Thursday, 9/21/17
Today, in honoring St. Matthew,
we should recall the causes he had for writing his Gospel. It began with the
Romans destroying Jerusalem and its temple in the year 70 A.D.
Back then, there had been a
sizable remnant of the Pharisees that had established itself at a town called
Jamnia. There, they found themselves struggling with an identity crisis. They
had always seen themselves as the People of the Temple, but without the Temple,
who were they?
As a conclusion to their
problem, they came to decide that to be a Jew, one had to avoid eating with
Gentiles, and had to observe the many dietary
rules laid down since the time of Uriah and Nehemiah, six centuries before.
With that, the Pharisees
decreed that those who had become Christians could no longer be considered true
Israelites, Further, they announced that Jesus had come to destroy the Law and
the Prophets.
In response to those accusations,
Matthew demonstrated how Jesus, for from destroying the Law and Prophets, showed by his Sermon on the Mount ,that he had come
to fulfill them.
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