“All Israel Will Be Saved”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Reading: Romans 9:1-5, 10:5-13, 11:25-36
Thanks to our scripture readers for speaking in tongues.
Today is Pentecost when the church speaks in languages we never learned. At the first Pentecost, the disciples and Jesus’ mother are all gathered, and a raging wind tears through the place, tongues of fire land on each, and they speak in languages they never learned. Onlookers accuse them of being drunk. One early church authority says this: when you’re drunk on spirits you forget things you know. When you’re drunk on the Holy Spirit you know things you never learned. The church begins life in a profusion wind and fire and maybe the greatest miracle, language.
The scripture today is the heart of the book of Romans, which we have been studying for some months now. Last week, Romans 8, is many people’s favourite chapter of the whole Bible. We read from it at nearly every funeral in here:
We are more than victorious through him who loved us. 38 I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
That would be a good place to end a book of the Bible. But like many a preacher, Paul passes up an excellent ending. He turns now to write about his fellow Jews: “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.” Why? Paul is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah of Israel. But most of his fellow Jews think he’s wrong. Paul wishes he could give himself up for them: “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own brothers and sisters, my own flesh and blood” (9:3). Centuries before, Moses was up Mt. Sinai receiving the law, and the people down below were breaking all of the commandments while God was giving them. And Moses prays, “if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of the book that you have written” (Ex. 32:32). Both Moses and Paul wish they could be cut off, blotted out, so that all Israel could live. But neither has the authority or ability to do that. Only Christ can.
Scholars once thought this part of Romans was an excurses. Paul finished what he had to say with chapter 8, and chapters 9-11 are a long digression about Judaism. Scholars now think that’s exactly backwards. This is what Paul has been working up to the whole time. Here’s why. Paul believes that Jesus Christ is the saviour of the world. In here, we’d amen that. The Christian Church is built on that belief. Okay, Paul goes on and asks. Well then what benefit is it to be Jewish? The church has often said “none.” Or even that being Jewish is harmful. That’s to our shame. Churches like ours at TEMC are trying to undo that history of anti-Judaism. And here Paul is our best friend. In these chapters he’s trying to think through what it means both to believe that Jesus is God’s way of salvation and that God’s promises to Israel remain in place and can’t be undone. You can hear Paul wrestling; you can see the sweat glistening on his glorious bald head. How can God both be faithful to Israel and also bless the entire world?
In Genesis, when God summoned Abram from nowhere and nothing and promised to give him countless descendants and repair the world through them, that was the birth of the people Israel. God promises, “through you all nations of the earth shall be blessed.” Paul teaches the church to say: hey, that’s us. We’re the nations being blessed with salvation from Israel. The prophets Micah and Isaiah put it this way:
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s temple
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
2and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
One day, even the gentiles—can you believe it? Gentiles! Even non-Jews will be blessed by Israel’s God. God doesn’t choose Israel for Israel’s sake. No. God chooses Israel so as through Israel to bless all the others. That’s true for us too, church. God doesn’t choose us for our sake or benefit. God chooses us so as through us to bless everybody else. The church is the everybody else. We’re the nations being gathered and blessed by Israel’s God through Israel’s messiah.
So, here’s the puzzle. Gentiles like us are now streaming to Zion to worship Israel’s God through Jesus Christ, speaking all our languages. But Israel itself is not restored. In fact, most of Israel thinks Jesus is not its or the world’s saviour at all. This is one reason some fundamentalists are so obsessed with the nation-state of Israel, founded in 1948. Well look—Israel is restored now. Can Jesus’ return be far behind? I think they’re wrong that a modern nation-state changes God’s dealing with the world—Israel is all the children of Abraham and Sarah, not just one country—Jews by birth, Christians by faith. So, Paul’s fellow Jews think the order has to go like this: messiah comes, restores Israel, blesses the world. Paul thinks the order has gotten jumbled up a bit: messiah comes, the world is blessed, so what about Israel’s restoration?
The question is not just one of other religions, important as that is. The question is this: can God be trusted? And that question matters in the hospital room, at the kitchen table, everywhere. If we think God used to love the Jews but left them behind for us Christians, well then God is flighty and fickle, and we shouldn’t trust that God. It’s like this if you’ll forgive the gendered analogy. Imagine a man who says to a woman with whom he’s having an affair, ‘I love you enough that I’ll leave my wife for you.’ Uh, right, that means you’re the sort of man who up and leaves his wife. You’ll just leave me too. Why would you trust a man with character like that? If Christians think God left Israel for us, why should we trust that God? Now we don’t usually say it so baldly. We say the Old Testament shows a God of war or rules, the New Testament a God of grace or love. Or here’s a trickier version. I’ve preached this sermon: Jesus is a sort of proto feminist who treats women well, unlike the Jews at his time. Jews hear that sort of thing today and say ‘you Christians can’t help yourselves; you need us Jews to be villains to praise your guy Jesus. How do you know he didn’t learn to respect women from his Judaism and not despite it?’ Paul’s argument in Romans that God can be trusted is one reason I’m so committed to our Jewish elder siblings, why we as a church are, and need to show it in a day of renewed antisemitism in Toronto. Because God is trustworthy. God cannot abandon his promises to Israel even if Israel is not much interested in his Christ. Because God is faithful. Even if we’re not.
Not to resolve the tension overly quickly, but Paul tells us what he thinks:
I want you to understand this mystery, brothers, and sisters, so that you may not claim to be wiser than you are: a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of the gentiles has come in. 26 And in this way all Israel will be saved.
Y’all hear me on that? “All Israel will be saved.” That’s chapter and verse right out of Paul. Anybody ever tempted to anti-Judaism, antisemitism? Your problem isn’t just with Judaism. It’s with Christianity. Rip out the Jewish roots of the church and the whole church dies. There is no Jesus without his Jewish mother, his Jewish family and first followers, his Jewish disciples and apostles and writers of his New Testament, his Jewish self. To love them is to love Israel and vice-versa.
