 So thanks for coming to this workshop. So this talk, this workshop is on, well it's called The Mystery of Israel in the Church. And what we'll be looking at is Israel, the people Israel, not obviously the political state, the people Israel as a type of Christ, of the church, of our calling, and also of the last things. So a very rich type. And I'll start out by explaining what I mean by type and typology. And let me just, I was told to do an advertisement. And the bookstore has these books on sale. And this talk comes out of the first volume of a three volume series called The Mystery of Israel in the Church. And they're talks that sponsored by the Association of Hebrew Catholics. And so if you want to find out more about this, you can look up their website, Association of Hebrew Catholics. And I've got about 150 talks on that website that are free downloads. Okay, so what do we mean by typology? The Second Vatican Council in the Constitution on Divine Revelation tells us that God reveals himself to mankind through words, but not only through words, also through deeds, and we could say more importantly, through deeds and events, than through the words themselves. And so the Second Vatican Council says, this plan of revelation is realized by deeds and words, having an inner unity. The deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and the realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery in them. So God reveals himself speaking to mankind through scripture, but he reveals himself more by the very deeds that his providence guides, and that would be the calling of Abraham, Israel, but before that Adam and Eve, and of course the ultimate deed, is God becoming man, living for us and dying for us and rising for us. So the incarnation, the paschal mystery, are the ultimate deeds. But what we want to look at here is earlier deeds, the deeds of Israel as prefiguring the central deeds of Jesus Christ. All right, so that's, now because God is the author of scripture, scripture has a richness that no other book can possibly have. Works of literature can have a richness though. Great works of poetry and literature can have a richness such that there's more than one meaning in one passage. The author foreshadows through words, other events that will happen later. Now God does that in scripture in a way that human authors can't do. A fiction writer can make up events such that they prefigure other events. A history writer can't do that, he's gotta record the events that occur. God however, being the author of history with his providence, can so arrange the events of history that those very events point to later events. And it's so beautiful to see that because we see that the Lord is in control despite all the bad things that happen. And we see that there's a plan that goes from the beginning to the end. And we call the steady of those deeds that point to other deeds or events that point to future events, biblical typology and two slides. So the meaning we could say that a biblical event has in signifying a future event or reality is called the typological or spiritual meaning of that event. And so we're gonna look at Israel as a type of Christ in the church. And so we can distinguish the literal sense of scripture and the spiritual or typological sense in this way. What the word signify rightly understood is the literal sense. Taking into account the metaphor, taking into account the meaning that the sacred author is communicating with the words. But what we're gonna be looking at is what God is communicating not just with the words but with the events described by the words insofar as they are signifying other future events. Next slide. So Thomas Aquinas describes it like this. He says holy scripture is divinely ordained to manifest to us the truth necessary for salvation. The manifestation or expression of a truth can be made through events or words. In that words signify events. And one event can be the figure of another event. The author of events, that's God, is able not only to use words to signify something but also can dispose the events to be figures of something else. And thus truth is manifested in a two-fold fashion in holy scripture. In one way, insofar as events are signified by words and this is the literal sense, right? Or we could say the historical sense. In another way, insofar as events are figures of other things and the spiritual sense consists in this. Or we could call it the typological sense. It's the same, spiritual or typological. And thus it belongs to sacred scripture to have more than one sense, more than one meaning. So reading scripture is different than reading a history book because in scripture we'll find a multiplicity of senses in the very same passage. So just take the beginning of Genesis. God said, let there be light. And so the literal sense is God created physical light at the beginning. But we could see a spiritual sense in that. That light was made by God to be a figure of another light, that true light that came into the world to enlighten every man, Jesus Christ. And so light, just by its very nature because God made the physical reality light to be able to convey a spiritual reality, a light that illumines our minds and hearts, right? And we'll see, there are lots of other examples, the Exodus. The literal sense would be Israel crossing the Red Sea. But a spiritual or typological sense is that crossing to safety through the waters signifies another passage through the waters by which our sins are blotted out, baptism. And so that would be a typological meaning of the text of the Exodus. It prefigures our baptism and it prefigures Christ's paschal mystery. And so that's typology. And so there's a Greek word, next slide. So typology comes from the Greek word type which means figure or model. And so the idea is that the events, say in the Old Testament, are types or models of some future thing. So typology studies, we could say, the architecture of God's providence in history by which he's arranged that earlier events, the whole life of Israel, is informing us about Christ, the church, and our lives as well. And that's what makes reading of scripture not simply studying ancient history, but we're studying our own spiritual lives, we're studying Jesus Christ in the old as well as in the new. And therefore typology is essentially Christocentric. It's seeing everything that God has done as preparing for Christ, pointing to him in advance, or once he's appeared, pointing back to him. And that's our lives, that's the church. Our suffering in our lives points to his cross. So typology is Christocentric. Now there are three, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a beautiful section on typology, 115 to 117. And it speaks of three, the spiritual sense is broken down into three, and St. Thomas explains it like this, he says, quote, the spiritual sense has a three-fold division. So far as things of the old law signify the things of the new law, right? So things in the Old Testament, signifying things in the New Testament, we call that the allegorical sense. So the Exodus signifying baptism would be the allegorical sense. And then insofar as things done in Christ, or which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there's the moral sense. Much of scripture, above all the life of Christ, the gospels, are giving us the type of our lives. And so that's the moral sense. The literal sense would be, say in the gospel passage, what Jesus did. The moral sense would be how that's a type for my