God has not rejected his people

27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 5:1-7
Second Reading: Phil 4:6-9
Gospel Reading: Mt 21:33-43 

This Sunday’s readings describe a landowner’s love and care for his vineyard. The landowner is God, and his vineyard is the House of Israel.

A cursory reading suggests that God chose the Israelites first, but abandoned them because they rejected his son, and has now turned to the Gentiles. Indeed, many Christians have used these passages to explain and justify all the sufferings the Jews have endured.

However, this Sunday’s readings are not the whole story. St. Paul tells the Romans that “the gifts and the call of God” to the Jews “are irrevocable.”

“Has God rejected his people?” he asks. Of course not. Israel has “stumbled,” but “does their stumbling mean that they are forever fallen? Not at all. Rather, by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles.”

Comparing Israel to an olive tree cultivated by God, Paul says that “if some of the branches” have been “cut off and you, a branch of the wild olive tree, have been grafted in among the others and have come to share in the rich root of the olive, do not boast against the branches. If you do boast, remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.”

Branches “were cut off because of unbelief and you are there because of faith,” he continues. “Do not be haughty on that account, but fearful. If God did not spare the natural branches, he will certainly not spare you.

“Consider the kindness and the severity of God – severity toward those who fell, kindness toward you, provided you remain in his kindness; if you do not, you too will be cut off. And if the Jews do not remain in their unbelief they will be grafted back on, for God is able to do this.”

“Blindness has come upon part of Israel,” Paul explains, “until the full number of Gentiles enter in, and then all Israel will be saved;” and if their rejection of Christ “has meant reconciliation for the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead!”

“Just as you [Gentiles] were once disobedient to God and now have received mercy through [the Jews’] disobedience, so they have become disobedient – since God wished to show you mercy – that they too might receive mercy,” Paul says.

We Gentiles tend to regard the boundary between the Old Testament and the New as a sharp turn in the history of our salvation. However, as a young teenager, the late Cardinal Aaron Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris France, who was Jewish, accepted Jesus because he read the Bible as a continuous whole.

“For me,” he said, the New Testament “dealt with the same spiritual subject” as the Old, “the same benediction, the same stakes: the salvation of men, the love of God, the knowledge of God.”

“I am not leaving you,” he explained to his parents; “I am not passing into the enemy camp. I am becoming what I am. I am not stopping being a Jew – just the opposite. I am discovering a way of living it.”

“For me,” he said, “the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the Goyim [the Gentiles]. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.”

“What is a Jew,” he asked, “if not a man with a calling for his fellowman? For this reason, he is rejected and persecuted and killed!” If the Jews have suffered more than any other race, it is because they have a greater role in the world’s redemption.

In his epitaph, in Notre Dame Cathedral, the cardinal says, “I was born Jewish. I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aaron. Having become Christian by faith and by baptism, I have remained Jewish, as did the apostles. I have as my patron saints Aaron the high priest, Saint John the Apostle, [and] holy Mary, full of grace.”