“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, (2) That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. (3) For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: (4) Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; (5) Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.” Romans 9:1-5
To be right with God is to have a share in God’s covenant and the covenant that matters most in this regard is the covenant that God made with Abraham which means to be right with God one must be a child of Abraham which is to say one must be an Israelite. To be a son of the covenant is to be a Jew and to be a Jew one must be a son of Abraham. This is the manner in which God is saving the creature that bears his image – that would be we human beings – but it does not end with our salvation, because God’s finality for us heralds his finality for his whole creation. Or at least the portion of it that is on this spinning planet. We know that much from Romans.
And we know more: We can at least begin to understand God’s intention for humanity, our final cause, by looking at two narratives in Genesis that Paul references in his epistle to the Romans. First there is the creation story in Genesis and Adam’s place in creation and we have already spent much of our time looking at that narrative. We know that the bond God established between humanity and the rest of the sentient creation has outlasted all our sin, survived our manipulation of one another, and our abuse of the creation itself. Obviously animals cannot know and understand as we do. Animals do not understand anything and they do not ask questions. A blue bird does not wonder if he is doing a good job at being a blue bird. But there is some sense in which the creature recognizes and responds to mastery and that may be what Paul is thinking about when he writes:
“For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God… Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Romans 8: 19,21
As I have said it is not that animals understand that God’s final cause for all creatures is bound to his final cause of humanity, but it is an eschatological reality, a sure future reality that humanity’s deputation to love and enable the creature to achieve its full potential, is our reality – which is another way of saying that God has enabled humanity to act as his deputy in order that God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Let me remind you of the theme of chapters 9, 10, and 11 of Romans:
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Romans 10: 9
This verse is not only the theme of the 3 chapters before us, but we may appropriately take it as the theme of the whole epistle to the Romans and to grasp it’s meaning we have to understanding it in the context of the whole epistle. This is what it means: to be right with God is to have a share in God’s covenant with Abraham which means to be right with God one must be a child of Abraham which is to say one must be an Israelite. To be a son of the covenant is to be a Jew and to be a Jew one must be a son of Abraham. So today when we read “thou shalt be saved” we know that Paul is not speaking about some utterly private experience that we may safely tuck away into our hearts, he certainly is not saying that salvation is all about me, nor is he declaring easy belief-ism, or moralism, but rather being saved is about a covenant that God made with a man named Abraham about 2,000 years before Christ, a covenant that Paul refers to as the promise. The promise that God made to Abraham, that very same promise belongs to Abraham’s children who were within his own body whose descendants God promised would be as plentiful as the teeming stars of the night sky.
“What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found? (2) For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. (3) For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” Romans 4:1-3
It is that last verse that opened up his understanding of what God was doing through Jesus the Messiah. Furthermore Paul makes an important distinction that we will see coming up again when he refers to “Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh.” Paul is saying that Abraham may be a father “pertaining to the flesh” which is to say that Abraham is a father to, let us say an ethnic group, the group we generally call Israel. Ethnic Jews are the children of Abraham and there was a time in Paul’s life when he thought to be a member of the tribe was equivalent to being in the covenant and that meant that being right with God. But now Paul is making a distinction between being a child of Abraham according to the flesh and what he calls in Romans being a child of Abraham inwardly, being an inward Jew, the Jew not of flesh, but of a new birth effected by the Holy Spirit:
“For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” Romans 2: 28-29
There is a sort of popular, sort of journalistic approach that assumed that St. Paul was the true founder and inventor of the Christian religion and this distinction between the ethnic Jew and the spiritual Jew is an example of Paul’s troubled imagination. But that is hardly the case and as I have said over and over again in the past St. Paul’s understanding of Jesus the Messiah came from Jesus not Paul’s fancy. There is an example of this in the Gospel of John that shows both how universal the notion that ethnic Israel was equivalent to being in the covenant and Jesus’ rejection salvation through nationalism. There was an occasion when a group of Jews came to believe in Jesus and he began to teach them:
“Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free… Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham.” John 8: 31-33, 39
So there you have it. There were those Jews who believed on Jesus in his day but once Jesus made it clear that their status as children of Abraham according to the flesh did not mean they were truly Abraham’s children because they did not do the works of Abraham. St. Paul would quickly to say that the “works of Abraham” is his faith in God’s promise. So you see that when St. Paul says, “he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly” he would be relying not upon his theological imagination or genius, but he was relying upon the very words of Jesus the Messiah himself. Ethnic Israel, national Israel according to Jesus is not equivalent to being a child of Abraham and much to Israel’s surprise those people once thought to be hopelessly lost, the non-Jew, may be the true children of Abraham. But look around. Where are the Jews? Put yourself in St. Paul’s place we may begin to understand his grief and maybe even bewilderment:
“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, (2) That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. (3) For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh…”Romans 9:1-3
Paul is not grief stricken over the true Israel according to the Spirit; he makes it clear that his sorrow was inconsolable and he lived with the heavy burden that his kinsmen, his fellow ethnic Jews had rejected their Messiah. He was not saddened that gentiles all over the world were coming to Jesus; but it was beginning to appear to him that ethnic Israel was constituted mostly of unbelievers. Paul simply states the scandalous reality that the concrete, ethnic community that received the revelation from God, that received the promise through Abraham, that received the law at the hand of God, that received the liturgy, that received the filiation – that concrete, ethnic community of Israel with all those advantages was collectively in a state of unbelief.
“Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; (5) Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.”
It is that last line that is the most poignant of all: there is certainly a hint of Abraham himself in the reference to the Fathers, but most heartbreaking of all is:
“and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.”
Not only does it seem that Israel had turned entirely deaf, dumb, and blind to what their God was doing in Jesus the Messiah – Jesus the Messiah was himself an ethnic Jew. In a manner of speaking, Israel had in spite of itself given the one gift to the world that only Israel could give and that gift is Jesus the Messiah.
But how is this possible? God had made a promise to Israel and he had given Israel gifts, wonderful gifts that no other people in the world had ever possessed. And yet it appeared to Paul, certainly to some of Paul’s fellow travelers, that God had cast Israel away and that being an ethnic Jew predisposed one against the only way into the covenant that God had cut with Abraham. This we know to be true: to be right with God is to have a share in the covenant with God that God made with Abraham which means to be right with God one must be a child of Abraham which is to say one must be an Israelite. To be a son of the covenant is to be a Jew and to be a Jew one must be a son of Abraham, but a true child of Abraham will do the work of Abraham and Paul is crystal clear about the work of Abraham:
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Romans 10: 9