life, so the literal sense of Christ's crucifixion is what historically happened, and the moral sense is that's the model of our self-emptying and sacrificial's love. And this also applies to the Old Testament. Events in the Old Testament also have a moral sense, and sometimes the moral sense can also be negative, and we're shown things that we ought not to do, like Ezau selling his birthright for a plate of lentils. That's a moral type of moral sin, because basically every mortal sin is selling our birthright, sons of God, sons and daughters of God, for what in effect is a plate of lentils. So that's the moral sense. And then there's a third sense called the anagogical, which means pointing upwards, we could also call it eschatological, that points to the last things. So for example, the Israelites crossing the Jordan River, entering into the Promised Land, is a type of our hope entering into heaven through the, after the tribulation of this life. And so there are, and the Catechism summarizes this, saying, according to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of scripture, the literal and the spiritual, and by the way, just a parenthesis, sorry, the literal is also spiritual in the sense that it's rich, right? All the senses of scripture nourish our spiritual life. So the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. So we could say the literal on the one hand, and then three typological senses, allegorical in which the Old Testament prefigures the new, the moral in which it prefigures the Christian life, and the anagogical in which it prefigures the last things, heaven, hell, death, judgment. There's a handy, right? And then the Catechism gives some examples that we've seen, the crossing of the Red Sea, a type of Christ's victory, and of Christian baptism, and it gives the example of St. Paul, who says that everything done in the Old Testament was done for our instruction, right? So when we read about the Israelites in the desert, rumbling and murmuring and things like that, our tendency is to think, wow, what a stiff-knit people, right? And that would be to utterly, utterly miss the point, that's about me, right? And also you, that's about us. And then the anagogical leading us, so Jerusalem, the physical Jerusalem being a type of the heavenly Jerusalem for which we law. So there's a little verse, the letter speaks of deeds allegory to faith the moral how to act and anagogy are destiny. So the Catechism gives us that in number 118. All right, so that's a little overview of what typology is. And so we're gonna look at the typology of Israel in this talk, and then in the workshop later this afternoon, I'll look at the typology of figures that prefigure Mary in the Old Testament. All right, so the typology of Israel. So Israel, the chosen people, was chosen to give witness to the coming of the Messiah, to be the people in whom God would become man. And he molded their history so that all of their history would be pointing to him in those three ways that we spoke about, and the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical senses. And so everything in the life of Israel has something to say about Christ, the church, and our moral life. And therefore, typology is really crucial for seeing the continuity of God's plan, for binding together the Old and the New Testaments, the Old and the New Covenants. And it shows us that the center of all God's plans is Jesus Christ, his passion and resurrection. Okay, so Israel is a type of Christ. And we find this, well, Jesus is the first to explain this. Jesus explains this in a beautiful way on the road to Emmaus, right? Two disciples that are walking there, they're crushed. And you all know the story. Jesus comes up to them. What are you talking about? And don't you know? Are you the only person who doesn't know what happened in these days? And he says, what things happened? And so they go on and tell him about his crucifixion and the report of the resurrection which they didn't believe. And Jesus berates them and says, didn't you know, right? Shouldn't you have known this? Because Moses and the prophets and the Psalms say that the Messiah has to suffer these things, right? Before he's glorified. He says they should have known this by their reading of the Old Testament. And so what he unlocked to them, no, and their hearts were burning as he opened the scriptures to them on the way. What did he open to them? Basically biblical typology. How the events in the five books of Moses, in the prophets, the exile, and the Psalms, how all of that was speaking about him, not just through words, but even more importantly through deeds, prefiguring, above all, his paschal mystery. So Jesus revealed to them, we could say, the typological way of reading the Old Testament as being Christocentric, as being about Christ. And he did the same thing to the 11 apostles in the upper room that same night when they came back to the upper room. And Jesus did the same thing. He showed how all the scriptures were pointing to him. Right, and so again, typology. We wish we were there and heard the explanation, but it's transmitted us by the fathers of the church, by the church's liturgy. The way that the fathers read scripture was profoundly typological, seeing Christ in the Old Testament prefigured. And one example of this is from a second century bishop named Milito of Sardis, and he has a beautiful homily that he gave on Easter, in which he sees Christ prefigured in all these ways. Sorry. It is he led away as a lamb and sacrificed as a sheep. So he's looking at the Passover of Israel, the lamb sacrificed, and that obviously is a type of Christ's passion, Christ the Lamb of God, who delivered us from bondage to the world as from the land of Egypt. So the Exodus is pointing to a better deliverance and freed us from slavery to the devil as from the hand of Pharaoh and sealed our souls by his own spirit and the members of our body with his own blood. And so just as the Israelites were protected from the angel of death by the blood of the paschal lamb painted on the doorposts, so we are protected from Satan, the true angel of not the first death, but the second death as it were from hell by the blood of Christ painted on the doorposts of our lives through the sacraments by which he's sealed our souls by his spirit and the members of our body with his own blood. That would be basically baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist receiving his very blood as our spiritual nourishment. And he goes on, it was he who shamed death and bound the devil in torment as Moses had Pharaoh. It is he who rescued us from slavery to liberty, from darkness to light, from death to life, from tyranny to everlasting sovereignty and made us a new priesthood and it chosen people forever. He is the Passover of our salvation. It is he who suffered much in many men. It is he who enabled was slain and Isaac was bound and Jacob was a wanderer and Joseph was sold and Moses was cast out and the lamb was sacrificed and David was persecuted and the prophets was dishonored. So Milito of Sardis, like all the fathers, see all those Old Testament persecutions, tribulations as types of Christ's passion. And especially the Passover being the supreme type of Christ's passion but not only of his passion but above all of its effects in saving us. And the beauty of typology is that God God is the perfect teacher obviously and so he uses what I like to call a divine pedagogy by which he teaches us not with abstract propositions but with