Sunday, August 17, 2008AD
20th Sunday in Greentime
Meet St Paul -- Part 11
Gentiles in Roma
All three of our Sunday readings coincide with the same glorious theme that St Paul has stressed in his Letter to the Romans. God is the God of all, not just of some!
In the first reading from Isaiah 56, we hear of a reading from around 450BC. The Jewish people looked beyond their borders and live in different places around the Meditterrean Sea. They wondered about their Chosen People status vis a vis the Gentiles, the nations, the goyim (in Hebrew).
They were very conscious of what identified them as a People of “Exclusive Election”. They observed Torah; they worshipped in the Temple; they followed delineated table fellowship guidelines; they felt that their territory was designated specifically for them by God; they followed a specific religious calendar in which every seventh day was meant to be a day for religion, rest, relaxation and rejuvenation.
But what about the others who were not part of the Chosen People. If God were the only God, then, where did others fit in? The prophet, known as Third Isaiah attempts to answer the question, “The foreigners, who joined themselves to the YHWH – all who keep the Sabbath free from profanation and hold to My holy covenant, them I will bring to my holy mountain and make joyful noise in my house of prayer…,for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Through Israel’s Exclusive Election, their vocation is to announce and to bring in Gentiles inspired to worship the God of Israel. The Exclusive Election of Israel was to lead to the revelation of the Inclusive Election of all who respond to YHWH in faith.
St Paul saw in Christ Jesus how this was to be done. Through the Paschal Mystery of Christ Jesus, the archetype of Creation, all have been brought to a new relationship with God, Jew and Gentile alike.
The Apostle to the Gentiles today specifically addresses the Gentile God-fearers who now have been brought (through baptism) into the Jesus Movement, still considered a branch of Judaism in the mid-fifties of the first century. He reminds the Gentiles that God’s promise to Israel is irrevocable, viz., that Jews still were the Chosen People whose vocation it was to announce that Israel’s God was everyone’s God. The influx of Gentile God-fearers into Christian house churches was the fulfillment of the prophecy uttered by Third Isaiah 500 years earlier. All are invited and empowered through faith in Christ Jesus.
Gladly, Gentile God-fearers baptized in Christ Jesus rejoiced. Sadly, Jews in general and some Jewish Christians in Roman house churches begged to differ. St Paul reaches out to both groups in this portion of his letter. He tells the Gentiles to see in the lack of overall Jewish response to the Gospel of Christ Jesus as a way in which God would somehow work to bring Israel to faith. He tells the Jewish Christians never to look down on Gentile Christians, as second class Christians.
The Gospel of St Matthew tells us that Jesus focused primarily on a mission to the 12 tribes of Israel, but that even during His public ministry, there was an implicit universal outreach. The lady in the Gospel today is a Gentile who asks Jesus for a healing. He, at first, rebuffs her, but she put Jesus in His place. JESUS APOLOGIZED TO THE WOMAN!! He was having a bad day and admitted it! At the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, the Risen Jesus tells the 12 to go to all nations, not just Israel.
The Roman house churches were in God’s vanguard in St Paul’s opinion. Recall his words in the baptismal hymn from Gal 3.28, “All who have been baptized in Christ Jesus have become one in Him. There no longer exists Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.” That is the reason that they call us the Catholic Church (kata – according to; (w)holon – the entirety, the unity; kuriakon – belonging to the Lord.) We are called one and all, to belong to the Lord in unity and entirety in Christ Jesus!!) St Paul intuited it and celebrated it. May New York Catholics intuit it and celebrate it as well. In Christ Jesus, may New York Catholics live lives of Kin-dom (sic) ethics, of xenophilia, of Faithjustice, of ethical monotheism. Teach the kids. 081708AD jfq
