Now would be an opportune time, I think, to point out a fundamental fact concerning followers and disciples of Christ: we have been grafted into the tree of God’s original people – the Jews (Romans 11:17-24). They, the Jewish people, constitute the first tree, but we gentiles have been added to that tree – not inorganically, but with the full participation that comes from the grafted branch joining organically in the life that proceeds from the original root.
One might answer that Adam and Eve were God’s original people, and indeed they were, in a merely technical sense. But the creation of the Hebrew stock in the calling of Abram was something of a second creation, just as the family of Noah appears as a renewal of the entire human race in its time. It seems almost as though humanity proceeds by fits and starts, always getting it wrong, suffering erasure or near-annihilation, and finding in God’s providence and energy a periodic means of re-creation.
The point here, though, is that the Jewish people were the first ethnos called into the world specifically for the purpose of supplying us with a kinsman-redeemer. That was not Adam’s primary purpose, nor was it Noah’s. Yes, the promise of an eventual messiah was given to the Edenic pair, but they had been created to dwell forever, happily, in a setting that offered them all they needed. It was an aberration on their part (fully foreseen by the Trinity) that led to their being sidetracked into a secondary, alternative destiny.
The Jews, then, were fashioned from the very first for one primary, overarching purpose: to bring into the world – not just a high moral standard (Natural Law was capable of doing that) – but the Rescuer of us all. They were told by God that they would be a blessing to the nations (Genesis 22:18, 26:4), and this Rescuer is how that blessing would ultimately reveal itself.
Having been grafted into the Jewish tree, we Christians are Jewish in that spiritual, figurative, metaphorical sense. A sense that conveys a vibrant, living reality. There is a legend to the effect that the Danish king at the time of the Nazi invasion wore a star of David publicly, in solidarity with his Jewish subjects – an apocryphal story, disappointingly. But the tale conveys a vibrant, living reality: good people are all Jews now, in the face of a renewed Nazilike onslaught against the Chosen People. This is especially true of Christ’s followers, who share with them a robust spiritual genotype.
It is not emphasized enough, nowadays, that Jews and Christians are close relatives – near of kin – in the unseen world where all the most solid and concrete realities abide. We Christians reserve the terms “brothers” and “sisters” for fellow believers in Jesus, but there is a realm or sphere in which the Jews are “fellow heirs” of ours – fellow inheritors of a legacy and a patrimony unique to the sons and daughters of Christ, and the sons and daughters of Jacob.
Now is the time to focus on those shared family ties. Now is the time to prize and treasure again our “ghostly” in-laws, who gave us the messianic Hero we worship and adore. Now is the time to defend and uphold the people whose spiritual blood (the “sap” of the tree we share) runs in our invisible bodies. Now is the time, as it is always the appropriate time when Satan attacks the nation he hates most, to wear the star of David alongside our crosses and crucifixes. May God bless the beleaguered and bedeviled Jewish people.
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