events that are very graphic, the exodus. So somebody who never thinks about typology remembers the story because it's such a memorable story in itself. And so God uses events that are memorable on the natural level to enable us to understand a spiritual reality which would be here, liberation from sin. So he uses liberation from temporal bondage to be the type of liberation from sin. And that's, typology does that all the time. It takes the temporal level, the natural human level, our level and uses that to be the analogy to understanding a spiritual reality that we can't see directly. So let's look a little closer now at Israel as a type of the church. So Israel was chosen with an election. And we read about that in Genesis chapter 12. Abraham called out of his father's house to go where God tells him to go. And so that's, we could say the type of every election. Gratuitous. Abraham chosen from innumerable other human beings to be the forefather of God-made man. Chosen not because of some excellence that was in Abraham beforehand, but chosen according to God's plan gratuitously. And that then becomes the election of Israel, the chosen people through Abraham and not through Ishmael but Isaac, the son of the promise, not Isau but Jacob and the chosen people. So Israel's election to be the, now that's obviously today, if you speak to Jews about being the chosen people, very often they will say we wish we weren't chosen because it's brought so much anti-Semitism, so much persecution. But it's not up to us, right? It's God who calls and chooses. And we too in the church are chosen from the nations, from Israel and the nations to be God's people. And so Israel's election, we could say is the type of our election in the church. And just as Israel wasn't chosen because of some superior natural disposition, some superior intelligence, sometimes people speak like that but the scripture tells us otherwise. Deuteronomy chapter seven has a beautiful section on this. God tells, Moses tells the people, you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more powerful, I'm sorry, we're more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you. For you were the fewest of all the peoples but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath which he swore to his fathers. So what we're being told there is that God's election doesn't depend on some prior disposition in us because ultimately everything is from the Lord. There can't be a prior disposition in me that predetermines God's call. But it's the other way around. God's call comes first and then there's our cooperation or the lack of our cooperation. But God's call always has to come first. And St. Paul says something similar to us in the first letter to Corinthians chapter one, 26 to 29. He says, consider your call brethren. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. So St. Paul is saying that our election to be members of the body of Christ in the church is supremely gratuitous and not dependent on anything in us but on God's call. There's something in us that can lead me to lose that call and I can fall away, that's mine. But the call is the Lord's. And that call gives us something, again that a nobility that we can't understand. It gives us a nobility to be sons and daughters of God. So Israel in being chosen was spoken of by God as his firstborn son. So Israel received together with the election, the sonship and St. Paul also loots that in Romans nine where he goes through the glories of Israel and we're gonna come back to that section later in this talk. At that point in the letter to the Romans, St. Paul is grieving because of the rejection of Christ by many Israelites. But he says, but nevertheless there's the glory and one of the key glories is the divine sonship that Israel received. And of course the chief glory is that of Israel is the Messiah, God overall forever. And that election to be the people of God and to be sons and daughters of God is now enlarged to the nations in Christ. And that's the mystery hidden from all ages that that sonship was to be opened up to all who would be inserted into the new Israel, which is the church. And so Pope Benedict, well before he was Pope, Joseph Ratzinger says that the history of Israel should become the history of all. Abraham's sonship is to be extended to the many, right? And that's what happens in our baptism. We're inserted into that communion of the patriarchs and the prophets and made fellow citizens as St. Paul develops in Ephesians chapter two. And so Israel as the chosen people and the people of the divine sonship is the model of the church. And also God's peculiar possession. I have a beautiful expression. So we saw Moses in Deuteronomy. God says through Moses that you are chosen to be my special possession among all the nations. And that was also one of the passages that was in Exodus 19, that was skipped in our first reading today that Father Pablo alluded to, where Moses gives the description of the chosen people. He says, now therefore, if you shall hear my voice, obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples for all the earth is mine and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. So that's the calling of Israel. And then St. Peter in his first letter, chapter two, verse nine applies it to the church and therefore to us. You, he says, are a chosen race, every member of the church, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you are no people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. So Israel is the type of the church, the nobility of Israel as a type of the nobility of the church. The rabbis say that God created the world for the sake of Israel. And that might sound egotistical, but it's true, God created all things for the sake of bringing us into communion with him, first in Israel and now in the church. So we can say both things, God made the world for the sake of Israel and for the sake of the church. But that leaves no one out because all are called into that richness. And if not all make it here, those who didn't have an opportunity to know about it are not necessarily excluded. So the covenant with Israel initiates all of these, the chosen people, the sonship, God's peculiar possession, and maybe the most glorious is that the election makes the recipient into a spouse, both a son and a spouse. So Israel was betrothed to the Lord and the church is the bride of Christ. We read about this in Hosea 219, God promises, I will espouse thee to me forever. I will espouse or betroth thee to me in justice and in judgment, in steadfast love and in mercy. And then many centuries later, John the Baptist proclaims that Jesus is precisely the bridegroom. And he says, he who has the bride is the bridegroom, the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears his voice, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. And so in the incarnation, the bridegroom comes to Israel and God betrothed himself to us in his church. And so the very nature of the church is to enter into a spousal, nuptial union with God himself, in particular with God made man with Jesus Christ. And the whole structure of the church revolves around that. And now this would be a whole nother talk, I'm just gonna allude to it. The Eucharist is where that reality is most centrally realized. In the Eucharist, we come and receive the bridegroom. And as the pledge of our union, the consummation of our union, still hidden, still veiled in mystery in this earthly pilgrimage. In other words, as we get as close