Monday,
17/12/12
Thirty
years ago I took over teaching Religion to the top grades in out parish school.
In choosing the essentials to teach, I decided on having the Seventh Grade do a
close reading of one of the Gospels. I had secretly decided on using Luke, but
as a show of democracy I asked the kids which Gospel to take up. Unfortunately,
they called for Matthew, a Gospel I knew nothing about. However, after studying
it, and teaching it for twenty-four years, I came to understand Matthew’s quite
different approach.
The
Jewish religion had been altogether centered on worship in Jerusalem’s temple,
so after the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 A.D., the Pharisees had to find
the one thing that could still separate Jews from non-Jews. They decided that a
true Jew was one who honored his ancestors by observing kosher and not mixing
with Gentiles. So they began telling the Jews who had become Christians, and
who ate with Gentiles, that they could no longer call themselves Jews. Then,
they began saying Jesus was not a true Jew because he didn’t avoid Gentiles.
To
prove that Jesus honored his Jewish ancestors, Matthew began his Gospel with
this genealogy that showed Jesus to be the descendent of Abraham and David. You
can’t be more Jewish than that.
Jewish
genealogies were never expected to be accurate, and this one certainly was not.
While eight hundred years elapsed between Abraham and David, just four hundred elapsed
between David and the Babylonian
captivity, and six hundred elapsed
between that captivity and St. Joseph. And yet this account tells us there were
fourteen generations in that eight hundred year span, in that four hundred year
span, and in that six hundred year span.
Matthew
knew the very tricky way Oriental minds worked. He knew they would mentally break the three groupings of
fourteen generations into six sets of seven generations. With that, Jesus would fit in as the
first of the seventh set. It sounds crazy, but For Jews back then that position
marked one as God’s beloved.
Such
genealogies never included the names of women, but Matthew purposely included
three women in the ancestry of King David. They were Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. They were all
Gentile women. Since those Gentiles were good enough for David, they should have been good enough for the
Pharisees.
No comments:
Post a Comment