This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:1-24; Deuteronomy 1:1-18; Romans 9:1-18; Matthew 23:27-39

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

Jesus’s final woe. Jesus pronounces a seventh, and final, devastating woe against the religious leaders of his generation. These leaders might claim for themselves the blessing of those who identify with “the persecuted” (see Matthew 5:10). However, in reality, they are the culmination of a long line of rejecters. While they honorifically entomb past heroes of the faith (“the prophets” and “the righteous”—Matthew 23:29), in fact, their veneration, in Jesus’s view, is faint praise. Jesus sees Israel’s history as a sad series of rejecting—indeed, of murdering—the prophets and the righteous. It’s a string that runs from the beginning of God’s story (Cain’s murder of Abel in the first book of the Bible—Genesis 4:8-11) to the (at the time of Jesus) most recent chapter of God’s story (the stoning of Zechariah son of Jehoiada in the courtyard of the Temple—2 Chronicles 24:15-22 [2 Chronicles being the last book in the Hebrew canon of Scripture]). And it will culminate, Jesus knows, in their rejection of him. 

There is, of course, deep mystery in the New Testament’s claim that God has offered his own Son “for sin.” There is deep irony as well in the fact that Jesus’s rejection by his own—those whose mission in the world was to be a holy nation and a “peculiar people” bringing light to the world—puts them in need of the same mercy as everybody else. 

Thus, it’s significant that Jesus meets his contemporaries’ rejection of him not with anger, but with sadness: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matthew 23:38). He laments their bad choice, even while he knows its outcome will be good: the salvation of the world. And he looks to the day when the unfolding sadness will be turned to joy, when his countryfolk will confess: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 23:39). 

God’s mysterious choice. Over the course of the first eight chapters of Romans, Paul has demonstrated how Jesus Christ magnificently brings together strands of Israel’s story. The disobedience of Adam is countered by the obedience of Christ (Romans 5). The justifying faith of Abraham is exactly the kind of faith that Christ both embodies in himself and calls forth from us (Romans 4). The trek from slavery to liberty that Moses led his people through in his day foreshadowed the journey from slavery unto sin to the glory of creation’s liberation from corruption that Christ is now conducting for those who trust him (Romans 6-8). 

Having traced that pattern of thinking, Paul exults, in chapter 8, in God’s unconquerable love. But now, beginning in Romans 9, Paul pauses to reflect soberly on the fact that many—in fact, most—of his contemporary countryfolk are rejecting Jesus as the Christ. That fact prompts anguish in his soul. Note: anguish, not anger. A fact that one wishes had not been lost on 2,000 years of Western church history. 

Paul wishes us to know three things in this passage:

First, when we witness others make the horrible choice of turning from God and from his provision of eternal life in Jesus Christ—especially when they enjoy every privilege that would seem to make a good choice a cinch (see Romans 9:4-5)—it is an invitation to deeper love and empathy for, not rejection of, them on our part: “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people…” (Romans 9:3). 

Second, the sobering—and at the same time, personhood-valuing—truth is that the kind of personal election that Paul exulted in a few verses earlier (“those whom God foreknew he also predestined”—Romans 8:29) was never identical with God’s national election of Israel to be his chosen vessel for bringing salvation to the world: “Not all (ethnic) Israelites truly belong to (spiritual) Israel” (Romans 9:6). God never accepts or rejects anyone just because they belong to a particular family or tribe or race or ethnicity. 

Third, from beginning to end, we are dependent on God’s loving and persistently merciful resolve to overcome our resistance and the drag of sin. No one will get to heaven without confessing: “By your mercy alone, O Lord.” When we know as we are fully known, as Paul puts it (1 Corinthians 13:12), we will be so staggered at the realization that we have been so deeply loved despite what we will have come to realize about ourselves, that certain questions will just fade away: Why not mercy for everyone? Why are some “loved” (meaning “chosen”) and some “hated” (hyperbole for “not chosen”)? Why are these hearts hardened, and those not? All those questions—or so I strongly suspect—will give way to other questions: Given what we know about ourselves, why mercy for anyone—especially the likes of me? Why is anyone “loved”—especially me? Why is any heart softened—especially mine? Those are the questions we will ponder, for 

When we’ve been there 10,000 years, 
Bright shining as the sun, 
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise 
Than when we’ve first begun. 

Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+