to the bridegroom as is possible, this side of the beatific vision. And so the whole nature of the church is Eucharistic as realizing that nuptial union with the Lord. And so Jesus speaks at the Last Supper about a new covenant, right? The Eucharist is precisely the new covenant in his blood. Not that the old covenant wasn't glorious, right? The old covenant had all of these glories, sonship, chosen people, bridal people. The new covenant brings to consummation all of those realities. And it's Jesus in the institution where he refers to the new covenant is quoting one of the prophets, Jeremiah 31, 31, where Jeremiah says, behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Not like the covenant I made with their fathers, which they broke though I was their husband, but this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel. I will put my law within them. I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they shall be my people. In other words, the new covenant is simply taking the old covenant, all of that glory, and completing it, bringing it to perfection in Christ through his grace that writes the law on the heart through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Now we could go through the typology of all the sacraments. We don't have time here. I'm just gonna lute to it briefly. One became an Israelite if one was a male, through circumcision. So circumcision was the, we could say, sacrament, analogically, or that sacred rite of Israel by which one became a member of the chosen people. Not by birth. People tend to think one is a Jew simply by birth, and that's not right. Just as one is not a Christian by birth, and one is not a Jew by birth, one is a Jew by the sacrament of initiation into the covenant, which is circumcision for boys, and for girls it would be on their name day, also on the eighth day, in the first week. And that's a type of our baptism, and the physical circumcision is a type, St. Paul tells us, of the circumcision of the heart, which we gain through Christ. He talks about that in Colossians two. He says, speaking now to the members of the church, the Gentile Christians, you have come to the fullness of life in him. In him you are circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ. Christ was physically circumcised. His circumcision was a type of the perfection of love, the circumcision of the heart, and in Christ we gain access to that circumcision of the heart through his grace that we receive in the sacraments, beginning with baptism. So circumcision, a type of baptism, the Paschal Mystery, we've seen a type of the Eucharist. The priesthood of the Old Testament, likewise, is a type of the priesthood of the new, and again this could be a whole talk, but just let me say this. In the Old Covenant, the priesthood was divided, we could say into three levels. There was the High Priest who was the oldest son of Aaron, then there were all the sons of Aaron who were the priests, and then all the members of the tribe of Aaron, which was the Levites, served the altar, even though they weren't priests. And so that corresponds to bishops, priests, and deacons in the church. So the bishop in every local church is the High Priest of that local church. All the members of the Presbyterian correspond to the sons of Aaron, the priests, and the deacons in the church correspond to the Levites in Israel. And so it was a natural thing for the apostles the apostles received the fullness of the priesthood. But it was a natural thing to have co-workers of a lower level presbyters, and then deacons to serve the communion in charity on the pattern of Israel. And we find this in one of the first popes, Clement I of Rome at the end of the first century is writing to the church of Corinth, which had been suffering a schism. People had revolted against their bishop apparently, and their lawful presbyters, and had perhaps substituted some other person to be bishop, and Pope Clement writes to them, and he quotes the Old Testament, and he says, to the High Priest, the proper services have been given. To the priests, the proper offices are signed, and the Levites, the proper ministry has been imposed. The layman is bound by layman's rules. And so he sees the church as structured into, we could say four orders. The High Priesthood would be the bishops, the priests, the presbyters of the church, Levites, deacons, and the rest of us, members of the church, layman. And God structures the body of Christ in this way for the sake of complimentary order and harmony. Okay, one of the, perhaps the greatest glory of Israel, I haven't spoken of yet, and that was the indwelling of God with his people. And Jews refer to that as the Shekinah, and it comes from the Hebrew word to dwell as in a tent, shachan. And shachan is to dwell. And at Mount Sinai, God gave Moses instructions for building the tent of meeting, first with the Ark of the Covenant to be housed in the tent of meeting, and that was to be carried with the chosen people on their journeys. And then finally to be planted in the place that God would choose, which was the temple in Israel, in Jerusalem. And so the greatest glory of Israel was the Lord dwelling with them in their midst and giving them that most intimate access to him and through that indwelling, right, the Shekinah. And so we got that in our first reading today at Mass, the glory on Mount Sinai, the thunder and the lightning and the, all of that was some kind of physical type of the glory of God speaking to his people and being present, hearing our prayers in a most intimate way. And this, by the way, when you read about the politics of the Middle East, we just have to keep this in mind that Israel, the land Israel is sacred to Jews, not for economic and temporal reasons, but because that's the land of God's indwelling with his people, right? That is, so for a theological reason, Israel is sacred as the place of the indwelling, right? The supreme type of the ultimate indwelling, which of course is Jesus Christ, right? So that indwelling in the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple of Meeting, the Holy of Holies in the temple, manifested sensibly by a certain visible glory that descended on it, right? That was a type of a greater and better indwelling. For told by the prophets, Isaiah, for example, in the prophecy of the virgin birth, who will be called Emmanuel, God with us, right? That God with us was in a sense already realized in Israel in the temple, right? But God is there forecasting a better indwelling and that better indwelling is God becoming man in the midst of his people and dwelling with us. And so when John speaks about this in the first chapter of his gospel, the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, right? The very word for dwelt literally would mean pitched his tent among us, dwelt among us as in a tent is chosen by John, precise to bring out this continuity with the indwelling in the tent of the meeting, right? God's indwelling presence in the midst of his people. And even the root of the word is the same in Greek as in Hebrew here, skeine from shachan. And Ratzinger speaks about this and he says, the man Jesus is the dwelling place of the word in this world, right? The supreme dwelling place of the word. Jesus's flesh, his human existence is the dwelling or tent of the word. The reference to the sacred tent of Israel and the wilderness is unmistakable. Jesus is so to speak the tent of meeting. He is the reality for which the temple and later the temple could only serve