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‘Through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.’
Rom_11:11
I. It is one of the most marked, as it is one of the saddest, phenomena in the history of the Church that for ages, almost from the days of John himself, we look in vain for any appreciable Jewish element in Christendom to win Jewish hearts to Christ by a wise and loving evangelisation. With only relatively insignificant exceptions this was the abiding state of things till well within the eighteenth century, when the German Pietists began to call the attention of believing Christians to the spiritual needs and prophetic hopes of Israel, and to remind them that the Jews were not only a beacon of judgment, or only the most impressive and awful illustration of the fulfilment of prophecy, but the bearers of yet unfulfilled predictions of mercy for themselves and for the world. Meanwhile, all through the Middle Ages, and through generations of preceding and following time also, Christendom did little for Israel but retaliate, reproach, and tyrannise. It was so of old in England: witness the fires of York. It is so to this day in Russia, and where the Judenhetze inflames innumerable hearts in Central Europe.
II. No doubt there is more than one side to the persistent phenomenon.—There is a side of mystery; the permissive sentence of the Eternal has to do with the long affliction, however caused, of the people which once uttered the fatal cry, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (Mat_27:25). And the wrong doings of Jews, beyond a doubt, have often made a dark occasion for a ‘Jew-hatred,’ on a larger or narrower scale. But all this leaves unaltered, from the point of view of the Gospel, the sin of Christendom in its tremendous failure to seek, in love, the good of erring Israel.
III. Here, surely, is the very point of the Apostle’s thought.—In his inspired idea, Gentile Christendom, in Christ, was to be so pure, so beneficent, so happy, finding manifestly in its Messianic Lord such resources for both peace of conscience and a life of noble love, love above all, directed towards opponents and traducers, that Israel, looking on, with eyes however purblind with prejudice, should soon see a moral glory in the Church’s face impossible to be hid, and be drawn as by a moral magnet to the Church’s hope.
IV. Is it the fault of God or the fault of man, man carrying the Christian name, that facts have been so woefully otherwise in the course of history? It is the fault, the grievous fault, of us Christians. May the mercy of God awaken Gentile Christendom, in a manner and degree as yet unknown, to remember this our indefeasible debt to this people everywhere present with us, everywhere distinct from us.
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Bishop H. C. G. Moule.