The Readings 17th Teusday after Pentecost (26 Sep 23)
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Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
Ephesians 2:19
THE PRESENT WRITER Has only seen two episodes of The Chosen. There have been, however, several clips on YouTube that actually make me want to watch. First, it feels like “Gospel As Chick-flick” and that just seems wrong. But the way the writers of the TV show explore certain issues really intrigues me. The Gospels all show Jesus hanging out with non-Jews and working miracles on their behalf: Samaritans, pig farmers, Romans. The Gospels do not, so much, explore how the Jewish followers of Jesus reacted to this. The TV show does this in what must certainly be ways to catch and grab a viewer’s attention (advertising needs eyeballs), but also it is thought-provoking and reveals a good sense of how insiders and outsiders view each other (in any group) and how the Early Church must have struggled with this.
In writing to the Ephesians, Rabbi Shaul of Tarsus, a student of Rabbi Gamaliel, is trying to explain to a whole bunch of Gentiles what’s going on. The community in Ephesus was nearly all Gentile. Some part of them would have been hanging out with the local Synagogue, moved by the Ethical Monotheism they encountered there. They may have been financial supporters of the community, following the commandments and keeping the Sabbath to a certain extent, a Ger Toshav. Other Gentiles in the community may have just gone direct from “heathen” to “believer”, that is, what we might call “Christian” today.
In the passage that begins in Ephesians 2:11ff, Rabbi Shaul argues that you Gentiles who “were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world…” are now, in Christ, “no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” Mindful there that “Saints and Members of the Household of God” does not mean the small band of 5000 or so believers in the world at that time. Rather he means the men and women of Israel and all the Righteous Fathers and Mothers in the Scriptures. In other words, being in Christ Jesus means being in Israel. The foundation of which is the Prophets (that is, in the Scrolls of Scripture) and the Apostles (that is, the Chosen 12 & others), with Jesus being the cornerstone that unites together all of these divergent or even mutually-repellant building blocks.
The heathen, in Jesus, become our brothers and sisters. The Righteous in Messiah are not even “aliens” (that is, Ger) but now joint-heirs with the Family of Abraham, in whom all the world is blessed. This became an intersting manifestation of the Church for a while. There are no “us” and “them” in the body of Christ. Jews and Gentiles wrestled with this for a while, until by 135 or so there was enough of a split. Jews began praying for God to punish the “traitors” that refused to fight against Rome. But how could Christians fight once the Jews had named a new “messiah”?
God is doing away with insiders and outsiders in the Body of Messiah. Once you are in, you are in. What should have been, as it were, the Hypostatic Union between Israel and the Nations has become a division so acrid that it seems nothing can undo it.
But God.
Although it cannot be but in the Last Days, let us pray for a return to that place where Gentiles believers feel like guests “raised from the lowest table to the highest” and Israel opens his household under the headship of the Father to all nations in the Son. We shall be aliens and strangers to each other no longer, but joint heirs of the kingdom.
Orthoparadoxy 
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