Text:  Romans 11:13-32                                                                              W 13^th Sunday after Pentecost

Leveling the Field

            In the name of him who was sent to seek and to save the lost sheep of the House of Israel – and all those who would be adopted into that House through faith and trust in the Savior, dear friends in Christ:  Last week when you met for worship, the message that our dear brother Wayne shared with you had to do with fact that in a spiritual sense, some people are given more advantages than others.  The Old Testament Israelites were a case in point.  While entire nations of people all around them were stumbling in near absolute spiritual darkness, the Israelites alone were the recipients of the continuing light of God’s revelation.  Unique among the nations, they had the Scriptures, the prophets, and the promises of God to illumine their way and guide them to all truth, while all their neighbors sat in comparatively benighted ignorance of the Lord and his holy Word.

            Unfortunately, however, though the Israelites had these great advantages, they misused and squandered them.  Most of them, like the prodigal son not truly appreciating what they had, took their precious inheritance and threw it away.  Though everything they had been given was supposed to point them to Christ and to prepare them to receive him when he came, when the Lord Jesus did finally arrive on the scene, the vast majority of them rejected him.  When Jesus called to them, “Put your trust in me”, they responded, “Forget it.  We’d rather trust in ourselves.”  And so they lost out.  All their advantages came to naught in the end because they failed to appreciate and use them for the purposes for which God gave them.  And their failure serves as a warning to us – especially to we who are the recipients of the great biblical faith and rich heritage of the Lutheran Reformation – that we not squander and waste the advantages that have been handed down from heaven to us.  We don’t want to follow them into the sins of pride and faithlessness – as unfortunately so many of those who start with advantages we have sometimes do.

            Well, with all this having been said, today’s Epistle reading from Romans continues to build upon this line of thought with a remarkable assertion that may at first seem a bit contrary to logic.  The idea is this:  some people who have been blessed with great spiritual advantages waste them – we’ve seen that.  But in this world so full of evil and unbelief, the Lord in his wisdom actually uses the sin and faithlessness of some who are blessed with certain advantages to bring his salvation to others who don’t.

            Let’s take a small-scale example of this to illustrate what I mean.  Consider Judas Iscariot.  I mean, come on, who was blessed with more spiritual advantages than he was?  Here’s a guy who was chosen to be one of the twelve disciples of the Lord.  Out of all the billions of people who ever lived, he was one who saw and experienced the ministry of Jesus in a way that, well, only eleven others did.  If there were such a thing as winning the grand prize in the lottery of spiritual advantages, he did it.  And yet … and yet the prospect of making a few dishonest dollars (or denarii, I guess, to be more accurate) was enough to lure him to throw away the special privileges he’d been given.  He betrayed Jesus.  But, and here’s the point, his sin and faithlessness was an important step in the sequence of events that would lead to the cross where our Savior died for the sins of the world.  Not that what Judas did was good or that the Lord wanted him to do it, quite the opposite; but in God’s amazing wisdom, Judas’ evil deed and his unbelief served the cause of God’s plan of salvation for all people.

            Okay, now let’s bump it up a level.  Consider now the religious leaders of the Jews at the time of Christ.  They also had great advantages.  In a spiritual sense, they were the ones floating on the top of the milk of the Lord’s revelation.  Not only were they of God’s chosen people, but also they belonged to the exclusive priestly class.  They were the chosen of the chosen, if you will.  They stood closer to the Word and promises of God than anyone else.  They lived and breathed it every day.  And it was their job to prepare the people for the coming Savior.  They dedicated their lives to it—so you’d think that they more than anyone would know what to look for.  But they misused their advantages.  And so, when the time came, they missed their Messiah.  More than that, they rejected him.  They were the ones who plotted against him, who accused him before Pontius Pilate, and who encouraged the people to call for his death.  But here again, their sin and unfaithfulness served the cause of the Gospel.  And there’s some real irony here too.  The main part of the ministry of these priests and leaders was offering sacrifices to God.  That was what they were supposed to do when faithfully performing their duties.  In the end, through their unfaithfulness, they unwittingly offered up the very Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world.

            Now, hopefully you’re seeing the pattern here, because now we want to bump it up still one level higher – and this is the level on which Paul is operating in today’s Epistle lesson:  that on yet a larger scale, the rejection of Christ by the greater part of the Jewish people in his day – and to some degree still today—that near universal rejection of Christ by the Jewish people – is a big part of opening the flood gates so that the saving Gospel message could flow out to the Gentiles, that is, the people like you and me who are not Jews and did not have the advantages the Jewish people had.

How is this so?  Well, there are several ways.  First, you probably know that the Jews were pretty smug and standoffish about their faith in the One True God.  They felt that they had the inside track on salvation, and they didn’t feel much compelled to share their faith with their Gentile neighbors who, they believed, simply didn’t deserve salvation anyway.  So, you can well imagine what would have happened if the Jews had received Jesus as their Savior.  They would have sat on the story and kept it to themselves.  Oh, sure, there might have been a little sharing; but nothing on the order of what really happened in the first two centuries after Christ.  And then, helping the spread of the Gospel even more was the fact that the Jews who rejected Christ actively persecuted the early Christians.  This made people sit up and take notice of what was going on.  It put the Christians in the spotlight, so to speak, so people who knew nothing about them were compelled to find out what these Christians had that they thought was so important that it was worth suffering and even dying for.  That, and the persecutions caused Christians to flee their homes and go to places where there weren’t persecutions going on.  And wherever they fled they took the Gospel with them and made more converts of their new neighbors.  And finally, there’s this:  Paul says that he worked especially hard in his ministry to the Gentiles, far more than he might have otherwise, expressly for the purpose of stirring up jealousy among the Jews who had rejected Christ.  He traveled all over Asia Minor and Greece spreading the Gospel and planting churches wherever he went – and he filled these churches with mostly Gentile believers.  Obviously he was motivated by the Gospel to save as many people as he could; but he says he worked with such energy and industry because he wanted his fellow Jews to see the mighty hand of God at work in the lives of the Gentiles so that these faithless countrymen of his would be humbled and compelled to admit the truth, and so turn to Christ Jesus themselves and be saved.

