Behold the Christ: Proclaiming the Gospel of Matthew, by Leroy A. Huizenga, reveals the significance of St. Matthew’s Jesus: He is Emmanuel, God with us always, who saves his people from their sins by dying for them.
In showing how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament, gave us a way to live, and taught us how to follow the narrow way to the kingdom of heaven, St. Matthew modeled the fourfold way of reading Scripture according to letter and spirit.
Above all, St. Matthew’s Gospel presents Jesus Christ founding the Catholic Church as a robust, rigorous religion with rich rituals, chiefly the sacrificial Eucharist as sustenance on the narrow way to heaven. Jesus demands much of his Church, but the same Jesus who commands his Church also promises and delivers much—above all, himself.
Keyed to the lectionary and featuring a section on the relevance of St. Matthew’s Gospel for our contemporary age, Behold the Christ will make the Gospel and indeed the Faith real to today’s readers.
About the Author
LEROY A. HUIZENGA is Administrative Chair of Human and Divine Sciences at the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND. He holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in New Testament from Duke University. During his doctoral studies he received a Fulbright Grant to study and teach at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany. Dr. Huizenga is the author of The New Isaac: Tradition and Intertextuality in the Gospel of Matthew (Brill, 2012), co-editor of Reading the Bible Intertextually (Baylor, 2009), and is currently writing a major theological commentary on the Gospel of Mark for Bloomsbury T&T Clark’s International Theological Commentary series.
