You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts.

Today is Wednesday, October 21st, 2020.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are talking about the person that prepared the way for Jesus Christ in his public ministry, and that, of course, was his

cousin, St. John the Baptist. We have already heard about what the landscape of Judea was like,

and the birth story of John the Baptist and the beautiful song that his father, Zacharias,

sang when he was born. Now, today we're going to do a little bit

of background work. There are various groups that Jesus speaks to and condemns in the Bible.

We might be used to hearing these names, but maybe you don't know much about them.

A lot of the understanding that we might need to work on is understanding how a person

became a priest for the Jewish faith, how you became a priest and served the people in the temple

in Jerusalem. Now, this is confusing because it is very different from how a person becomes a priest in the Catholic

Church. Okay. So think way back. Way back to the very formation of the tribe of Israel, there was a

man named Jacob and he had 12 sons. And each of those sons went on to have big, gigantic families. In fact, each of those

sons, their name has to do with a tribe of Israel. People can look all the way back in their

family tree and say, I come from the tribe of Judah. I come from the tribe of Levi, whatever it might be.

And they're talking about these 12

sons from Jacob. They look all the way back in their family tree, generations upon generations

back. Now way back, there was one of the sons of Jacob named Levi, and it was decided that

every one of his descendants that they would

become the priestly tribe. So if you wanted to be a priest, you had better belonged to that

family tree, because if you didn't, there was no way that you would ever become a priest.

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