When dealing with monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam mostly), Wright asserts that most important elements can be expressed as answers to these two questions:
- How is the creator active within the creation?
- How is the creator dealing with evil within his creation?
About the second, with record to early Jews and Christians, he continues:
The basic Jewish anser to the question, How is the creator dealing with evil within his creation? was of course that he called Israel.
This, as we saw, created second-order difficulties, since Israel became, so to speak, part of the problem as well as the means of the solution. The early Christians, on the basis of everything we know of them from both within and outside the canonical ‘New Testament’, accepted this answer, recognized this second-order difficulty, and asserted that Israel’s god had dealth with the difficulty in and through Jesus and thereby affirmed the basic answer. Israel’s prupose had come to its head in Jesus’ work, which itself had led up to its appropriate, though highly paradoxical, culmination in his death and resurrection. Those who now belonged to Jesus’ people were not identical with ethnic Israel, since Israel’s history had reached its intended fulfillment.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.457
I think this is right on. Romans 11 clearly teaches that we (Christians) were grafted onto the branch of Israel. The Old Testament had not been erradicated by the coming of Jesus, but fulfilled. The various Christians throughout history that have been unfriendly or even murderous to the Jews are deep in sin and misunderstanding. “Replacement Theology” it’s called. We replaced the Jews. Screw them.
No. We are grafted into them. But this can go the other way too (and it does).
For several years during college, I followed a lot of teaching from Messianic Jews who were really big on Israel, the nation, and the dirt itself. I even subscribed to a newsletter by Gershon Solomon, of the Temple Mount Faithful! Whenever some hurricane hit the United States, it was clearly God’s wrath for some kind of recently enacted foreign policy that wasn’t friendly to Israel. Invite some Palestinian leaders to dinner at the White House (not that I think that was a good idea), and we were clearly spitting in God’s face and the covenant he made to give Jacob’s sons and daughters that stretch of land on the east coast of the Mediterranean. So despite their rejection of Jesus the Messiah, all these old covenants were still in place. Really? Remember Jerusalem was crushed in AD 73 and its people remained scattered nearly 1900 years – longer than the previous history of the entire nation.
I’m not denying that the restablishment of a Israelli state in 1948 was rather incredible and done by the hand of God. But seriously folks, all that stuff in the Old Testament? It’s FULFILLED by Jesus. It’s actually not OK (without sin) to go kill the Palestinians still squating in the Gaza. Just because it was OK for Joshua to clean house back in 1400 BC doesn’t mean that’s still part of God’s plan (and Jesus’ followers plan) today.
I like those some of that Jewish fusion worship music too, but incorporating Israeli customs into your Christian rituals doesn’t get you closer to YHWY. Lighting up that cool Menorah you picked up in Jerusalem? That’s nice but God isn’t impressed.
So I’m down with Israel. I want the current people to thrive and turn to the Lord when they can. I don’t want their enemies, some of the Muslim, to thrash them. But they don’t have magic powers either. God bless ’em. And the ones faithful to Jesus? We ARE them.