Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
Romans 11:25-36
Mystery that Blesses
For some time now, as I have been reading about trends in spiritual fashions, as it were, I’ve noted that one of the currently fashionable things is “mystery.” As near as I’ve ever been able to tell, “mystery” in these discussions is a sense of the bigness of God, the way in which God is simultaneously beyond our apprehension, and yet within our consciousness at the same time. If you read very far in these musings, it gets kind of confusing and abstract. And, honestly, I wonder many times WHY these kinds of people – looking for “mystery” in their worship – do not seek out a high-church Anglican parish with a hefty commitment to teaching the Bible and Christian theology. That is, of course, the thing which we seek to create here at St. Anthanasius, and what we are striving to achieve here looks to me very much like what I’m reading about when all these worship gurus are endlessly talking about re-introducing “mystery” into Christian worship.
We have a different sort of mystery today before us in the Second Lesson, Romans 11:25-36. But, this word “mystery” is a technical term in Paul’s writings. For Paul, a mystery is not a puzzle that you have to solve, or a delicious sense of strangeness. Rather, a mystery is something that had never been known before. Moreover, it is something which could never have been discovered, something which no one could possibly know, EXCEPT for God’s having revealed it.
In this passage of Paul’s letter to the Romans, he touches on a mystery concerning the nation Israel, and his reason for doing so is given right there in verse 25. Paul does not want them – or us – to be ignorant of this mystery, because if we remain so, we are in danger of becoming “wise in our own opinion.” I daresay that even in Paul’s day, some were becoming wise in their own opinion, and that is one reason Paul steps in to correct their wise opinions, because those wise opinions were wrong.
From what Paul says in these verses, it’s easy to see what the wise opinion (and also incorrect opinion) was all about. It concerned the nation Israel, and the wise opinion said something like this: “God is finished with Israel. They have rejected their Messiah, and so God’s done with them. We gentiles are now the true Israel; we gentiles have replaced Israel in God’s plan of redemption. Clearly those Jews are blind and hard-hearted, just as the Prophet Isaiah foretold.”
In fact, the Lord Himself explained the hard-hearted reception he got from his own people THIS WAY in Matthew 13:
Jesus said,
14And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says:
"Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, And seeing you will see and not perceive; 15For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, And their eyes they have closed, Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So that I should[1] heal them.’
The wise opinion about Israel which Paul is correcting is certainly an understandable mistake. But, it is, nevertheless, a mistake, and Paul corrects it in these verses.
Paul first of all insists that the blindness of Israel is partial, and not total. “ … blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.” Yes, Israel considered as a nation was blind to the truth about Jesus of Nazareth.
But the blindness is not total, because there are some few within Israel who know the truth. Paul is one of them! The rest of the Apostles are also Jews. In fact, when Jesus was explaining the hardness of Israel’s heart, by declaring that Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in them, he was speaking to the disciples, who were Jews just as much as Jesus was.
And Jesus said to these Jewish disciples of his: 16But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; 17for assuredly, I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.
So, it is clear that even in Jesus’ ministry, the blindness of Israel, while massive and far reaching, was nevertheless NOT total. Jesus’ own disciples were Jews, and these disciples included far more than just those whom he appointed to be Apostles.
There was also Mary his mother, the other Mary and Martha, Lazarus, Nicodemus, Simon of Cyrene, the disciples who met the Lord along the Emmaus Road. There were those who met in the upper room on the day of Pentecost, and those several thousand who believed on the Lord when Peter preached to them that Pentecost in Jerusalem – all of them Jews.
The early church was almost entirely Jewish, and the Jews remained a major component of the Church during its first century of life. And, even today, when Gentiles are the vast, overwhelming majority of Christians in the Church, there remain those who are Jews, the physical seed of Abraham, who are also our brothers in Christ.
So, yes, Israel as a nation is blind. But the blindness was never total, and today it is still not total.
Paul makes a second correction to the wise opinions of his day. Not only is the blindness of Israel not total, it is not permanent. “All Israel shall be saved,” Paul declares, and then he quotes another passage from the Prophet Isaiah: “"The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; 27For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.”
Indeed, Paul might just as well have quoted the first lesson appointed for today, the words of the prophet Jeremiah. He was speaking to a generation of Israel that was hard-hearted, unable to hear, unable to see and comprehend the divine discipline that was visited on them for their disobedience to God’s covenant. In the 32nd chapter of Jeremiah, God was announcing the impending destruction of Jerusalem and the slavery of its inhabitants by the King of Babylon. It certainly sounds AT THAT TIME as if God is finished with Israel, wouldn’t you say?
Of course. That’s what anyone would conclude! And, so God, through the Prophet Jeremiah says this:
36"Now therefore, thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say, "It shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence: 37Behold, I will gather them out of all countries where I have driven them in My anger, in My fury, and in great wrath; I will bring them back to this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely. 38They shall be My people, and I will be their God; 39then I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me forever, for the good of them and their children after them. 40And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from doing them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts so that they will not depart from Me. 41Yes, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will assuredly plant them in this land, with all My heart and with all My soul.’ 42"For thus says the LORD: "Just as I have brought all this great calamity on this people, so I will bring on them all the good that I have promised them.”
In Jeremiah’s day, the blindness was comprehensive, but it was not total. There was always a faithful remnant in Israel, even if were only a tiny remnant. And the blindness of Israel was – by God’s promise in Jeremiah – not permanent. For, he swore to restore them, and to grant them repentance and a sure future in holiness.
What Paul adds to this picture – the mystery concerning Israel – has nothing to do with Israel’s future restoration, for that was revealed, that was a certainty by the promise of God, from the time that the Prophet Jeremiah foretold it hundreds of years before. The mystery – the thing which Jeremiah did not foresee – is this: that the blindness of Israel was the reason for the abundance of grace that was then flowing during Paul’s ministry toward the Gentiles. Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles.
Earlier in Romans 11 Paul written, I say then, [has Israel] stumbled that they should fall? Certainly not! But through their fall, in order to provoke them to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles. 12Now if their fall is riches for the world, and their failure riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fullness!
You see, Israel’s rejection of Jesus was the ground for Jesus’ apostles to turn their preaching to the Gentiles. And, the gentiles found grace from the Lord which they had never known – as gentiles – prior to the blindness of Israel to her own Messiah. Speaking to his gentile readers, Paul says
28Concerning the gospel [the Jews] are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers. 29For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. 30For as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, 31even so these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy. 32For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all.
There is a hymn we sometimes sing that begins “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” I’d like to conclude our look at this lesson from Paul by slightly revamping that line from that hymn: “There’s a wholeness in God’s mercy like the wholeness of the sea …” Whatever is true of the sea in its vastness is true for the sea as you walk along its waves as they wash up on the shore. If the sea in its vastness is wet, so it is wet for your feet. If the sea in its vastness is salty, it tastes salty if you touch even a single drop of it to your tongue. And so, if God’s mercy toward his people Israel and his mercy to the Gentiles shows an ocean like depth of riches, both in wisdom and knowledge, so also is God for us individually.
You know, our salvation began to be worked out in history with a promise to God made to a single man – the father of the Jews, Abraham. “In you,” God promised Abraham, “all the families of the earth will be blessed.” It is the fulfillment of that promise which comes to each one of us you today if we have found the forgiveness of our sins in the finished work of Jesus on the Cross.
And, so we join Paul in saying, “For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
