To My Boys: September 21, 2020
Good morning!
Happy feast day of St. Matthew. As one of the great Apostles of Jesus, we get to celebrate twelve of these feast days a year. Unlike most of the other Apostles, though, we know a good deal about Matthew, including the fact that he was a tax collector, gospel writer, and martyr.
One thing that is very clear about Matthew is the fact he takes his Jewish roots very seriously. Being a Nazarene by birth, he was immersed in the same Jewish tradition Jesus was. It is for this reason he writes his gospel as a Jew, for Jews.
The best example of this can be seen in the first chapter of his gospel. Like Luke (who was not an Apostle, by the way), Matthew begins with the narrative of Jesus’s birth. Unlike Luke, his focus is not on Mary, but on Joseph. Matthew tells us the Angel Gabriel appears to Joseph, not Mary, in a dream and tells him to take Mary into his home. Then a little later, the angel appears again in a dream and informs Joseph to take the mother and her child to Egypt because Herod wants to kill the child.
Why does Matthew place the emphasis on Joseph instead of Mary? The answer lies in the fact that Matthew knows his audience very well and writes from the angle of the story that is most appealing to them. Because the Jews understood that according to their tradition the Messiah was to come from the lineage of King David, Matthew needed to emphasize the tie of Jesus to that lineage. Joseph was the tie.
This lineage thing was so important for the Jews, Matthew chooses to begin his gospel with an apparently boring genealogy. Boring because who wants to sit there and read a long list of difficult names no one has ever heard of. Who? The Jews obviously. They wanted to know (and Matthew wanted to tell them) that Jesus was a descendent of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Solomon.
For Matthew the Jew, it was crucial to emphasize that the Jesus who was crucified on the cross was the Messiah promised to the people of Israel from the very beginning. For Matthew the Jew, it was crucial to witness to his people that what he had learned from his father and grandfather at Temple and prayed with his mother and grandmother at home was embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. For Matthew the Jew, it was crucial to explain why he had become Matthew the Christian.
Auspice Maria
BELEN JESUIT PREPARATORY SCHOOL
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: communications@belenjesuit.org
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: communications@belenjesuit.org
Belen Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana, Cuba, by Queen Isabel II of Spain. The task of educating students was assigned to the priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), whose teaching tradition is synonymous with academic excellence and spiritual discipline. In 1961, the new political regime of Cuba confiscated the school's property and expelled the Jesuit faculty. The School was re-established in Miami the same year, and over the next decade, continued to grow. Today, Belen Jesuit is situated on a 34-acre site in western Dade County, just minutes away from downtown Miami.