as signs. And so in every, and again this is the glory of the, and we take it for granted. In every church, we've got a tabernacle and that tabernacle is the holy of holies in a way that the holy of holies in Israel could never be. Right, the glory of Israel is that it had one place and only one place, the holy of holies in which God indwelt in a unique way. In which he could be encountered in a unique way. But that, he wasn't there in the way that he's in the tabernacle. He was there only as a type of that presence. And we see that in what was kept in the Ark of the Covenant. In the Ark of the Covenant there was the manna as a type of the Eucharist. There were the tablets of the law, the Ten Commandments as a type of Jesus, the living Torah. And there was the rod of Aaron and signifying the priesthood of the old covenant as a type of Jesus, the eternal high priest. But those were three dead things. Tablets of the law, the manna, physical bread and a rod. And so that was the glory of Israel, that indwelling of God through those things was a type of an infinitely greater indwelling that we have wherever Jesus Christ's humanity is made present by the Eucharist. But do we, and of course it becomes a point for examination of conscience. Think of what, so Israelites had to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year to be at that place of indwelling. What do we do with our so much immensely easier access to the true holy of holies in the Tabernacle? Okay, all right, now I'm gonna switch gears and pose another question. What about, so we've been talking about Israel in biblical times as being a type of Christ in the church. What about Israel today, Israel after Christ? Is Israel the people, I mean not the political state, but the people of Israel from the, let's say from the resurrection to today, do they remain the chosen people and do they remain a type of Christ the church, our spiritual life and the last things? And this is something that actually has been very controversial in the church. And I think most Christians in the course of the history of the church have thought, no, that Israel lost its status as the chosen people by rejecting the Messiah. But the fact is, scripture says that's not the case. And above all, St. Paul says that's not the case because God is faithful even though some men are unfaithful. So God's fidelity is never trumped by human infidelity. By the way, that negative answer that Israel loses its chosenness through the fact that many in Israel didn't recognize Christ. That's often called supercessionism. The idea that Israel simply got superseded and all of its privileges transferred to the church. And I think it's easy to fall into a position like that. But what I wanna point out here is that's not right. Now Paul poses this question in Romans three. He says, what if some were unfaithful? Does their unfaithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? Answer, by no means. Let God be true, though every man be false. In other words, thanks be to God. That our sin, say as members of the church, doesn't annul God's fidelity because God is faithful even when we are unfaithful. And we can use that as an absolutely certain theological principle in so many occasions that God's fidelity means that he respects his plan even when we don't respect it. And a terrible example of this is hell. God respects the covenant given to us even when we refuse it to the end. And he respects our free will even at that extreme. That's his fidelity to us and to his covenant, the very possibility of hell. And so God is faithful even though we're unfaithful. Apply it to Israel, right? If Israel was elected with an eternal covenant, the infidelity of Caiaphas is not going to break God's fidelity to his people, right? And that's certain. Another text is, and more important is Romans nine through 11, so I'm gonna look at that closely for the rest of the talk. And in this section, so it's an incredibly moving section in the letter to the Romans in which Paul speaks about his grief over his people. Now we heard in Philippians that Paul speaks about himself as a Hebrew from Hebrews, circumcised in the eighth day as to the law of Pharisee and he's proud of it even though he counts it all as scuba as refuse to gain Jesus Christ. In other words, the fact that something else is infinitely greater being inserted into Christ doesn't take away the glory given to Israel by God. But nevertheless, Paul is immensely distressed, right? That's so many of his brothers, brothers and sisters didn't recognize the Christ. And so he poses this question, how can this be? And how should we understand it? And that's what St. Paul wrestles with in Romans nine through 11. And I'm gonna look in particular at chapter 11. And in chapter 11, verse 29, he says that the election of Israel continues because God's gifts and call are irrevocable. And God doesn't call them back, he's faithful. And the Second Vatican Council took that phrase and inserted it into the document, the very important document called Nostra Etate on relations with non-Christian religions. And it speaks of all non-Christian religions, but in Israel, obviously, it has a special place. It's not just another non-Christian religion, it's the cultivated olive tree into which we were engrafted in the church. And so Israel has this unique place. And that's dealt with in this document in chapter four in a beautiful way. So it says, God holds the Jews most dear. I think, and when you read this, think of the history of antisemitism. How many Christians didn't hold Jews most dear. But God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of the fathers, the patriarchs, Abraham, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. He does not repent of the gifts he makes or of the calls he issues. That's Romans 11, 29. Such is the witness of the apostle. In company with the prophets and the same apostle, the church awaits that day known to God alone on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and serve him with one accord. And that's alluding to the prophecy that Israel will come to recognize them as sign last day and we'll come back to this in a minute. But before we look at that, I'd like to look at another aspect in which Israel today continues to be a type of Christ. And this is a very difficult one to deal with because it's the history of the persecution of the Jewish people for the last 2000 years. In that persecution and culminating above all in what Jews call the Shoah, the catastrophe, or we often refer to as the Holocaust. It's obviously not the only, but it's the supreme extension we could say of antisemitic hatred. And so what I wanna suggest is that Israel in her persecution and suffering continues to be a type of Christ. And so the Jews at Auschwitz were a type of Christ in their suffering there and therefore were able to participate in the redemptive meaning of suffering given to all suffering by Jesus Christ on Calvary. Now, Nostra Etate condemned one of the main causes of what we could call Christian antisemitism, the idea that the Jews were rejected or accursed by God as if this followed from Holy Scripture. So Nostra Etate, Vatican II, condemns that as unfounded. We can't hold that the Jews were accursed because they didn't recognize Christ or rejected by God. We've seen that St. Paul says the opposite. God's gifts and calls are irrevocable. And so they continue to be the chosen people. And so we can't hold them as rejected or accursed. And another problem with this is that it's