Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Jesus was a “rabbi” par excellence. In today’s Gospel, his contemporaries say he “taught with authority, unlike the scribes.”
The scribes, scholars of Mosaic law, would cite sacred scripture or Jewish tradition, to give their teachings authority. But Jesus didn’t need to do that.
Throughout his Gospel, Matthew presents Jesus as the new and greater Moses (even Matthew’s Christmas story is essentially a retelling of the infancy narrative of Moses in Exodus and other extra-biblical writings about Moses). Jesus gives the new and greater law, not on Mount Sinai, but on the Mount of the Beatitudes. Moses taught with authority given him by God. Jesus teaches by his own authority. One clue that a Gospel quote hails from Matthew is the phrase: “You have heard it said…but I say to you…” In this, rabbi Jesus is not revising the law but fulfilling the law.
To listen to Jesus preach, as he does today, would be far greater than listening to the Wright Brothers explain flight, Henry Ford go on about the “horseless carriage,” Thomas Edison describe electricity, Steve Jobs talk about i-pads. Inventors of what we now take for granted, they might impress us with their authority. But listening to them would be but a small glimpse of what it would be like to hear Jesus preach his blueprint for dwelling in the Kingdom in Matthew 5, 6, & 7. After all, he is “King” of this earth shaking, revolutionary “Kingdom.”
The truth is, though, that even if we can’t go back in a time machine to hear Jesus preach, we can still have the same experience of astonishment. The reason being because he continues to teach us in his Word, here and now, with that same amazing authority.
He does so in the Liturgy of the Word. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council emphatically reminded us that “when the Holy Scriptures are read in Church, it is Christ himself who speaks” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7). That’s why we stand when the Gospel is proclaimed, because we rise out of reverence and respect for Christ who himself is proclaiming the words of the Gospel through his minister.
Yes, our Lord continues to teach every time we gather at the Eucharistic liturgy. The greater questions are: Do we listen? Do we act?
—Timothy J. Cronin