Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: “Beloved For the Sake of Their Forefathers”

Readings: Romans 10:1-10; Deuteronomy 30:8-15.

One of the things about the gift of a lectionary is that we faithful eventually end up reading uncomfortable passages. Our epistle reading, Romans 10:1-10, is part of Paul’s three chapter passage (Romans 9-11) concerning the place of Israel, the Torah, and Jesus in God’s plan of salvation for the world. Here the apostle Paul exclaims, “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them [the Jews] is that they may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened.”

This is a far cry from what I heard when I was in Galilee in 2008, when a priest shocked me by saying “they have their own way to God; we leave each other alone!” REALLY? They are on their own so far as the gospel is concerned, and have their own way? It is also a far cry from the derogatory and hateful things that I see on the internet, where some people who name Christ, including Orthodox, routinely slide from a distrust of Israeli policies to slandering the character of Jewish people in Israel and in the world at large.

Please understand. I am NOT talking politics, or debating the Palestinian-Jewish question. I am talking about plain, ordinary, harsh words and hatred of other human beings, indeed, of a group of other human beings. Concerning the Jews, Paul’s heart’s desire and prayer was that they might be saved. Indeed, he went so far as to say, in the mode of Moses interceding for his people, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race” (Rom 9:2-3 RSV). That is how much he cared.

But Paul is not simply baring his Jewish soul for us: his longing for Israel’s salvation stands as a model that every Christian should follow. Consider the desire of our savior the Lord Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem and who went “first to the lost sheep of Israel!” Consider the LORD’s Old Testament yearning for Israel as a husband for his wife in the prophetic writings. Consider the blanket statement given in the New Testament concerning God’s forbearance: he is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2Pe 3:9 RSV) That is clearly all, not all except the Jewish people, about whom St. Paul reminds us in Romans 11:28-29, “they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

Some might argue at this point and retort that that the Jewish people of our time are not the same race/religion as those of the New Testament: Paul’s concern, they might quibble, was at the beginning of things, before there was a rejection of Christ. Certainly there have been changes since the time of Jesus and Paul. Certainly Judaism has taken its course, developing into a religion isolated from Christianity, bereft of the Temple and clearly focused upon Torah, with several branches, and embracing different blends of people-groups.

But the principle of the Judaism today is, in fact, the very problem that St. Paul saw in the first century: it is wholly centered upon the reading and practice of Torah (and rabbinic commentaries on Torah), following in the line of Pharisaic Judaism, of which St. Paul himself was an example before his conversion. It was and is the absolute focus upon the Torah that leaves them, especially the most fervent among them, with “a zeal for God, but unenlightened.” No, we cannot get out of our responsibility to share concern for the Jewish people by saying that things have changed, because the Jewish people have rejected God’s gift. What the Pharisees did not recognize, and what Jews since them have failed to recognize, is that the Law itself was penultimate, not ultimate, made to point out human failure and need for God, and made to foreshadow the brilliance of Jesus, God Incarnate.

Our passage in Romans echoes a fascinating passage in Torah from Deuteronomy:

Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. (Rom 10:5-10 RSV)

The LORD your God will… again take delight in prospering you, as he took delight in your fathers, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, if you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, `Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, `Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. (Deut. 30:9-15)

Frequently we consider that the OT presents a religion of bare-naked obedience, over against the NT religion of the heart. Here, the people of Israel are called to listen to God’s word “in their mouth and in their HEART.” Here they are reminded that God has come near to them in his word, and is not remote—not over the sea, or high in the heavens out of reach. Here we see a God who DELIGHTS to prosper Israel, and who warns them to return to HIM with heart and soul. It is not a matter of simply obeying commands, but of the Torah bringing them into God’s presence, pointing them to Him.

Notice what has happened here! What Deuteronomy says about TORAH, St. Paul says about JESUS, who is the very fulfillment, the end, the goal of the Law. Just as Moses brought the scrolls down from God’s presence to be in the midst of the people, so—indeed, even MORE SO—God’s embodied Word, God the Son, came right into our human realm. There is no need to go seeking, for he has himself descended and ascended, seeking US out.

The Torah was given to prefigure this coming of God into our midst. In the Torah the people had inscribed words, words from God. In Jesus, the whole world has the enlivened Word, the true light! He himself has descended to the depths and ascended into heaven ON OUR BEHALF, and so there is no need to seek out the mystery who is God. But many of God’s people were gazing so intently upon the written Torah that they did not see God’s fulfillment of it. They forgot that the purpose of Torah was to help them see God better. As Deuteronomy put it, if you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul…” Instead, they relied on the Law to do something it was never intended to do—to make them righteous when they obeyed it. As St. Paul puts it, “For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the fulfillment of the Torah.”

In Deuteronomy, Moses put before the people the choice of life and death: Turn to the Lord and live, or perish. In the New Testament, God puts before us himself incarnate, the One who is Life itself! And paradoxically, through his death, he conquers death for us, whether we are Jew or Gentile. As St. Paul goes on to say, just after the limits of the passage we read in Romans, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, “everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom 10:12-13 RSV). For God’s plan was to make Israel a distinct people, a light that the Gentiles could see, and eventually come himself as a fulfillment of his written words, to reconcile Jews and Gentiles into one people. Israel was given a land and a Torah not for her own benefit alone, but for the whole world, and her mission was fulfilled in Jesus, the one who plumbed the abyss and ascended into the heavens for all who would call upon his name.

All the apostles, St. Paul, and the first converts in the book of Acts were Jewish. Today there are those among us of Jewish descent who have come into the Church. These converts, St. Paul tells us, are for us a sign of resurrection, and joy! In the next chapter after our passage, commenting upon the mis-step of Israel, he says, “So I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means! But through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean! (Rom 11:11-12 RSV) God could work, then, through the rejection of Jesus by his own people to pass on the gospel to those of us who are Gentile. But how much more, then, can he work through those Jews who turn to him!

This God, who has mercy upon all, whose plan is to graft us together, now is calling his historical people through the largely Gentile church! Such a calling is particularly difficult to issue in a post-Holocaust age that is strongly individualistic and pluralistic. It is hard for people today to grasp that God has a comprehensive salvation story that embraces all, whether Jewish or otherwise. May our lives shine with such brilliance that those who are still Gentile, and not yet adopted Christian children of Abraham, and those who are Jewish, but not yet united with the Messiah, are attracted and not repelled.

In 1997, journalist and author Ira Rifkin was covering the visit of our own Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew: Johnstown, PA was the last stop. Rifkin there witnessed the lavish care of the parish for a family, Protestant father but Orthodox mother, who had a son with cerebral palsy. Then, he witnessed the care of the patriarch himself, offered after the liturgy: “Bartholomew…placed his hands on the young man’s head, and briefly stroked it, as the father wept…Tears also began to flow from other family members, as fellow congregants seated nearby touched and hugged them in an outpouring of compassion and understanding. I cried as well. So much for maintaining a professional demeanor….I found the experience spiritually meaningful in an extraordinary way.”

That Jewish journalist is not (yet) a convert, but his book, Seventy-five People Who Changed the World, features our dear Fr. Alexander Schmemann as one who “made intellect a spiritual force.” If such things were commonly witnessed not only by Rifkin, but be everyone who meets us, then they would see Love himself, our Lord Jesus, in our midst, interpreted for them as we cry in our worship, “Jesus is Lord!” For we do not only mystically represent the cherubim: we are the body of Christ, a light for everyone, whether Jew or Gentile.