Tenth Sunday after Pentecost; 6 August 2023; Proper 13A (RCL); Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7, 16; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21.
I know, I know. August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which takes precedence over a Sunday. But I didn’t want to miss the chance to preach on Romans 9, so I asked permission of my bishop to use Proper 13 instead, and received it. As we’ve been reading Paul’s argument over the summer, it is clear that he is using the epic of Israel as his outline. Adam, Abraham, slavery, freedom through baptism (the Red Sea), the giving of the law, and at last (in Chapter 8) the inheritance.
Figuratively, in Paul’s argument as we reach chapter 9, we are standing on the verge of the Jordan, about to enter the promised land. So, the question is, “What becomes of Israel?” Paul has been accused by his contemporaries of preaching that the covenant with Israel has been abrogated. And reading a letter like Galatians, it is easy to see why some might have thought that. Now, in writing to a community he does not know, and which has not heard his preaching, he has to set the record straight.
Chapters 9 – 11 deal with the relationship between the new church and Israel (as a theological construct, not as a nation-state, just to be clear). God’s covenant with Israel is irrevocable. Paul has to twist himself into some rhetorical pretzels to make the point, but that is the point.
To Israel belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to Israel belong the patriarchs and from Israel, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah. He will go on to recount their failures, but remind us that the covenant depends on God’s faithfulness, not on human effort. The big mistake is to think that righteousness (the gathering of a life-giving community) is our doing.
For most of Christian history, we have held a supersessionist understanding of the relation of the Church to “the Jews” — we have superseded them as God’s chosen people. And our history is strewn with the catastrophes and crimes that have sprung from that understanding. Paul would be furious. He began his public career as a persecutor of the church, rabid and ready to put Christians to death. After his conversion to seeing God’s desire to enter covenant with all of humanity through the incarnation, death, and resurrection God’s Son, Paul is not about to turn the tables on his own people.
The opening of righteousness to Gentiles is meant to make Israel jealous so they, too, will renew their covenant with God. Gentiles, like a wild olive branch have been grafted into the place of unproductive branches; don’t think God won’t graft them back on, and you off, he says to the Gentiles, if you also don’t produce the fruits of righteousness.
And if the vocation of the adopted children of God is the freeing of creation from its captivity to futility, in our day, there is no reason all of God’s adopted children can’t cooperate in that vocation to heal the world. That would be Paul’s vision and dream.