The King of Israel

Tucked well away in the Divine Liturgy in a prayer that the priest says silently for himself we find a significant title of Christ.  The priest offers the prayer as the people sing the cherubic hymn but because it is not a prayer of the Church but a private prayer of the priest there is no reason for the people to hear it and seal it with their “Amen”. Nonetheless, I sometimes feel that it is a shame the people cannot overhear it, for it is very beautiful.

       In this prayer the priest prays quietly that God will accept him in his priestly role despite his unworthiness.  And in this prayer he refers to Christ as the one who is carried on the throne of the cherubim, the Lord of the seraphim, and the King of Israel.

       Note the Hebraism please:  Jesus is “the King of Israel”.  It can be a little unexpected.  We are not used to thinking in terms of Israel  but of the Church and of the world.  The very term “Israel” for us seems to call us away from the New Testament and back into the Old Testament, away from Christianity and back into Judaism.  Only Jews, we think, talk about Israel; Christians have left all that behind and think only of the Church.  (I pause to note that here the word “Israel” has its Biblical meaning and refers to the covenant people of God wherever they may sojourn, not to the modern State of Israel.)

       This reflex is not wrong, but it can blind us to things in the New Testament, things which the apostles and their first Jewish converts took for granted.  For them, Israel was basic and eternal; it was and always would be at the center.  It was in Israel that God’s promised salvation would work itself out.  That was why the failure of most Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah was so shattering— shattering enough that Paul spent three chapters discussing it in his Epistle to the Romans. 

       Let’s look more closely at the New Testament.  At the very beginning of it, at the Annunciation, the angelic announcement to Mary that she had been chosen to become the mother of the Messiah, the angel says to her that her Son “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David and He will reign over the House of Jacob forever” (Luke 1:32-33).  Note carefully: not “reign over the world forever” (though that is also true) but “reign over the House of Jacob forever”.  The people of Israel form the matrix for the promise and in fact a part of the definition of what it means to be the Messiah.  The Messiah is the One who sits on the throne of David and reigns over Jacob.  The verse feels as if it sprung straight from the Old Testament, not the New.

       The Blessed Virgin echoed the same thing, her Hebrew voice also sounding as if it sprang straight from the Old Testament.  In her Magnificat song she declared that God “has given help to Israel His servant in remembrance of His mercy as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his seed forever (Luke 1:54-55).  Note again: not “help to the world” (though that is true) but “help to Israel”.

       Zachariah in his Benedictus song joined that Hebrew chorus:  “the Lord God of Israel  “has visited us and accomplished redemption for His people” (Luke 1:68).  The glory of His people would shine beyond the borders of the Land so that (as Simeon would later pray in the Temple) this glory would not only be for the glory of His people Israel but also “a light of revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32), but Israel was the focus of the glory.

       All this was hardly accidental. And the Lord Jesus continued to regard Israel as the locus of God’s saving work.  When the Twelve asked Christ what their reward would be in the age to come He replied, “In the regeneration [i.e. in the age to come] when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28).  Note yet again: not “judging the world” (though that also is true; see 1 Corinthians 6:2) but “judging the twelve tribes of Israel”. 

       Israel was therefore the locus and focus of God’s saving activity.  This was long ago promised in the Old Testament: God spoke through the prophets that Israel would blossom and sprout and fill the whole world with fruit (Isaiah 27:6). Now, through Christ, those promises were at last coming true—Israel was beginning to sprout and blossom and through the work of the apostles would fill the whole world with fruit.  Before anything else, Messiah Jesus was “the King of Israel”.

       We see this Israel-centric approach in what was probably the first of the New Testament epistles, the Epistle of James.  At that early time the Church consisted largely of Jews and so James’ epistle, a circular meant for all the churches, was addressed to “the twelve tribes of the diaspora” (James 1:1).  Christianity was Jewish to its core.

       And here’s the point: it did not cease to be Jewish to its core even after a multitude of Gentiles were admitted—so many Gentiles, in fact, that by the second century the Christian Gentiles vastly outnumbered the Christian Jews, giving the erroneous impression that the Church was the alternative to Israel or that the Gentile Church had replaced Israel.  Rather, the Church was Israel—Israel now reconfigured by its faith in a crucified Messiah and transformed, but Israel nonetheless.

       That was why St. Paul referred to the Church as “the commonwealth of Israel” in Ephesians 2:12 and as “the Israel of God” in Galatians 6:16. It is also why in Romans 11:16f he compared Gentile converts to wild olive shoots that had been grafted into the olive tree of the Jewish Fathers.  He also told those converts that it was not them that supported the root of the olive tree (i.e. the Fathers) but root of the Fathers that supported them.  Therefore, he said, “Do not be arrogant toward the branches [which had been broken off]”—i.e. the unbelieving Jews.  “Do not be conceited, but fear, for if God did not spare the natural [Jewish] branches, neither will He spare you”.   

The point of this analogy is this: the olive tree into which Gentile converts were grafted was the Fathers, the Jewish patriarchs, the ancient people of Israel.  Israel had not been superseded but transformed.  It had died with Christ as a nation and had been raised as a Church, a people with a new nature, one neither Jewish nor Gentile, an entirely new creation (Galatians 6:15).

       For us modern Christians this means three things.

       First of all, in obedience to St. Paul, it means we Gentiles must not be conceited or arrogant toward the branches.  Anti-semitism is therefore not just oxymoronic (since Christianity is, in fact, Jewish) but also is in clear disobedience to the orders of St. Paul.  (This does not, permit me to say, have any bearing whatsoever on our views of the actions taken by the modern State of Israel, which remains an entirely different topic. See here for a brief discussion of Christian Zionism as theological construct.) But it does mean that hatred of Jews because they are Jews is not an option for Christians—at least not for Christians who can read Romans 9-11. Or, come to that, for Orthodox Christians who can see the iconostas in their churches, for most of the people portrayed on it were Jews, including our Lord and His most-pure Mother.

       Secondly, it means that to truly understand the New Testament we must recover a recognition that the Church is Israel, rooted in the Old Testament. Israel’s Old Testament history is our history; the promises of its Old Testament prophets were given to us.  Marcion is long and happily dead and buried; let us not dig him up and try to rehabilitate him. And let’s say it again: we are Israel, the locus of God’s salvation in the earth just as the prophets said.

       Finally, it means that we must recover a sense that the unbelieving Jews are somehow linked to us and their destiny is connected with our own.  St. Paul makes this crystal clear in Romans 9-11. There he said that a partial hardening had occurred in Israel, hardening the hearts of some to allow us Gentiles access to the God of Israel and to become His people.  

This hardening should mean sorrow for us as it did for St. Paul—he had great sorrow and unceasing grief about it in his heart and his prayer was always for their salvation (Romans 9:2, 10:1).  This hardening meant the reconciliation of the Gentile world to God and the removal of the hardening will mean life from the dead (Romans 11:15).  We are therefore still somehow partners with them in the plan of God. 

       This does not mean, let me be quite clear, that anyone who rejects Christ can be saved.  “Partners” here does not mean “partners in salvation”. It means that God’s plan for the end of the age includes the Jews as many of them return to Christ and find salvation in Him. The Church’s destiny at the time of the end remains intertwined with the Jews.  To quote St. Paul yet again, “From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers, for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:28-29). We may therefore expect that the hardening may one day be lifted.

       All this is, I suggest, tucked away in that luminous Christological title “the King of Israel”.  We are Israel and Jesus is our King. And as the King of Israel He sits at the right hand of God the Father, reigning over all.