“All Israel Shall be Saved”

A Good Friday Meditation on Why the Jewish People are Not to Blame for the Death of Jesus

Perhaps you have had the privilege of attending a Passover meal put on by Jews for Jesus. They show how the symbolism of the Passover is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Of course, the Messianic Jews – Jews who believe in Jesus as Messiah – are a small minority of all Jews living today. As in the days of Paul the Apostle, so today most Jewish people reject their own Messiah. Paul struggles with this distressing reality in Romans 9-11.

If you go on the internet and search for Jesus as our Passover Lamb, you might stumble across a website of an organization called “Jews for Judaism,” which is a rather strident organization that strives to counter messianic organizations like Jews for Jesus. They claim that Jesus is not the Passover Lamb, and that Christians are hijacking their Scriptures by claiming that he is.

This claim has been echoed by many liberal theologians and biblical interpreters and it has become fashionable over the past 75 years to claim that Jewish people do not need to hear the gospel because they can be saved apart from believing in Christ. (This is sometimes referred to as “two covenant theology”). It is also common to hear that Christians need to repent of the persecution of Jews throughout the history of Christendom. To affirm that Jewish people need to believe in the Jewish Messiah is said to be supersessionism, which is the idea that Old Testament Israel has been set aside in favor of a Gentile Church in the plan of God.

It is certainly true that Christian persecution of Jews over the past two millennia is something dark and evil and that we should repent of it. It is not right, however, to go so far as to infer that the apostles were wrong in supposing that Jewish people do not need the Gospel of the Messiah. The “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” (Rom 9:2) Paul felt about the rejection of the Messiah of Israel by the majority of Jews in his day was rooted in Israel’s prophetic tradition that laments Israel’s disobedience and refusal to believe in the LORD’s provision.

When, for example, Isaiah pens a lament about the coming desolation of exile in Isaiah 6:11-12, he also includes a word of hope about the “holy seed” (Isa 6:13). Isaiah preached judgment in the short to medium term coupled with hope in the long term. Paul does the same with his talk of a mystery in which a spiritual hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. (Rom 11:25). What exactly he means by his declaration that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:27) has been debated for a long time. But it certainly is not as simple as saying that Israel is set aside, and a Gentile church takes her place. Nor can it be that Jews have no need to believe in Messiah Jesus. Neither supersessionism nor a two-covenant theology is nuanced enough to express the mystery here, which is eschatological.

In 1 Corinthians 5:7b, the Apostle Paul writes: “Christ our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival.”

Paul and the other Jewish apostles argued for a messianic interpretation of the life and work of Jesus and many first-century Jews both in Jerusalem and from the Diaspora agreed with him.

·      Acts 2:41 tells us that on the Day of Pentecost about 3000 souls were baptized after Peter’s sermon.  

·      Acts 2:46 tells us that the Lord was adding to their number daily.

·      Acts 6:47 tells us that “the Word of God continued to increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many priests became obedient to the faith.”

·      The preaching of the apostles that Jesus is Messiah split the Jewish nation in two with some believing and some rejecting him.

·      Acts 13 makes clear that Paul continued to place a priority on preaching the good news to Jews first in every city he visited on his missionary journeys.

·      Romans 9-11 shows his anguish over the continuing rejection of the Messiah by most of the Jewish people and his hope that someday this would change.

What all this means is that early Christianity emerged as a group within Israel made up of Jews who then preached to first to other Jews and later to gentiles. All the first disciples of Jesus were Jews. All those who received the Great Commission were Jews. All the writers of the NT were Jews (except Luke who wrote under the authority of Paul).

         When we say Christ is our Passover Lamb, it is not a matter of gentiles appropriating the Hebrew Scriptures. It is, rather, gentiles choosing to believe one group of Jews rather than another group of Jews.  

         This is important to note because Christians have sometimes used the idea that the Jews were responsible for Christ’s death as an excuse for persecuting Jews in general. It is true that the Gospels tell us that when Jesus was brought before Pilate the Jewish leaders were trying to kill him and the crowd cried “Let him be crucified!” (Matt 27:22-23) There is no doubt that the Jewish leaders were the enemies of Jesus just as their ancestors had been the enemies of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other prophets. And there is no doubt that the crowd called for his death and preferred Barabbas.

         However, we have to balance these facts with the fact that at least two members of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, were secret believers in Jesus and went to ask Pilate for the body of Jesus so they could honourably bury it. In addition, Jesus had a core of faithful Jewish followers, and we see thousands of other Jews coming to faith immediately after the Ascension, as we have just noted in the Book of Acts.

         On Good Friday it is important to say clearly that the Jews as a people are not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus except in the same sense that all of us are responsible for sinning and thus making it necessary that he die. The Roman empire, representing the Gentile nations, and the Jewish Sandredin, representing the Jewish nation, both are equally culpable of rejecting God’s Messiah. The point is that “all have sinned,” as Paul argues in the first three chapters of the Letter to the Romans. The Jewish people are not responsible for the death of Christ in the sense that they are not uniquely responsible. They are responsible only in the same sense that all of us are responsible.

So, for Gentiles to self-righteously persecute Jews on the basis that the Jews are uniquely responsible for Christ’s death is theological error exacerbated with self-righteousness and constitutes a gross injustice. Even the fact that Jews hundreds of years after the first coming of Messiah persist in rejecting him does not make them uniquely guilty of anything. At worst, they are just like most unbelieving gentiles. Yet, thre is more to the story than that. Paul’s words in Romans 9:4-5 should make it impossible to forget the debt we gentile Christians owe to Israel. For do they not have “the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises”? (Rom 9:4)

Israel occupies a unique place in the world and cannot be reduced to demonic evil or treated as an exception to the negative effects of sin on fallen humanity. The persecution of Jewish people is a stain on Christendom, and we rightly repent of past attacks on Jews, discrimination against them, and unjust laws concerning them. But our love and respect for Israel is not based on viewing them as somehow unfallen and not in need of justification, redemption, and propitiation like everybody else.

 We ought to imitate the example of the Jewish Rabbi Paul and fervently long for the day when the people of Israel will believe of their own free will in the Jewish Messiah Jesus. But as the Messianic Jew movement of the past half-century has demonstrated, this does not entail them becoming gentiles or even joining churches and abandoning the synagogue. It means them becoming even more Jewish than they were before, not less.

In the meantime, as Paul teaches, the way has been opened for the in-gathering of the nations into the Messiah and for this we are profoundly grateful. We are like the wild olive shoots grafted onto the tree of Israel. (Rom 11:17ff) How could we hate Israel? On the contrary, we long for the day when we will worship Messiah Jesus together. And eschatological patience characterizes our attitude in the meantime.

 Throughout the past two thousand years many Jews have feared Christians and have been hounded, robbed, and killed or exiled simply for being Jews. This is a shame and disgrace to the name of Christ. When we say that Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, we do not mean that God has set the Jewish people aside forever. We mean that we have adopted the faith of God’s people and believed the gospel brought to us by the Messianic Jews who wrote the New Testament – the Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.