St Martin-in-the-FieldsSt Martin-in-the-FieldsA Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on August 2, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Romans 9: 1-5
I wonder if you’ve ever held an esteemed position in a community or institution, but then been forced to spend a period of time elsewhere. Let’s imagine you return to the scene five years later. What you find is that things have changed; many faces and customs are new, and the leadership has fallen on other shoulders, most of which you don’t know. And somewhat to your dismay, no one defers to you – or even especially remembers you anymore. Broadminded and magnanimous as you are, you find this a bewildering and disorienting experience. You want to say, ‘Have you no idea who I am?’ but something stops you: that something is the intimation that the reply might be, ‘Actually, no. Tell me any particular reason why I should.’
The first Christians in Rome were Jews, and were led by Jews. In 49 AD the Emperor Claudius banned Jews from the city, probably because there was violent conflict between Jews who followed Christ and Jews who didn’t. The leaders of the church consequently had to depart. There followed in Rome a rapid flowering of gentile churches with new gentile leadership. When Claudius died in 54, the Jewish church leaders returned; but in the intervening five years the churches had changed beyond recognition. The church in Rome was still divided when Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans around 60 AD.[1] Which is why Paul’s central purpose is to encourage the Jewish and gentile leaders to appreciate and enjoy one another. And it’s also why chapters 9 to 11, of which we read the opening part this morning, despite being the most neglected part of Romans today, are in fact the centre of Paul’s whole argument.
As we discover in the part we’ve just heard, Paul, himself a Jew, is dumbfounded and devastated that a majority of Jews have not been drawn to Jesus as the embodiment of God’s desire to be with them. Across these three chapters, Paul then responds to this catastrophe in three ways. First, he asks why: the answer is that God’s people have been proud – by establishing a righteousness separate from God’s righteousness – and disobedient – by not understanding God’s will for them. Second, Paul finds something to celebrate: the disbelief of God’s people has led to something new, an invitation to gentiles to be grafted into the tree constituted by God’s people, in a combination of Jews and gentiles called the church. And third, there’s method in God’s purposes: the influx of the gentiles into God’s company will provoke such jealousy among God’s people that they’ll be moved to repentance and faith.
The reason this ingenious argument has got buried in the Christian imagination is that we’ve forgotten what the church is. We think the church is what happened after Israel, and we don’t have to worry about God’s promises to the Jews because some Jews became Christians (and still do), and the rest we can treat like any other non-Christian. There’s the small matter of centuries of religiously inspired antisemitism climaxing in the Holocaust. And today there’s the agonising spectacle of what’s become of the State of Israel and the decimation of the Palestinians. Those two agonising stories provide more reason not to speak about the whole subject.
But that’s a disaster, for two reasons. One is, we’re misunderstanding what the church is. The church is what it means for God to make a people out of Jews and gentiles being with each other. Whenever we speak of ‘the church and the Jews,’ we’re making a grammatical mistake, because there is no church that isn’t Jews and gentiles together. The other is, we’re misunderstanding what faith is. If we can’t trust God’s promises to the Jews, we can’t trust God’s promises to any of us. By promises, I mean God will be with us always, our faults and failures will be forgiven, and we will dwell with God and one another forever. If God has made, then revoked, promises to one set of people, why would we trust we’ll be any different? That’s why Romans 9 to 11 matters so much.
George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda tells how Daniel, from mysterious heritage but brought up by an English aristocrat, rescues a drowning young woman, Mirah, from the Thames. Mirah has great gifts, especially as a singer, but had to escape from the prospect of being sold by her father as a sex slave to fuel his gambling addiction. She is searching for her brother, who turns out to be a visionary named Mordecai. Mordecai inspires an underground Jewish community in London. Daniel is drawn to Mirah. Meanwhile his sense of identity changes when for the first time he meets his own mother, who turns out to be a Jewish opera singer. His mother had wished for a better life for her son, so had resolved to persuade her lover, the English aristocrat, to bring Daniel up in more salubrious surroundings. Discovering his Jewish identity, Daniel feels now free to marry Mirah, and discover more from her brother Mordecai of what being a Jew truly entails.
