A wrenching parable

Prophetic approbation does not amount to a hill of beans. Don’t we realize how many prophets are genuinely “heard” in their own community?   You are in for a rude awakening if you thought that the “foundation of the church” included dead prophets of long ago. Should not the Living God’s church have living stones for its security as surely as its Head lives forever and its authoritative message is preserved alive in the words of those eyewitness stones?

The Jewish narrative proceeds on the basis that God gives the land to Abraham and his descendants forever but that does so much damage to the expectation that there is a design for the human family, because the global family – not a Jewish, Arab, Christian composite – is the focus of Abraham’s justification.  Jews evicted from Palestine may be shocking to new observers, but Abraham’s descendants spending seventy years in exile is historic.  What was happening in the Holy Land when Muslims built a mosque on Temple Mount cannot be a token of Jewish accountability. The eviction is more a question of responsibility for revelation than a question of residence or ownership. Even the kingdom of God has a replacement motif.

No one is replacing Abraham’s descendants

People will come from abroad to occupy the spaces in which Abraham’s descendants were. Of course this is not Gentiles having full participation in the traditions of Israel, especially the priesthood and temple services.

A parable teaches that Israelites have no guaranteed space

25) Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ 26) Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; 27) and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are from; depart from Me, all you evildoers.’ 28) In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves being thrown out. 29) And they will come from east and west and from north and south, and will recline at the table in the kingdom of God.

Luke 13:25-29

In the current state of affairs there are strict and unyielding barriers to Gentile participation in the life of the state. Getting past them depends on the lowering of the heat of the renters’ rhetoric. For God to have his children from east, west, north and south celebrating in Zion there has to be an eviction.