The Good News of The Jews

I am going to tell you the Good News of the Jews. You might believe it or you might not. I am going to tell it to you, in any case. If you are not yourself a Jew, you will ask, "What does this have to do with me?” But then if you believe it, you will realize that the most wonderful thing has happened. You will realize that though you are not a Jew the Good News of the Jews now has something to do with you. What it has to do with you is that you believe it. And it is the very fact that you are not a Jew, but that you are a human being, that you have been made by this Good News into a most wonderful witness to the glory of the God of the Jews. You have been made a unique witness that the God who chose to be the God of the Jews is the God of all living beings, the God who created all things, from whom you were lost. But now he has found you.

This is the Good News of the Jews. The God who created the world out of love saw how dark the human race would become and chose to overcome the darkness with the light of his own love. God saw that the human race would sin against the world he had made. They would sin against him, the creator of the world. He saw that I would sin against you. He saw that you would sin against me. Everyone would judge others and defend themselves. While they might see some of their own sins, would fail to see all of their sins against one another. Instead, they would fight and destroy their relationships with one another. He saw that, left to themselves, there would not be one of them who would be able to or want to live for ever in the holy presence of God. Instead they would choose to live their lives of sin, even though he had created them and had wanted everything good for them and had given them all things. How did God react to what he saw? He could have just been angry and destroyed all the sinful, violent, self-righteous human family. But he did not react this way. He chose love instead of condemnation. He chose to shine light where there was only darkness. That choice of God, that free, unmerited choice of mercy and grace, his choice to love the unworthy human race, he called Israel. To make that choice he gave his son to be a Jew, to lay down his life and to take it up again. He called it his Good News of the Jews.

From the very beginning, the time of Abraham and Sarah, and especially from the time of Moses and Aaron, the Gospel of the Jews went into all the world. Who has not heard it? And yet the peoples of the world did not want to hear the truth about this unmerited love of God. They heard this Good News and did not like it. They did not like Israel. They did not want the Jews to be Jews. There must be some other story about the Jews that can be told, they said. There must be some other explanation for their ideas about God. Perhaps their ideas about God being one are good ideas, they said, but this cannot mean that God loves them in a way he doesn’t love the rest of the nations. Certainly, God loves all people the same. Israel has no special distinction. And certainly their laws are good, but the laws of any nation can be just as good if they work at it. We will gladly include the Jewish nation among the commonwealth of nations, marry their children and give our children to them to marry. And so the nations conclude that any narrative that says that God created and preserves the Jewish nation as his only way of salvation for the world must be and will be silenced, one way or the other.

If you hear this Good News of the Jews and you are a Jew, to one extent or the other, you will be torn. You will be torn whether or not you believe what you hear. In one part of you there will be a reaction much like that of a non-Jew. You simply wont want to hear what is really being said. In another part of you there will be a reaction of hope. You will not be able to completely resist the hope that maybe it is true. Maybe this is the proof that your being a Jew is not a curse, as so many say, but a blessing to the world. In the part of you that stands against the Gospel of the Jews, against the message that God's love for the world can only be through the salvation of the Jews, you will be highly tempted to spin the message of Israel as God's chosen people in any other way than this. Since the Jews have the Torah, in the end the whole world will have to come to the Jews to receive the word of God. Isn't this enough? Is it really necessary also that Israel be miraculously redeemed from among the nations by God in order for the word to really see that the Jews are a blessing and not a curse? Still you might struggle with the question of why the Torah addresses itself only to Israel, to the Jewish people.

In the part of you that is drawn to hope of the Gospel of the Jews, the hope that it is true, you might listen ever more carefully, until you know its true, If you do not, you might be tempted to support the idea that God chose the Jews, and to give the Torah to the Jews, because the origin of their souls is from a higher source than the origin of the souls any other people . Because you want to be good and loving, like God, you might invite anyone and everyone in the world to become a Jew, if they so choose.

All the while, if you embrace this idea, you will have missed the message that God's choice of Israel was just as much about a rejection of the nations. Why would the rejection of the nations be good news? It would seem that there is no way out of the world hating you if you are a Jew. Either it seems it hates you on account of the exclusiveness of the Torah and its requirement for the ultimate conversion of the nations, or else it would seem that the world will hate you if you are a Jew because God rejects the nations, like he rejected Egypt and saves only Israel. Nevertheless, it remains that if Israel, the Torah of Israel and the Messiah of Israel, is not God's eternal condemnation of the world but the new and eternal form of God's love for the world, then both the Jew and the non-Jew will in the end rejoice together!