Sermon preached at Evensong on the Second Sunday after Trinity 2024

St Paul’s letter to the Romans, a portion of which we heard read as today’s second lesson, is the Apostle to Gentiles’ final surviving letter. It reveals a writer at the height of his theological and rhetorical powers, and many of Paul’s great themes find their fullest expression in this letter. He is writing – unusually – to a Church for which he does not have particular responsibility. There is no suggestion that Paul founded the Church in Rome. He is likely to be writing to them from Corinth, a cosmopolitan city in the ancient world, but no match for the capital of the Empire. This letter represents Paul’s introduction of himself to the Roman Christians, whom he is planning to visit. It is of course in Rome where Paul will eventually be martyred.

One of the topics he wrestles with in the letter is the status of the Jewish law in the light of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. For the Jews, the Law was (and is) a guarantor of the Covenant made with Moses on Mount Sinai, and a mediator of the Lord’s holiness to the chosen people. It is this latter feature which Paul is clear has now changed. The mediator between the Lord and the human race is Christ, and whilst the Law retains its dignity and promises, Christ’s coming has completely re-orientated Jew and Gentile. Rome, we know, had a considerable Jewish colony in the middle of the first century, and it is possible that some of these people had become followers of Christ whilst retaining membership of one or other of the city’s synagogues. The letter to the Romans reveals important questions about identity and practice, and how to integrate mainstream Jewish teaching alongside new insights as a result of Christ’s death and resurrection. When considering the relationship between Jews and Christians in the first century, we need to remember that what scholars have called ‘the parting of the ways’ between mainstream Judaism and the followers of Christ happened gradually and in stages. There is both continuity and challenge in this family conflict.

When Paul speaks of Israel or Israelites, he is not alluding to anything like the modern state of Israel, of course, but rather to a people who are in a particular covenant relationship with Yahweh, the Lord. This Israel is created by the promises of God, it is shorthand for the heirs of the covenant not just with Moses, but in this chapter even with Abraham, the patriarch who existed before Moses. In Romans 9, Paul is clearly proud of his Jewish ancestry – to them belong ‘the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises’ – it is a kind of litany of greatest hits. But Paul refers to himself as kindred with them ‘according to the flesh’ as a kind of qualification. In Christ, he has entered an entirely new series of connections, which are not based on the requirements of the Jewish Law, but rather on faith in Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believing community. The Spirit of the risen Christ dwells within the body of Jesus’s followers to the extent that they can be called the ‘Temple’ – remember, before its destruction in AD 70, the Temple was the holiest place on earth for Jews, including the Holy of Holies, where the High Priest would go to offer sacrifice but once a year. As a result of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and the gift of his Holy Spirit to his followers, this language is now applied to what Paul calls, ‘the children of the promise’ (those Jews and Gentiles who have recognised God’s action in Jesus) in a thoroughly new way.

The subsequent centuries since Paul’s writing have seen the sibling-like arguments between Jew and Christian frequently tip over into unacceptable caricature and violence. We think naturally of the horrors of the holocaust in the twentieth century, but in previous centuries, pogroms, libellous claims about ritual murder and the murder of children, alongside racial stereotyping, have all been too frequent expressions of Christian anti-Judaism. We are told again, now, that antisemitism, alongside Islamophobia, are on the rise in the Europe of our own day. Now, let me be clear in the current political context in the Middle East: legitimate space must always be preserved to criticise the policies of governments, including the government of the State of Israel. How can one look at the exceptional human tragedy of Gaza and not lament? But we Christians, with our own faith rooted in the life, death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah, ourselves sharing the promises once made to Abraham and Moses, have an especial duty to call out antisemitism. When Christians speak of Judaism, it is all too easy (often unintentionally) to allude to Judaism as a phenomenon of the ancient world, something which we largely know from the Bible. But Judaism is a living, breathing religion, and the millions of Jews living and worshipping today, share a family likeness with Christians, just as we did in the first century.

An insight from St Paul himself, reaffirmed in particular by the Catholic Church in the middle of the twentieth century, is fundamental here. God does not renege on the gifts God gives. God does not go back on the calls God makes. God’s love is faithful and eternal. And it is these faithful and eternal promises that non-Jews now share with the Jewish people through God’s unique and perfect self-expression in Christ.

We are in the delicate realm here of what theologians call ‘election.’ Not as in General Election, but as in the calling and choosing of a people. The election of the Jewish people, as those who would enter a covenant relationship with the Lord, was an election for freedom and for blessing. Freedom to worship the true and living God, and in order to be a blessing for those around them. This covenant, which we see uniquely and fundamentally extended to gentiles (non-Jews) through Christ, is a covenant of blessing. Not election to luxuriate in, pulling up the metaphorical drawbridge, but that Christ’s new creation might be a blessing for the whole of creation.

And that is where theology and politics perhaps find an important articulation together. It is impossible for us to speak of being chosen, or set apart, at the expense of others. God’s faithful covenant is a covenant of blessing for the whole of the human race, and for the whole of creation. The particular choosing of the Jewish people, extended to non-Jews in the life of the Church, is a first fruit of God’s ultimate design for the world. We are only being true to that covenant when we seek to extend it, and offer its fruits to others. That is the truth around which St Paul is circling in these middle chapters of the letter to the Romans. Communities blessed in order to be a blessing. Descendants of the promise, so that all those who believe might be adopted as heirs of this promise, in Christ.

Blessed in order to be a blessing. Elsewhere in his writing, Paul speaks of how we have this treasure in clay jars. Fragile, earthenware vessels which contain the indestructible treasure of life in all its fulness. But in order to know it, we must learn how to share it, even when such a sharing will be to our own cost. Surely, this is a lesson for Christians and Jews to learn together as religions, as we witness to God’s eternal faithfulness. It is also a lesson for each of us in love individually. What or whom do we live for? What do we love? What do we seek to keep to ourselves, when that should be shared. In an astonishing passage, CS Lewis meditates on these themes:

‘To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.’

It is this vulnerability which we see in the life and death of Jesus. But it is a vulnerability which contains an indestructible promise: of life together, of the healing of history, and of the final flourishing of all things in the light of Christ. That is a blessing – an election, if you like – that we can only know by sharing it.