too much like the prosperity gospel. And if we look into history and we say, wow, Israel has had this long history of dispersion throughout the nations, exile, persecution, antisemitism, that's a sign that God has cursed them because they didn't recognize Christ. Well, how is that different from the prosperity gospel? Seeing that when misfortune happens to me, it's because I've done, because I've sinned. And when my business prospers, it's because I'm so great. And we know that that's the anti-gospel. Christ doesn't promise that. He promises when he wants to draw us closer to him, how does he do it? By giving us a share in his cross and passion. And that's the best gift he can give us in reality. And so when we look at the history of Israel and we see that they had their share and over abundantly of Christ's passion and cross, what should we think? Not that they're rejected by God, but that they have a unique relationship to Christ, even though they themselves may not recognize the depth of that relationship, because they remain his people according to the flesh from whom he came, from whom his mother came, et cetera. And so when we read about Jewish history and all of that exile, we should see Christ in it all. A mysterious walking in the way of the cross. And this is beautifully expressed by the painter, the Jewish artist, Mark Shagal, a very interesting artist. And during the Second World War, from 1938 to 1947, he did a whole series of paintings on Christ's crucifixion and seeing the connection between Christ on the cross and the suffering of the Jewish people in Poland and the ghettos, the shtetl of Eastern Europe and the concentration camps. And he puts on Jesus the talith, the Jewish prayer cloth. And of course, Jesus would have prayed with that. Pointing out his Jewish identity and pointing out the identity mysteriously of the Jewish people and Christ's passion. And he saw these as very important works. Maritain, Jacques Maritain, the great Catholic philosopher and his wife, Raisa, who was Jewish by upbringing, she was a Hebrew Catholic, and she said of Shagal that with a sure instinct, he showed in each of his Christ paintings the indestructible link between the Old Testament and the New. The Old Testament was the harbinger of the New and the New Testament the fulfillment of the old. And Shagal, although he never, he didn't become Christian, he was Jewish, he wanted those words put into the catalog of his exposition of these paintings. And so in his works, Christ crucified stands for the suffering of the Jewish people as a whole. Now very often in the Jewish tradition, the canticles of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, Jewish exeges rabbis will say that that's not about, that it's the Jewish people as a whole that is realizing that through the righteous suffering unjustly. Now obviously Isaiah 53 is about Jesus Christ and so it's not right that it's not about him, but it's perfectly true that it's also, Isaiah 53 is also about Israel and the church because Christ in redeeming the world through his cross gave to all human suffering the power to share in the work of redemption. And thus the suffering of Israel and the church is a true participant making up quote, what is lacking as St. Paul says in Colossians 124, what is lacking in the passion of Christ. Obviously nothing's lacking in the passion of Christ in itself, what's lacking is our participation in that passion by uniting our sufferings with Christ's sufferings out of love. And so we can see that Israel also, the people Israel was able to do that through the centuries. And there's a beautiful meditation on this by Cardinal Lustigé. Cardinal Lustigé was the Archbishop of Paris appointed by John Paul II who was Jewish and he insisted on his Jewish identity that he didn't stop being Jewish when he became Christian just as Paul says I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews. I didn't, he doesn't say I was a Hebrew, right? And so Cardinal Lustigé has a beautiful book called The Promise in which he says, we must believe that all the suffering of Israel persecuted by pagans because of its election and not just by pagans, right, but by Christians is part of the Messiah's suffering. Just as the killing of the children in Bethlehem makes up a part of Christ's passion, right? That's why we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocence. Even though they themselves weren't aware of it, the Holy Innocence, right? They didn't have any idea that they were being killed because of Christ. But nevertheless, they were associated in his passion and we have the Feast of the Holy Innocence. And Lustigé continues, otherwise God himself would appear incoherent regarding his promised Israel. If Christian theology is unable to insert in its vision of the redemption of the mystery of the cross that Auschwitz also makes up a part of Christ's suffering, then we've reached the summit of absurdity. Christ has, John Paul II spoke about this as the gospel of suffering. Beautiful phrase. That Christ's passion gave to all human suffering this capacity to be redemptive. And it's redemptive to the extent that we're moved by charity. Now, an even more difficult expression of this is given by Elie Wiesel in his book, Night. Very difficult to read where he speaks about his experience in the concentration camp as a child. And there's a beautiful forward to that book written by the Catholic writer, Moriak. And he writes there in the forward. On that day, the day that, well that Elie Wiesel speaks about, horrible even among those days of horror when the child, that's the Elie Wiesel as a five year old, I think, or as a young child, watched the hanging of another child who he tells us had the face of a sad angel. He heard someone behind him groan, where is God, where is he? Where can he be now? And a voice within me answered, where? Here he is. He has been hanged here on these gallows. How true! But he didn't quite mean it in that sense that, that was a movement of despair in a sense. He thought God died. And I who believe that God is love, this is Moriak writing, what answer could I give to my young questioner whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness, which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli? His brother who may have resembled him? The crucified, whose cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine? Suffering, right? The problem of the righteous, the just men who unjustly suffer. The stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine. That conformity between the cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery where on the faith of his childhood had perished. But I could only embrace him, weeping, a beautiful text. So ultimately we should see all anti-Semitism as an attack on Christ, right? Christ was hanging on those gallows. That was quite right. He's present in every suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent. Okay, in the last minutes of this, I'd like to look at the prophecy of the future conversion of Israel. And we've seen that was implied in Nostrade Tate and that's developed by St. Paul in Romans 11. And the Catechism, the Catholic Church speaks about it as well. And so the prophecy is that, let's say two things. Israel, in the last 2000 years, obviously many Israelites have come to recognize Christ, St. Paul's magnificent example, all the apostles, our lady, et cetera, and countless throughout the centuries. But we also know that many didn't, no? And St. Paul speaks about that as a kind of blindness permitted by God. And we should see that as a type of ourselves, right? The blindness of Israel is a type of the human blindness that all of us have, sometimes more, sometimes less. And their future conversion will be a type of our conversion and of the last things. