Thursday, 12/1/15
Thirty-two years ago I
took over teaching Religion to the top grades in our 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 have come 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.
That had them 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 had broken away from the traditions dear to his ancestors.
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