The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. “The commonwealth [or polity] of Israel” and “the covenants of promise” guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his fourth Eclogue[87]—like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian prophecy—which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of Cæsar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the apostle wrote as Nero’s prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution. Only in “the commonwealth of Israel” was there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.
The Gentiles were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel’s election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of God. They became mere Gentiles, or nations,—a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no “covenant of promise,” no religious constitution or destiny, no definite relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized “people of Jehovah.”
These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves “the Circumcision.” The rest of the world—Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not—were “the Uncircumcision.” How superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, “those who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision, in flesh, wrought by human hands.” In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and brought his fellow-countrymen down to the level of those “sinners of the Gentiles” whom they so bitterly despised.
The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the apostle says: “You were at that time separate from Christ”—without a Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world’s one treasure,—shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88] from any part in Him who is to mankind all things and in all.—Once far off!
“But now in Christ Jesus ye were made nigh.” What is it that has bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is “the blood of Christ.” The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the relations of God to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God reconciled not a nation, but “a world” to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every man’s conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes between his soul and God.
When the Greeks in Passion week desired to see Him, He exclaimed: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto me.” The cross of Jesus was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite love and sorrow, by the perfect apprehension there was in it of the world’s guilt and need, and the perfect submission to the sentence of God’s law against man’s sin. So wherever the gospel was preached by St Paul, it won Gentile hearts for Christ. Greek and Jew found themselves weeping together at the foot of the cross, sharing one forgiveness and baptized into one Spirit.
The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah—the former of the two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, God’s chosen, then what availed their Abrahamic sonship, their covenants and law-keeping, their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.
Those who seemed nigh to God, at the cross of Christ were found far off,—that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and brought back to God. “He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all.”