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church in number 674 speaks about this. The glorious Messiah's coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by all Israel, that Israel will come to faith before Christ returns. For quote, a hardening has come upon a part of Israel, at that part that doesn't yet see him, doesn't recognize Jesus as the Messiah. And it quotes St. Peter who says to the Jews after Pentecost, repent therefore and turn again that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, that he may send the Christ appointed for you whom the heavens must receive until the time for establishing all that God spoke by his mouth of his holy prophets from above. So St. Peter implies that Israel will come to recognize him before he returns, but it's much clearer in St. Paul in a text that we're gonna look at in a minute. St. Paul says, if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? The full inclusion of the Jews and the Messiah's, the full inclusion of the Jews and the Messiah's salvation in the wake of the full number of the Gentiles will enable the people of God to achieve the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ in which God may be all in all. So what St. Paul is saying is that we're living in what he calls the time of the Gentiles, a time of grace to the peoples to be inserted into the church, which has been a mission begun in great measure in heroic fashion by St. Paul himself but continues to our day, think of Africa and China today as great areas of mission, areas in which they're great conversions, but it's not yet completed. So the time of the Gentiles is still ongoing, but we are to hope that there will be a time in which Israel as well as a people, not the political entity, will come to recognize Christ as well so that the church can achieve, quote, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ composed of Jews and Gentiles. In other words, the sacrament of the unity of the human race in which Christ becomes all in all. Let's just look at this a little more closely. So St. Paul does this in Romans 11. He begins by asking a question, the same question that we've seen, does the fact that many didn't recognize and mean that Israel has so stumbled as to fall and St. Paul answers by no means. Through there, has God rejected his people and the answer is no? Have they so stumbled as to fall and the answer is no? And he says a first reason is because there's been a remnant and we've just seen that. St. Paul himself, all the apostles, our lady, all the church at Pentecost, the 3000 on that first Pentecost, the 5000 we hear about later, all of those were Jewish believers in Christ, right? So there's a remnant, but that's not the full answer. He goes on and he says, well, has God rejected his people? No, hardening is permitted, but through their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to make Israel jealous. Now if they're, now what does he mean by that? By the fact that Caiaphas didn't recognize Christ, good has come to us and what good is that? Christ's cross, right? So an inconceivable, incredible good has come to the entire world through the hardening of at least Caiaphas and other members of the Sanhedrin. And something similar happened in the early church. St. Paul would always go first to Jews in whatever city he went and preach the gospel there and because they didn't receive it, he would then go to the Gentiles and so some Jews did receive it, others didn't, but the fact that as a whole, they didn't made the Gentiles able to receive it. In other words, the hardening of some in Israel had this effect that the Gentiles received the gospel and that the mission to the Gentiles was established. So that's why he says if their trespass means riches for the world, the world, the Gentiles receiving Christ and Christ crucified, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean? In other words, if God is so great, he can bring good out of evil. Not recognizing Christ is in itself, obviously a great evil, but God is so great, he can bring an infinitely greater good out of it. Caiaphas' blindness is our wealth. But if that's true about our blindness, he can bring greater good out of it, how much more good he can bring out of our non-blindness. And so that's what St. Paul is saying here, in the end when they do come to see and all through history, those who come to see, God will bring a greater good out of that and how much more their full inclusion. And he goes on, now I'm speaking to you Gentiles. In as much then as I am apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry to make my fellow Jews jealous and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? Now what does he mean by that? So this is not so easy to understand because perhaps it has more than one meaning. One way to read that is what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? Israel, as in some corporate sense, we don't quite know the extent of it, will come to recognize Christ. And one way to read this is, and that will occur shortly before Christ's second coming and the general resurrection, the physical rising from the dead. So life from the dead meaning the resurrection of the general resurrection at the second coming. It could also mean rising from the dead spiritually of Israel, rising from the dead in the sense of coming to fully recognize Christ and thus fully recognize God's plan. And it could also mean life from the dead for those lukewarm members of the church whose faith has been weakened, I think today the number of fallen away Catholics in our country, which is larger than any other denomination. So we live in a time in which it's reasonable to see that there has been a certain apostasy in which a culture that has formally received the gospel is falling away, sometimes more, sometimes less, some places more, sometimes places less from the gospel, and Jesus speaks about that when he says that when I come again, will I find faith on earth? But charity will have grown cold, et cetera. So Jesus speaks about falling away from the faith and St. Paul speaks about it more strikingly in the second letter to the Thessalonians when he speaks about a great apostasy as a sign that will come before the second coming and the antichrist. It's reasonable to think that if Israel, corporately, comes to recognize Christ, that will be an aid to faith in our world. And thus it will mean perhaps life from the dead, also for Gentile Christians who have fallen away from the faith and can come back to it. In any case, St. Thomas Aquinas reads this text as having all three of those meanings. Life from the dead, general resurrection, life from the dead, spiritual rising of Israel, and life from the dead, rising to new fervor in the whole church through a conversion in some corporate way of the Jewish people. Prophecy before the event is always very difficult to understand, and it's only after the event that we can make full sense of it. One last thing I'd like to, well, just briefly. In that chapter, Romans 11, Paul uses this beautiful analogy of an olive tree. So Israel is the cultivated olive tree. And he speaks about some branches of this cultivated olive tree having been lopped off because of lack of faith, think Caiaphas. Other