New twist on jealousy

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/103021.cfm
Romans 11:1-2, 11-12, 25-29
Luke 14:1, 7-11

What kind of holy and wondrous mystery comes about due to the mortal sin of believers in God? Mortal sins lead to death, not wonder. St. Paul claims that the worst kinds of sins have a holy and fantastic consequence. In typical round-about Pauline teaching, he says God uses our evil for good.

Paul even explains what kind of good that God performs with our sin. It's mind-blowing.

In Romans, Paul explains that God uses transgression, a ten-dollar word for heinous sin, to enrich the world. We could argue that God is talking only about the sinful Jews who repeatedly stumbled in their faithfulness to God. God, though, is the same then as now. So, wicked people who follow God (both Jew and Christian, I submit) become an enrichment to the rest of the world when they fall flat on their faces and sin. 

I'm not making this up. 

Believers who put themselves in mortal danger provide God with the opportunity to awaken the faith of others. This is both confusing and unlike anything that humans would calculate as a consequence of sin.

You might not believe it, but Paul makes a heck of a case for this mysterious effect upon the unbelieving world. Those who don't know the one true God get a boost in teaching and prophesying every time a believer cracks out a terrible sin. Sounds precisely the opposite effect we would imagine. Our sins should be ruinous to the world, shouldn't they?

This is our fabulous God. He is the God of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and John the Baptist. That's the same God incarnated in Jesus the Christ, whose Holy Spirit has gathered us Christ-followers for 2,000 years. We, along with all believers, were gathered together due to God's response to the sins of earlier sinners. 

If you're part of the lineage of Jews or the subsequent heritage of Christians, we are all grafted together as brothers and sisters. Sin urges us to repent, indeed, but Paul isn't talking about that. He's talking about God's power. When we sin, God flashes non-believers with a miracle of convincing faith. That's a fascinating specialty of our creator's divinity. God turns evil into a boombox for his mercy, love, and many other things.

Paul introduces us to this mystery in light of the Jewish nation's distaste for Jesus and their ultimate repudiation of the Messiah. As many as a million Jews eventually accepted Jesus. As temples of the Holy Spirit, these members of the body of Christ became enemies of the Jewish nation. 

The temple building no longer stood as the earthly residence of God. Too, the Law, the Torah itself, was subjugated to God incarnated as the Way and the Word. Worse, believers were elevated as priests, prophets, and royalty. Paul, then, calls the stubborn, unconvinced Jews enemies to Christianity. These were the Jews who hated everything about faith in Jesus as the Christ.

In respect to the Gospel, they [the sinful of Jewish lineage] are enemies on your account; 
but in respect to election,
they are beloved because of the patriarch. 
For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. (Romans 11:25-29)

See that positioning by Paul? Enemies, but still God's beloved. I posit that the gifts and call of Christianity are likewise irrevocable. Two reasons: first, because we are grafted to the stump of Jesse, a Jewish Patriarch; plus, Jesus promised to not abandon those who commit themselves to him. 

The kicker, of course, is that we believers all sin as much as anyone else. In sin, all peoples are kinfolk. We each have nothing over any other believer or Jew. We also have nothing over those who don't know God due to our sinfulness. Except, of course, we are called to turn back to God every time we sin. Just like the Jews. Non-believers don't have this urgency from their faith. God offers everyone the gift of faith, though. 

I love what he does with our sin, both for the non-believer and for us. This lost opportunity for repentance by non-believers is at the root of this mystery. God is loving. His call commands us to return to him. He calls us back with the strangest of methods. By making us jealous of the believers!

"But through their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make them jealous. ... Inasmuch then as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I glory in my ministry in order to make my race jealous and thus save some of them."

While Paul speaks about his Jewish race being jealous of his holiness, he adds that same jealousy to Christians who will fall away.

"I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you will not become wise in your own estimation: …"

That ending colon (:) in Paul's writing leads us to the relationship formula God revealed to Paul, and thus to us.

"… a hardening has come upon Israel in part,
until the full number of the Gentiles comes in,
and thus all Israel will be saved, as it is written … "(Romans 11:12)

Why is this important? How does a false exalted estimation of ourselves matter so much? It's about the hardening of our own hearts. God must give us witnesses to bring us back to him, or we will remain hardened.

We, as believers, did not earn our salvation, our intimate relationship to God. Our acceptance of God came from the gift of faith. The result of accepted faith is eternal life with God. We surrendered to it. We knelt down before God and wept at our sinfulness. God awakened us to him.

When we sin, we morph back into putting ourselves above God. Our sin puts God beneath us, just like he was before we became believers. Is it over for us when we sin? Has our sin ruined us forever? Nope. 

Something, someone gets us to repent. We don't repent sin because of our goodness. We regret our sin because God calls us back to him. He reaches for us. Paul hints that it is in seeing others coming to God that urges us to repent. In crass terms, we are jealous of others who fall upon their knees and are held in God's embrace. 

God is teasing us, in a sense. God transforms the world to win us back. He cleverly wins us over and the unbelieving world at the same time. When we see others excited when awakened to God, as we once were, God wins twice.

Unfortunately, this cycle is repeated so often as to be a terminal illness. We're patsies for sin. We then yearn for God by seeing God's love for others. We repent and sin and repent, over and over again. Our constant return to sin can doubt that God will keep up this outreach to us. As Paul says, we won't all return. " .... and thus save some of them."

How long will this mystery go on? For our whole lives. And for everyone's life. For as many lives as God wants to be born and brought to him. Paul cites the terminology in a very unique way. This mystery will continue until the "full number of the Gentiles comes in."

Fear not. It's not a horror show. The Jewish people, and we Christians, do not "stumble so as to fall." "Of course not?" cried out Paul.

"… a hardening has come upon Israel in part, until the full number of the Gentiles comes in …"

The hardening continues to this day. And those among us who have walked away from Jesus join the hardened Jews when we sin. The fluctuations, though, must be a considerable number. All that sin! All that eventual jealousy!

We must remain jealous of those who fly into the arms of God and be reminded of our first love of God. And our second love. And the thousands of times we have returned to him. 

"For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."