Jews and Gentiles in Christ

Under the title, the Unity of the Church we have already discussed the unity of the body of Christ and decried the tendency to divide into congregations that are all but Christocentric. Their consolidating factor, the central issue in their congregational life is language, culture, philosophy, a pet doctrine or something else. But Jesus, God's Son, the Messiah and our Lord and Savior, should be the focus of our individual and congregational lives, nothing else.

How is that to be worked out? That is the issue before us here.

We Jews in Christ need to get our priorities right: Jesus comes long before Jewishness. We love our people, love being what God has made us and love those distinctions which equip us to serve others by offering them our distinct contributions, but being Jewish doesn't make us better than anyone else. What is most important is that we lead godly lives, maintain an active spiritual walk, grow in our knowledge and fear of God, understand the Bible increasingly live for God and labor for a morality that it as real as it is determined.

People say "Blood is thicker than … ". They're right, and the blood of Christ is certainly thicker than our own. So, much as we love our people and are committed to their welfare, we must learn to cherish and cultivate our unity with fellow believers in Messiah in the recognition that Jesus' blood united us with those to whom we would not otherwise be united, and that such a unity places a real responsibility on us.

We need to place Jesus before our national ties. That, of necessity, implies that, when (unfairly!) faced with a conflict between relations with fellow Jews or fellow Christians, we prefer the latter. It means that, in church, we emphasize Christ and are willing to make sacrifices to maintain and cultivate our relations with fellows believers. It means that we take an avid interest in the history of the church and recognize that this history is also ours – warts and all!

It means that we seek Jewish fellowship with fellow believers or with Jewish unbelievers outside the context of church life and that, should there arise any conflict between the interest of the church and the interests of our Jewishness, the church will always come first. We must not allow ourselves to nurse the sense of hurt that has developed over years of non-Jewish Christian and nominally-Christian attitudes to our people. After all, God in Christ has forgiven us so much how dare we not forgive others? What is more, Messiah died to make all men one – how dare we attempt to undo that work by reestablishing dividing distinctions?

Non-Jewish believers also need to engage in certain considerations. Paul warned his readers not to boast in relation to Israel. The church has not always heeded that exhortation and, in the course of history has, however unintentionally, incorporated anti-Jewish sentiment into the fabric of much of its theology, preaching and practice.

Gentile believers often speak in terms that contrast a continued Jewish national identity with faithfulness to Christ – as if they did not maintain their own national identities alongside (and subject to) their Christian faith. In other instances, non-Jewish believers have burdened Jewish believers with expectations and adoration that do not stand the test of Christian reality.

Don't decry our love of our people or our active involvement in their welfare, and don't turn us into idiosyncratic museum pieces. Evaluate each one of us in light of our gifts and weaknesses, our proven experience and training and use us to the extent that we can be useful. Don't promote us because we're Jewish.

But don't hold us back for that reason either. Allow us to be what God has made us and don't feel threatened by our doing so. If we maintain national traditions in our homes, we're not necessarily being legalistic, not Judaizing and not questioning the unity of the church. We just want to be ourselves.

For more on this topic,click here.