branches that never belong to that olive tree but belong to wild olive trees being grafted in. Those are the Gentile Christians grafted, but what a beautiful image. Gentile Christians are grafted into God's olive tree which is Israel, right? That's the new Israel, that's the church. But the natural branches, he says, well, if these wild branches got grafted in, the natural branches, are they impossible to graft back in? It's their tree, right? And so it's easier for God to graft those back in when the time comes, right? When the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled and God brings this about. And so his message is for the Gentile Christians not to boast but to remember we have received mercy through them, right? Because all of the apostles, our Lady, Jesus Christ, all of them are the glory of Israel and we've received their wealth, right? So we're indebted to Israel in the church for all of his treasures, Jesus Christ, our Lady, the apostles. Now Gentile Christians, so I'm a Hebrew Catholic and I am indebted to Gentile Christians who have presented the gospel or made it available to me today and that would be. And the beauty of the church is that there's a mutual indebtedness, that God makes us all indebted one to the other so that God's wealth can come to all to our mutual complimentary service to one another. And so in God's plan Israel is still part of that mission pointing to Christ, called to come into Christ and coming into Christ being a witness to Christ to the rest of the world and also in the church completing that complementarity that is God's plan. May God realize that in his time. Thank you. Any questions? Thank you. Great question. So I think it's certainly not irrelevant. So the question was, right, the question was, I'm speaking about the people Israel, not the state of Israel, but is the fact that there is now a state of Israel since 1948 and that it includes Jerusalem since 1967, is that theologically interesting or relevant or is that just an accent of history? I'm embellishing the question, but I think the answer is it's not irrelevant. We shouldn't see things happening in history as being irrelevant. God has this plan. And so I think it's no accident that three years after the end of the Holocaust Israel as a state was born and thus there's a new corporate presence even though it's obviously most Jews don't live in Israel but nevertheless, the fact that there's a corporate political identity of Israel, I think it's theologically very important as Jesus, now this is two, I don't have enough time to develop this, but Jesus in the gospel gives a prophecy that the Gentiles will trample on Jerusalem until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled. That's in Luke's gospel. Jerusalem is no longer trampled by the Gentiles in our time. Does that say something about we're nearing, now of course it's always true. We're nearer to the end times than we were before but how much only God knows. But I think it's theologically very significant and I think it's significant also in this that Jews now who live in Israel, the lands where Jesus walked, that's now their patrimony. And there's something very beautiful about there's a great opportunity for faith I think in the restoration of Israel as a nation. I think it's something that we should, as Catholics, see in a theological sense and not just in a political sense, right? Well, so the temple is, I don't, many want to rebuild the temple, right? But it seems that it's part of God's providence that the temple never be rebuilt because Christ is the realization of that. In other words, there's a certain fittingness in the fact of the temple being destroyed 40 years after Christ's passion and not being able to rebuild despite the ardent desires of so many to have it rebuilt. Simply the providence of God. So I don't think that will happen but nevertheless Jerusalem retains that, pointing that typology of pointing to Christ's passion and his second coming. Well, I meant simply that many Jews don't live in Israel, they live throughout the world. But it's also interesting that in Israel, many Jews are coming to believe in Christ, right? This is a time in which they're, but tragically, they don't become Catholic for the most part. And so they remain different kinds of Protestant, often usually referred to as Messianic Jews, right? The number of Messianic Jews in the world is very large and getting larger all the time. And so we should think that's also part of the signs of the times. But we want to help bring them into the fullness of truth in the Catholic church. Right, right, I think it's important to bring, I mean, what is one's identity most profoundly? It's gotta be Christ and the church, but one doesn't lose the, as Paul says, Hebrew from Hebrews. But where do you put the accent? That's the question. God's grace, and only that, right? Because they're, no, I'm serious, because there are so many obstacles that are not their fault. I mean, just, okay, the question was, what would enable, what would be in the mind of a Hasidic Jew to convert and come to recognize Christ? And so my answer was only the grace of God. Because, I mean, just think of the 2000 years of anti-Semitism as a gigantic obstacle, the Nazi period, I mean, just all of that. Growing up in an Orthodox family, you don't hear anything positive about Christ, but it's beautiful to read conversion stories about. One of my favorite is a book called Before the Dawn by a rabbi named Israel Zoli, who took the baptismal name Eugenio Zoli from Pope Pius XII, whose first name was Eugenio. And he was the chief rabbi in Rome in 1945, and throughout the Second World War, and was baptized in 1945, and lost everything, lost all his friends and his position and everything. And in this book, Before the Dawn, he speaks about an encounter simply seeing the cross as a young, as a schoolboy in a friend, a schoolmate's house, who's Catholic, and wondering, first of all, who's that? Why do you have a crucified man on your wall? And then wondering, is that the suffering servant that we read about? So, and then posing the question, and what he would do, he explains this in his book, during his life, he would pray on the New Testament as well as on the Old Testament. And so, whenever you find that openness to posing the question about Christ, the Lord will complete the work. And he, of course, plants the question, but it's humanly, the obstacles are arched. Oh yes, absolutely. Right, so it obviously depends on the family. And the more religious the family, the graver the effects, right? And so, Edith Stein would be a great example. Blessed, I'm sorry, St. Teresa Benedict of the Cross. Edith Stein before she entered religion, is a good example of that. Her family was very devout Orthodox family, and her mother just could never accept that. And so, very often what happens is they mourn you as dead. They sit Shiva, as if you had died. And now, in other, so my family, my dad's Jewish atheist. And so, that didn't happen. So, I think in secular Jewish families, there's much less of that social consequences. But of course, there are less of the advantages because in my family, I'd never learned about Judaism. And so, I didn't have that wealth of preparation that I would have had in a more Orthodox family. I wouldn't say atheistic, but sure, secular. Absolutely, secular Jews. And here in secular Jews in the US tend to be more atheistic. We've done our time. But I'll still answer questions anybody who wants. Okay, thank you very much.