Observation: At the writing of this letter, Paul's ministry has been growing by leaps and bounds among Gentiles, but unfortunately, the majority of his fellow Jews are not warming to his message about Jesus (who is also Jewish, remember) as God's anointed Messiah. But he lays out a principle that will be vitally important for Christians to understand from then on: just because they don't agree about Jesus does not mean God is leaving them behind.
Application: I have a friend who is part of an interfaith household. Her husband is Jewish, and her daughters attend both Sunday School and Hebrew School. For a couple years in a row, I would get a text from her toward the end of Lent, asking if we would be using John's Gospel for Good Friday. The reason for this was that John's Gospel uses the term "the Jews" to mean he crowd of people who cried for Jesus' death (who, during the Passover Festival in first-century Jerusalem, happened to be mostly Jewish). She did not want her young children exposed to the implied message that it was their own people--their family--who caused Jesus' death. This broke my heart.
Christians have a dreadful history of misreading our own Holy Books, and the historical record, for that matter, to come to the conclusion that it was Jesus' fellow Jews who "killed" him. This is simply not true. It was the Roman Empire who condemned Jesus to a particularly Roman form of execution: Crucifixion. But that did not stop Christians--even Martin Luther himself--from misusing the New Testament to persecute, attack, and even kill our brothers and sisters, the Jews.
Paul's letter should counter these impulses in the strongest terms. True, Paul thought the message of Jesus would be more widely accepted, but the fact that it was not does not nullify God's covenant with Israel. God will remain faithful to the Jews to the very end. For Christians to say otherwise is to abandon our own tradition. They are our sisters and brothers in the faith of Abraham, and their faith is a treasure to God.
It is not enough for Christians to say, "Well, all that nasty stuff was in the past; let's move on." It's not enough to quietly go about our business and let them go about theirs. Especially in these times of renewed tensions and divisions, we need to bring our sin out in the open and repent of it. We need to educate ourselves on our tragic history, and pray for the strength not only not to repeat it, but to actively stand against those who would do so.
Prayer: God, we thank you that we are not alone on this journey of faith. We thank you for the witness of our Jewish brothers and sisters, and for their covenant with you. We ask for the courage to accept responsibility for acts of hatred perpetrated by Christians in the past. We ask for repentance. And we ask for your guidance as we seek to stand in solidarity with them today, in the name of our Jewish Messiah, who walked in faithfulness to your law and covenant for all of his days. Amen.
For further reading: "Declaration of the ELCA to the Jewish Community", 1994
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