Fine, okay, our church thinks that, we’re trying hard to heal the damage to the world that antisemitism brings. So why is Paul in anguish? Why does he wish he could be cut off for the sake of his fellow Jews? Because he really does think Jesus Christ is the only saviour there is.
There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. 13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
The grace of Christ is open to all. Paul wants his fellow Jews also to receive that grace. But most don’t seem to want it. So, there’s a rift in Paul’s soul between his fellow Jews and his saviour Jesus. A wound that won’t close, which brings anguish and pain.
And it’s brought the world anguish and pain ever since. Very soon after Paul, we Christians came to see ourselves as different from Jews, then rivals to Jews, thinking that for us to be heirs to Abraham’s promises then Jews must not be. A whole history of antisemitism followed, especially when Christians ruled empires and Jews were vulnerable minorities. When the crusades started, armies on their way to the middle east bumped into Jewish communities and said hey, why go for the Muslims, there are enemies of Christ right here! And proceeded to slaughter them. Half a millennium later, Martin Luther thought that Jews had been deceived by the Catholic Church, so reform the church and they’ll convert. He did and they didn’t, and Luther turned on Jewish people viciously. One of his last books was called “On the Jews and Their Lies.” Hitler admired it. It really took the holocaust before the church said woah, we need to rethink Israel. Because at the very best we did not equip Christians to oppose the Nazis. At worst, we wrote books about the Jews and their lies.
My teachers were taught by the generation just after the holocaust who wanted to redo Christianity without the anti-Judaism. And you know what they found? Romans 9-11 was their best friend. Here’s Paul, a Jew, longing for reunion with his fellow Jews, pained not to have it, and promising he one day will. He doesn’t quite know how. That’s why he dissolves into doxology at the end:
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
God will keep his promises, and save Israel, and the world. In the meantime, both Israel and the world are not much interested in Jesus or the church. Apparently, that’s God’s intention. With God, we all go from disobedient, imprisoned, without mercy, to those who receive all the mercy there is.
Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, 31 so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. 32 For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.
Is anyone far from Christ? Not to worry. That’s about to change. He wins over his enemies you know. Is anyone close to Christ? Don’t brag, that’s altogether mercy. That’s the way God saves: through Israel to everybody else; through Jesus to everybody else. I can’t explain that. No one can. But we can worship and adore.
I got to listen to a rabbi friend talk about Jesus once. He said Jesus is the first thing you Christians want to bring up with us Jews. And he said the truth is, we Jews don’t actually think about Jesus all that much. But when we do, we see a kindred spirit. A fellow Jew, mistreated by Rome, and martyred. Yeah, that sounds like our experience too. Only it’s often been at the hands of Jesus’ followers that it’s happened to us. Now what do we say back? ‘You still have to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and saviour?’ Don’t say that. It’s deeply offensive to Jews who’ve resisted assimilation for centuries. But you know what else we can’t say? That Jesus isn’t lord and saviour. That’s the liberal dodge: ah, who needs saving anyway? No, no, no then we’ve given up on what makes us unique and interesting. The Jesus we worship commands us to love enemies and refuses violence—he receives that from his Jewish tradition and shares it with us gentiles.
Tony Campolo used to tell a story of Jews and Christians marching together in the civil rights movement. And while in jail they got to arguing about Jesus and whether he’s really the messiah of Israel. Now that’s where you argue: you’ve marched for justice together, suffered and sang hymns from the black church together, now get out some bibles and have at it.
We were celebrating communion in here once. And a young woman I didn’t recognize was close to the front where she’d be the first one to come forward. I tried to gesture welcome toward her. She shook her head and stayed put. She told me later she was here to support a friend in the choir, and she’s Jewish. Now what should we wish for her? Of course she’s welcome to the Lord’s table. As a Jew she’s invited first, the rest of us only after. As with anyone who communes but isn’t yet baptized, we’d want to talk baptism after. But for her fellow Jews, if she communes or is baptized, she is lost to Judaism, a posthumous victory for Hitler. There are messianic Jews out there—ethnically Jewish who follow Jesus. Again, their fellow Jews tend to view them as worse than traitors, more like liars. And yet if you build bridges, some people cross them. In both directions. I’ve been in shul before when someone has offered me tallit, the beautiful prayer shawl they wear. No thanks, I said. That would mean I cover my life in Torah, which I don’t, wearing it would be a lie. His fellow Jews also shook their heads at the offeror. He said, “I thought he might be cold.” Jews don’t think you have to be Jewish to be saved. Being Jewish is hard, they’ll follow Torah for the rest of us. Still, I’d like her to come feast. One day we all will together.
Does Paul imagine all Israel will be saved by coming to commune with Jesus? Or via the laws of Moses? I’m not sure he knows. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” He just knows these two things that don’t go together easily: God has raised Jesus from the dead to save all people, and God has to keep his promises to his people Israel. This wound in Paul from the division between his fellow Jews and Jesus will not close. But Christ’s wounds are where we hide ourselves and so are saved. Not all open wounds are bad. This one is precious.
One of the great souls of the world in the last century was Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi who survived Hitler, marched with King, wrote books every Christian minister read. When the Catholic Church tried to leave a place for conversion of Jews in its Vatican II documents, Heschel advised them “I’d rather go to Auschwitz than become Christian.” The pope backed down. Heschel used to say this, I’ll close with it: when the messiah comes, and all the nations are gathered before him, we can ask him, hey, have you been here before? And he, Abraham Joshua Heschel, will run up and whisper in messiah’s ear, “for God’s sake, don’t answer.” Amen.