radix – root, descendant).  We think today of Jesus in his human descent from Jesse the father of King David, whereas the theme of the hymn is that of generosity.  But read on…

Our Diocese of Leeds had a ‘generosity week’ not long ago, in which local churches were encouraged to consider how they could be more welcoming, more inclusive and more generous with their time and money. The words of the hymn take a similar line, contrasting the Old Testament practice of tithing crops and animals with the New Testament approach to generosity which is not defined numerically but encouraged as part of our stewardship of all the resources available to us.

Jesus is described in the second verse as ‘never snared by earthly treasure’ but as giving ‘riches of the deepest kind’. Generosity includes, but is more than, giving money. It can be giving time to listen or help people with practical tasks, volunteering, opening our homes to visitors, lending tools to neighbours, and so on.   As the last verse reminds us, all this is ‘not a barren legal due but an overflow of worship’.

But going back to the daily theme of Jesus’ ancestors, in our church this morning we finished our series of sermons on the book of Ruth, in which she becomes the mother of Obed, the father of Jesse. So taking this ‘root of Jesse’ three generations further back to Ruth’s second husband Boaz, he was generous in taking this dependent immigrant as his wife, not imagining the implications that would have for the world forty-five generations later with the birth of the Saviour (according to the genealogy in Luke’s gospel). We can never know what effect a bit of generosity will have.

The Bible in a Year – 23 September

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

23 September. 1 Chronicles chapters 26-27

Following the previous chapters with detailed lists of Temple servants, come lists of other people with public duties (civil servants and judges), military leadership, or positions within the royal household.  The military commanders, each with 24,000 men, were allocated a month each: presumably this was a form of territorial army, in which able men were expected to leave their usual lives for one month of the year and do (unpaid?) national service.

I never cease to be amazed that this highly organised society, with detailed written records, existed in Israel (and other parts of the world such as Babylon and China) a thousand years before the time of the Romans, and two thousand years before England had anything remotely similar under the Normans.  It is something of pride for someone today to be able to spend years researching family history and say “my ancestor was a knight” but for Jewish people at the time Chronicles was written, they could more easily trace their descent back, hopefully as far as Abraham.

A people with a recorded history has so much to learn from – including the mistakes of their ancestors, as well as their successes.  One thing that worries me about today’s society is that although the Internet may have made it easier to do family history, there is also increasingly a loss of communal identity, not least in religion.  What Abraham, or David, or Jesus and his disciples, did is still relevant today, and so is the history of our own country and its leaders, but increasingly few people understand that, and live only for the experiences of the moment.