“Is this blessedness only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised?”
Romans 4:9a

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There are few verses of scripture we love to take out of context as much as the passages in Romans. But, like sound bites going viral from a long and nuanced speech, we won’t understand what Paul is teaching if we don’t read this letter like a letter. Paul is not writing out his systematic theology for a universal audience: he is writing a pastoral letter to a specific community, addressing specific needs. In understanding these needs, and this message, we will find something God has for us.

Paul writes to the young church in Rome; scholars believe this community was quite poor, and diverse with Jew and Gentile believers. But when the emperor ordered all the Jews out of Rome (mentioned in Act 18:2 and recorded in history), the community of Jesus followers likely took on a more Gentile flavor in their absence.

When the Jews returned to Rome after their exile, what did the church feel like to them? This community created to worship the Jewish God through the Jewish Messiah was now led by Gentile leadership. Nearly all the cultural and religious markers that indicated faithfulness to God were gone or changed. These (exhausted and traumatized) Jewish believers came home to a world turned upside down.

Paul writes to this community to explore questions of community identity in God’s family, or justification. “What advantage has the Jew?” he asks (3:1); “What then? Are we [Jewish believers] any better than they [Gentile believers]?” (3:9); “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also?” (3:29).

The question facing this marginalized community is: How are Jew and Gentile believers in Jesus going to form a covenant community together? Are Gentiles really part of this family? Even equals?

This may sound like a distant and irrelevant question to us. Tensions around Jewish vs Gentile identity is not a big issue in DuPage County or the global Church today.

But we have plenty of self-righteousness, plenty of trouble letting go of a sense of “us vs them” in which we are far superior in God’s eyes to them. So let’s see what Paul has to say to this community—and what God may be saying to us.

Questions for reflection and discussion:

  • What do you imagine the returning Jewish believers felt, coming back to a now mostly Gentile church worshipping the Jewish God and Messiah?
  • How do you think the Gentiles felt having them come back?
  • Where do you see tension and power struggles between cultural groups in the Christian faith today?
  • Where you do experience self-righteousness in yourself?

Church Reading Plan: Job 33; 2 Corinthians 3