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smatthew03
The
Jewish Messiah
Text:
Matthew 9:9-13
Date: Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist Day (Pentecost 15)
9/21/03 usb nokia drivers
As has been our custom of late we are elevating and
celebrating the minor festivals of the church year when they happen
to fall on the Lord’s Day, Sunday. So today, September 21 st , is
the day Holy Church remembers Saint Matthew, Apostle of the Lord
and the first Evangelist, writing the Gospel that bears his name
around the year 50 a.d. Our text is his own recollection, under
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, of the Lord’s call for him to
follow and become one of the twelve apostles. “As Jesus passed on
from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth,
and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him.”
My mother had the annoying habit of every once in a
while taking a scissors and cutting out her image in photographs.
I guess she didn’t like looking at pictures of herself. Likewise,
I happened on a replay of one of our services here at St. Mark’s
on the cable community access channel and listened to one of my
sermons. I didn’t mind listening, but I just hated watching myself!
Maybe there’s at least a little of that diffidence or shyness in
all of us. Saint Matt was like that. It is with some reluctance
that he writes down the account of his call to follow Jesus in the
context of Jesus’ healing lepers, the sick, a paralytic and those
oppressed by demons. Tax collectors, after all, were considered
greedy traitors, agents of the occupying Roman government, on the
bottom of the social ladder along with prostitutes and sinners.
And whereas Mark and Luke simply list the names of the twelve apostles
in their Gospels, Matthew just can’t resist adding the reminder
in his list, calling himself “Matthew the tax collector” [Mt. 10:3],
almost as a continued, humble and repentant confession of sin. This,
by the way, is one of the most powerful proofs of the truthfulness,
reliability and historic accuracy of the New Testament, that is,
the fact that the human authors do not dress things up to make themselves
look like miraculous success stories, but freely recount just the
opposite—their failures and doubts, their sins and faithlessness—and
that for good reason. For they were all intent not on promoting
themselves or “selling” a new man-made religion or philosophy, but
on proclaiming Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of the world—so
much so that all, except for John, died a martyr’s death rather
than deny their faith and their Lord—which is why the color for
their remembrance is blood red.
Matthew, also known by the Hebrew name, Levi, was especially
interested in his Gospel to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth
is the promised Messiah. He writes in a way that connects with the
Hebrew mind. His genealogy of Jesus begins with the father of faith,
Abraham, and chooses from among the generations three groups of
fourteen. Seven is the number of completion to the Hebrew mind.
Three times double-seven or fourteen means to say that Jesus is
the perfect fulfillment of the original promise to Abraham, that
“in you,” that is, by your offspring, “all the families of the earth
shall be blessed” [Genesis 12:3 (ESV)].
Along the same line of seven as the number of complete
fulfillment, Matthew chooses only seven of the more than 324 prophecies
of the Messiah in the Old Testament, most introduced with the words,
“this was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophets,”
telling of the virgin birth (1:23/Isaiah 7:14) in Bethlehem of Judea
(2:6/Micah 5:2), the flight to Egypt (2:15/Hosea 11:1), the murder
by Herod of the infants in Bethlehem (2:18/Jeremiah 31:15), his
new home in Nazareth (2:23/Isaiah 11:1, “branch”=“nazar”), the coming
of John the Baptist (3:3/Isaiah 40:3), and the commencement of Jesus’
earthly ministry in Galilee (4:15-16/Isaiah 9:1-2).
It is not a little frustrating to hear and read of
all the hubbub and clamor these days over the coming release of
Mel Gibson’s movie, “Passion.” The “Jewish” community and my initial’s-sake,
ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, are all upset fearing that the
movie’s portrayal of the murder and crucifixion of Jesus at the
hands of the Jews may result in encouraging a new wave of anti-Semitism.
But there’s a more important issue here. Abraham Foxman, national
director of the Anti-Defamation League, revealed the modern American
agenda when he said, “You don’t achieve interfaith relationships
by being tolerant of anti-Semitism.”
At the same time, another film titled “John,” portraying
the Gospel of John, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on September
11. For some reason this film isn’t drawing the same fire. One reason
is that it’s producer, Garth Drabinsky, is Jewish. He enlisted a
group of so-called scholars, five Protestants of varying views,
a Roman Catholic sister and two Jews, to guide the project. The
“scholars” embedded into the film words that scroll down before
the action begins, noting that “crucifixion was a Roman punishment
not sanctioned by Jewish law and that Jesus and all his early followers
were Jewish.” They also “educate” the audience with the so-called
“higher” critical position that John’s Gospel was written “two generations
after the Crucifixion,” “expressing the era when it was written
as much as, or more than, what actually happened during Jesus’ lifetime.”
The truth is that John wrote his Gospel as an eye-witness
of everything that happened no more than fifty years after the event.
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