"Whose?" he demands.
"I don't know," is the sad reply.
Incensed, Jacob paces around the room trying to imagine Mary sleeping with someone else during her engagement to his son.
"Why would she do something so foolish? She's marrying into our family, descendants of King David! How could she give up becoming part of the royal bloodline."
A carpenter by trade, Joseph doesn't feel so royal, staring at calloused hands, he struggles to get by though his father holds on his religion during these dark times.
Jacob believes with everything inside of him God is going to raise a new King, greater than David, and he will be born as his own family!
"It could have been your son," Jacob yells though Joseph doesn't respond.
At the moment he feels ... nothing.
Shocked beyond belief Mary's pregnant, Jacob knows the baby's not his grandson.
Engagements last exactly one year for precisely this reason! A pregnancy is hard to have without sex so if she's pregnant then she's slept with someone and it wasn't his son!
Joseph stares at his hands saying nothing.
"Put her away!" Jacob screams. "She is not going to dishonor this family! She is not going to jeopardize the chance the King may be your son! My grandson!"
Joseph sighs.
"And do it quietly! We will not be embarrassed!"
And that's the last time Jacob ever sees his son ... or Mary ... and he never saw his grandson.
Later Jacob goes looking for Joseph and he's nowhere to be found.
The talk is Mary's gone too.
Jacob is incensed!
And heartbroken.
His dream of seeing his own son be the great King had not materialized.
Joseph's a common tradesman, a quiet man, with nothing hinting of royalty about him but Jacob's grandson ... there was the chance the old man could still see it happen ... be part of it as it unfolds ... advising the new King ... HIS OWN BLOOD ... as they fulfill the promises of God!
Instead, Jacob grows old wondering what happened?
The rumor is Joseph took Mary and left.
The old man has no idea where they may have gone ... or why?
Jacob lives a lot longer sadly hearing nothing of a new King born to save them all.
He dies bitter and angry at what could have been.
But this is what he missed.
Joseph and Mary are together when the child is born ... a son.
Strangers come from the East giving expensive gifts of gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, things fit for a King though they never used that word, but they do treat the baby like royalty.
Joseph goes on to have four more boys ... Joseph, James, Jude and Simon ... and Jacob missed five grandsons he would have enjoyed.
Joseph and Mary expatriate, leaving the religion of his homeland for the pagan ways of Egypt where they built their first home.
What Jacob does see is a Government crack down on population growth and every male baby two years or younger is euthanized in the most horrific display of public policy for the common good ever.
Joseph eventually brings Mary and the boys back though he doesn't return home but settles in Nazareth, three hours away from where Jacob lives.
Obviously Joseph never much cares about seeing his old man again ... or introducing him to Jesus.
It's a pretty dysfunctional family dynamic.
But if you look at Jesus' bloodline, it's pretty dysfunctional too.
Beginning with Abraham, the father of the Jews winding all the way to Jacob himself are five fascinating women.
Women aren't normally included in genealogy lists of the time but Matthew includes them in Jesus'.
Tamar, one of Jesus' great Grandmothers disguises herself as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law, Judah, so she gets pregnant. Honestly, Judah deserves it because of the way he treated her. It's an ugly affair all around.
Rehab's another, selling out her own people, as a spy and watches her entire city destroyed as a result and then "passes" as one of the chosen people for the rest of her life.
Ruth is a Moabite, which is far worse than being Muslim in America, because her lineage starts in incest!
Bathsheba suffered sexual harassment, abuse and the murder of her husband so that the head of the Government ... the great King David no less ... can screw her.
And Mary his own mother ... Lord only knows how she got pregnant?
That's just the women in Jesus genealogy.
Read about the men leading up to Jacob and, well, it's one gigantic completely dysfunctional mess.
And yet ...
Out of it comes the birth of the Messiah.
"For unto us a child is born ..." is how it's said elsewhere, and if that child can come from such a deviant family tree, then we have it in us too and become everything God intends us to be.
Jesus certainly did or there would be no Christmas celebration.
Perhaps, we can too.
Maybe that's what Christmas is all about anyway.
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