10 December 2025

‘A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots.’ This is how Isaiah begins his prophecy about the coming Messiah.  It has an insignificant beginning – a shoot from the stock, a branch from the roots. But it has been located in the lineage of a man called Jesse.

Jesse was the father of David who became Israel’s greatest king. You remember that he was the youth looking after his father’s sheep when Samuel came to anoint the king. He was the youngest, the smallest of seven sons, ignored and forgotten out in the fields.

But as the Lord said to Samuel about the other brothers, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’

But the shoot from the stock and the branch from the roots did not have its origin with Jesse but with Jesse’s grandfather Boaz and his grandmother, Ruth. It is her blood which runs in the veins of the little child called to lead. But Ruth was a foreigner, a Moabite from Jordan.