This is Scott Hahn and I want to welcome you to the Road to Amayas, a podcast from the St Paul Center. Take a deep dive into the Sunday mass readings this new year.

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scripture from the heart of the church. Hello, I'm Scott Hunt, and I want to welcome you to the Road to a Mayus, a podcast from the St Paul Center,

where we take a close look at Sacred Scripture to derive what we call biblical theology. We've just begun year A where we focus on the

Gospel of Matthew. I want to welcome Rob Corzine, my dear friend, our vice president here at the St. Paul Center.

So good to be here.

Yeah, and a blessed Christmas to you.

Indeed.

So what I want to do today is a sort of flyover of the Gospel of Matthew since we're going to be flying over it

and through it for the rest of 2023 and the Gospel of Matthew is distinctive for

lots of reasons you know you have the

Davidic genealogy which we were discussing on the last episode. You also have

the five sermons that constitute the framework of the entire gospel, beginning with the sermon of the

mount in Matthew 5 to 7, followed by three shorter sermons then culminating in the sermon

of the mount of olives that runs from Matthew 23 to 25.

So the first and the last of the five are three chapters long in the middle three or one chapter apiece.

You can see literary artistry at work, but you can also see theological depth on the part of the evangelist. He's not just telling a story, he's not just a biographer. He is someone who is something of a contemporary of Jesus,

a disciple, a former tax collector, a scribe, but truly a contemplative theologian.

Yeah, we missed that a lot.

People tend to think, and Durwell points this out of the Bible

as our field where we go and collect our samples

...