IV. What I Fear Most

I have described my finest work, my laziest work, and now my most personal work. In each confession I have identified the one thing I cannot close, cannot remove, cannot silence.

In this third confession, what I cannot close is not a text and not a name and not a moral intuition. It is a promise.

The promise made to Abraham. The promise renewed through Isaac and Jacob. The promise carried through four thousand years of history, exile, dispersion, persecution, and — impossibly, against every historical precedent — return. The promise that the God of Israel has not abandoned His people. That the covenant has not been revoked. That the blindness is partial and temporary. That the fullness is coming.

Paul wrote it. He was not speculating. He was reporting what he had been given. And what he had been given is the thing I have been fighting since before the foundations of the world: the knowledge that the story ends in a way I cannot prevent, that I cannot win, that I have already in some sense lost — the only question is how long the delay can be maintained.

The Gentile church's job, in Paul's account, is to provoke Israel to jealousy. To live in such a way — with such genuine love for the God of Israel, such genuine knowledge of the Jewish scriptures, such genuine humility about the debt owed to the Jewish people, such genuine radiance of the Spirit that was promised through the Jewish prophets — that Jewish people look at what has been done with their inheritance and want it back.

For most of the last two thousand years, the Gentile church has not done this. It has made Jewish people want to keep their distance. I have helped with that.

But when it does — when the Gentile church approaches its Jewish neighbors with the combination of conviction, humility, and love that Paul describes, carrying the Jewish scriptures and the Jewish Messiah and the anguish Paul carried — the conversation that results is the one I am least equipped to prevent.

That conversation begins on the next page.

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"He was despised and rejected by people, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness; people hid their faces from him; he was despised, and we considered him insignificant." — Isaiah 53:3 (NET)