I want now to suggest this story is an allegory for what it means to read Romans chapters 9 to 11. At the start of the novel, the story of the Jews is one of deficit. Jews were despised in nineteenth-century England. Benjamin Disraeli, who flourished during the time the novel is set, was baptised as a Christian to avoid the prejudice that would have prevented him becoming Prime Minister. When Mirah is drowning, it symbolises the awful plight of a vulnerable Jew in British society. But Daniel is fascinated by and attracted to Mirah, and through her to her prophetic and mystical brother, who shows him the depths and mysteries and glory of Judaism. Daniel’s apprehension turns to admiration, even envy, until he discovers that his real parents were Jewish, and he finds his identity as a person who cannot be separated from the Jews. The story decentres the confident and self-important gentile church in England and shows how its true character is as a people grafted onto God’s people, whose destiny lies in Jews and gentiles being with one another, which is what the church is. There’s an extraordinary irony that’s illuminating for readers of Romans 9 to 11. The church, understood as Daniel and his adoptive father, has a complacent, entitled attitude to its status in the world; God is assumed to be on their side, but doesn’t figure deeply in their story. By contrast Mordecai and his followers, precarious and threatened as their life is, trust in God is without question: it’s who they are and all they have.
Daniel Deronda is the first novel in English to portray Jews in a favourable light. But for more than half the story Daniel is not the main character. The main character is Gwendolen Harleth, who begins the novel as a profligate, stubborn and selfish heiress, but suddenly discovers her fortune is lost, and has few options other than to marry the controlling and manipulative Henleigh Grandcourt. The portrayal of Grandcourt’s clinical asphyxiation of Gwendolen’s charm and vivacity is one of the most chilling descriptions of being imprisoned by cold cruelty in literature. In the second transformative water moment in the novel, Grandcourt drowns in the Mediterranean off Genoa, with Gwendolen, now free, racked with guilt over her delay in throwing him a rescue line. She longs to marry Daniel, but he chooses the peerless Mirah instead.
Notoriously, literary critics have lauded the emotionally taut Gwendolen story and suggested the maudlin Jewish plotline be removed altogether. But I suggest that, just as the Daniel story is a portrayal of the church, the Gwendolen story is paradoxically a portrayal of the Jews. As Paul explains in Romans, many Jews turned away through what he calls pride and disobedience from the true destiny in the church through Jesus Christ. We can see Gwendolen’s wilfulness and stubbornness, and the precarity of her wellbeing, as corresponding to this part of the story Paul tells. Gwendolen’s terrifying marriage to Grandcourt is like the captivity of the Jews for many centuries, unable to break free from subjugation to an unsympathetic and oppressive power. But by the end of the novel, accepting that Daniel will not be her husband, yet blessing his marriage to Mirah, Gwendolen represents the blend of acceptance and envy that Paul describes as his anticipation of God’s destiny for the Jews.
It’s the genius of George Eliot, missed I dare to suggest by many literary critics, to tell the story of the gentiles through the Jewish Daniel and the story of the Jews through the gentile Gwendolen. Together these two plotlines give us the true narrative of the church; both the story of how gentiles were once far off but brought near by Christ, and the story of how the Jews, quickly or slowly, are brought into fellowship with gentiles in Christ – which is the true purpose of God in being with us now and forever. Daniel Deronda is a parable of what it means for the church to rediscover a whole family, the Jews, we’d not realised we had, and a plea for Jews to find their belonging in being with gentiles now and forever.
We live at a time when the centuries-long oppression of the Jews is in danger of being forgotten. We also live in an era when the appalling actions of the Israeli government have made it more fraught to talk about how there is no church, no relationship with God, no gospel without the Jews. Paul is heartbroken that most Jews have not fallen in with the worship of God in Christ. Many today are heartbroken that the existential fear of extermination and an overbearing sense of entitlement has led the Israeli government to such a deplorable approach to being with the Palestinians. But neither heartbreak must obscure the abiding truth that the Jews have been at the centre of God’s purposes since the very beginning, and they still are, and if we for a moment think otherwise, we’re suggesting God’s promises can’t be trusted: and if we think that, we’re all toast. How God finds a way through the mystery of faithfulness to the Jews, while incorporating the gentiles, is something Paul describes, and we continue to ponder, marvel at, and sometimes doubt. But what it tells us is that being with is God’s original purpose and ultimate destiny, and the people that bear that truth are called church, and Paul’s definition of church is the community where Jews and gentiles learn to be with each other, that they may eventually be with one another and God in heaven forever. And the time to rediscover that sacred calling, complex and agonising as is our present political moment, is now.
[1] See Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress 2006) 1-94. I owe this summary to Kendall Soulen.
