A Meditation on The Jewish God

in this time when Mary would be great with child:

...Christians are solemnly enjoined not to speak of the Jews as an accursed or rejected race, as if Holy Scripture had mandated one to do so. In fact, to so vilify the Jews amounts to an act of dishonor against Almighty God himself, for whom the Children of the Covenant are to remain forever a sacrament of his fidelity; the deepest, most abiding pledge that God's promised word, once given, will never be withdrawn. Here the conciliar text cites the Apostle Paul, kinsman by race to this people for whom he would gladly have suffered-yes, even unto final separation from Christ!--were the Father only to ask it. Paul's insistence on the truth of Israel's continuing proximity to God is unambiguous. It was God, he said, who called Israel to be his own, and "the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable" (Rom 11:29). [10] In other words, if God chose the Jews, a scandalous choice in its particularity of this people and not another, why would he, having thus chosen, ever revoke his word, the clearest and dearest sign of his eternal solicitude toward this People of the Promise?

The glory of Israel is neither ethnic nor racial but fundamentally religious: for two millennia all the revelations of God were entrusted to it. Can such a thing be said of any other people in the history of the world? And not just the words of God were handed over to Israel; the unheard-of enfleshment of God's very Word took place within Israel, within the womb of the Jewish maiden Mary. No other people can say that from the loins of its very life there once sprang into human being the Eternal Word and Son of the Father. "In this alone", says Daniélou,

there is a greatness that staggers our imagination and reason. All other earthly greatness is passing. The great empires of antiquity have sunk into oblivion; their monuments--attempts to defy time--are merely tombstones of bygone civilizations. The great powers of today will decline in their turn, but Jesus Christ will live eternally and will be eternally Jewish by race, thereby conferring a unique, eternal privilege on Israel...