Now, I hope you’re still with me, because all of this is the backdrop to the comments Paul makes in today’s Epistle lesson.  But at this point he’s not talking his fellow Jews; he says, “I’m talking to you Gentile Christians.”  His comments are directed to us.  And what he has for us are some sharp words of warning, as well as some words of encouragement.  And what he says is essentially this:  now the advantages are with you.  The Lord has redistributed the spiritual wealth.  He’s taken away the blessings that belonged to them, the Jewish people, and he’s given them to you.  The question is, what are you going to do with them?

The danger is that you might think of yourself as somehow superior to God’s chosen people.  “After all, they were the Judases, the killers of Jesus, the ones who persecuted the Christian Church, and so on. It might be that we think that the Lord was right to cast them out and bring us in because we would never behave like that – oh no, not us.”  But you see, these are precisely the same sorts of attitudes and mindsets that caused the Jews to fall. 

And in the passages skipped over by today’s Epistle reading (yes, they did that to me again), Paul describes just how tenuous our situation really is. He gives the example of an olive tree that represents the whole community of those who are being saved out of the world throughout history.  The roots of this tree are the Patriarchs to whom God gave the promises of the Gospel; its trunk might be thought of as the Old Testament nation of Israel.  And now, Paul says, in these last days, the Lord has cut off the natural branches of this tree (the Jews) that he has spent so much time and effort cultivating so that he could graft you, a branch from a wild olive tree, in.  And to catch his point you have to understand that it’s the last sort of thing anyone seriously wanting to produce olives would do.  The natural branches of a cultivated tree produce nice fat olives full of oil for its owner, while wild branches would only produce bitter, pathetic little things that are mostly pits and skins.  Paul says, “Don’t go thinking that you’re more special than the branches that were cut off, because the One who grafted you into the tree from which now draw your spiritual nourishment could just as easily chop you off to make room for those natural branches, which would actually be a better fit.” We are to bear in mind at all times that it is by God’s grace and mercy alone that we are where we are, grafted into the tree of the House of Israel.  Though now blessed with the advantages, we’re not to think of ourselves as superior to anyone.

But doubtless you’re familiar with the way Christians over the centuries have sometimes persecuted Jews.  During the Middle Ages especially, some Christians actually imagined that they were doing some great service to God by treating them with contempt.  How very different is the attitude of Paul whose heart ached to see the Jewish people redeemed by coming to saving faith in Jesus. It’s an attitude that he calls upon us to share.

They are even today, for the most part anyway, on the outside now – no longer part of the community of those who are being saved from sin by faith in the Lord. And centuries of bad treatment and hostility by some Christians against them have made it that much harder for them to see the truth of God’s love in Jesus Christ.  But Paul makes it clear that the door is not closed to them.  God’s gift and call are irrevocable – it means that they cannot be taken away. And what he says is this, “Look, it was their unfaithfulness and their rejection of Christ that caused God’s mercy to overflow to you.  Now let God’s mercy to you overflow to them – not through your unfaithfulness; but rather from your love in Christ Jesus.   They are now, in a spiritual sense, where you once were.  Let’s help them find their way back to the fold.

Now perhaps you’re thinking, “This is all very good for those who have Jewish neighbors, people who live in New York or Florida or some place like that; but here in Southwest Iowa – which ain’t exactly the Kosher Capital of the country – there’s not a lot of application.  There’s precious little I can do to reach out to Jews.”  But actually there is.  There are any number of ministries that focus primarily on winning Jewish converts to Christ.  Perhaps you’ve heard of Jews for Jesus, or of our Synod’s own special outreach called Apple of His Eye Ministries.  Obviously we can help by supporting and praying for such ministries as these – but we’ll want to make sure we support only those actually working toward making converts to Christ.  There are a number of Christian – Jewish friendship organizations that take the “I’m okay, you’re okay” approach, and that exist only to smooth relationships. They may do some good work, but from a mission point of view they’re not helpful in winning souls to Christ.  We’ll want to support the good ones, and Apple of His Eye Ministries is as good as they come.

But beyond that, there is a much broader application of these passages to our lives because in them have a glimpse into the heart and mind of God who wants all people to come to a saving knowledge of the truth, and who goes to extraordinary lengths to bring people into the safety of his fold.  We’ve even seen that if he can’t reach the lost through the faithfulness of his people, he’ll use their sin and unfaithfulness to accomplish what he wants done.

That should motivate us all the more to reach out with the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ, to Jews, yes, but also to Muslims, Hindus, Cultists, and our unchurched neighbors.  There is no one whose sin or ignorance or upbringing or false ideas or outright hostility and rebellion against God are so great that the Lord does not want that person as one of his own children, redeemed by the blood of his Son that he gave up for the sins of all people.   

And that should be comfort for us as well when we fall into sin and unbelief, and fail to live as the Lord calls us to do.  In Christ Jesus, the Lord has leveled the field, so to speak.  All like sheep have gone astray, and all enter the kingdom of heaven only through God’s mercy in his Son.  Or as Paul says it, “All were condemned so that God can have mercy on all.”  We receive that mercy every day – and we’re about to receive it again in a very special way in the Sacrament of Holy Communion.  May it be that we let this mercy to us overflow to others, that through us others may come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus, and that this house of worship may become a house of prayer for all people.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!