On the Chosen People and the Universality of Salvation

Benedict opens the Synod on the Middle East with a homily on the nature of the covenant between God and man:

“Yahweh has made known his saving power,/ revealed his saving justice for the nations to see. /Mindful of his faithful love and his constancy to the House of Israel” (Ps 98:2-3). This then is the theme: salvation is universal, but it passes through a specific historical mediation: the mediation of the people of Israel, which goes on to become that of Jesus Christ and the Church. The door of life is open for everyone, but this is the point, it is a “door”, that is a definite and necessary passage. This is summed up in the Pauline formula we heard in the Second Letter to Timothy: “the salvation that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 2:10). It is the mystery of the universality of Salvation and at the same time of its necessary link with the historical mediation of Christ Jesus, preceded by that of the people of Israel and continued by that of the Church. God is love and wants all men to be part of His life; to carry out this plan He, who is One and Triune, creates in the world a mystery of a communion that is human and divine, historical and transcendent: He creates it with the “method” - so to speak - of the covenant, tying himself to men with faithful and inexhaustible love, forming a holy people, that becomes a blessing for all the families of the earth (cf Gen 12:13). Thus He reveals Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (cf Ex 3:6), who wants to lead his people to the “land” of freedom and peace. This “land” is not of this world; the whole of the divine plan goes beyond history, but the Lord wants to build it with men, for men and in men, beginning with the coordinates of space and time in which they live and which He Himself gave them.

With its own specificity, that which we call the “Middle East”, makes up part of those coordinates...