Sermon by the Revd Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 23, 2026

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

There can be few chapters that have occasioned so much powerful and at times revolutionary theology, just think of Luther, as that of the chapter of Romans that we have heard, the 11th chapter.

And this is hardly surprising when we consider its place in the thought of St.

Paul.

Romans 11 is, after all, St.

Paul's culminating theological meditation on the relation of Israel, the Gentile nations, divine election, mercy, and the church.

It is also both subtle and profound, as it forbids both despair about Israel and Gentile Christian triumphalism.

For the God whose gifts are calling are irrevocable.

Those gifts that have ordered salvation history, such that disobedience becomes the occasion, not the cause or justification of mercy made available to all.

Structurally, Romans 11 completes an extended argument that began in chapter 9, thus having established that the gospel reveals God's righteousness impartially to Jews and Gentiles, the content in a sense of the proceedings of chapters 1 to 8, Paul confronts the apparent contradiction.

If Israel possesses the covenants, promises, patriarchs, messiah, and scriptural witness, how can so many Israelites have failed to receive Jesus as the promised Messiah?

Does their unbelief invalidate God's promise?

St.

Paul's answer moves through three successive and coordinated claims.

That Israel has not been rejected, Israel's stumbling is neither total nor final, that the mutual history of Jewish hardening and gentile inclusion will culminate in an eschatological disclosure of mercy.

This chapter, therefore, does not merely append a discussion, as it were, of the Jewish question in respect of Christ, tacked on to Paul's doctrine of justification.

Rather, it does something much larger, as it protects the internal coherence of nothing less than the gospel as a whole.

But just how to unpack all of this is theologically something that has engaged mightily generations of theologians ever since.

And one major result was the famous work on Romans of the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Bart.

And here, interestingly, recent work has shown an additional and important thread for the East.

As it has been argued by S.

H.

Ray that through Barth's great friend and fellow country church pastor in their early days in Switzerland, Eduard Turnsen, there was introduced an element of Eastern Orthodox thought in the form of Dostoevsky to Bart.

Now, Karl Barth, we have to remember, had been educating in the liberal Protestant tradition, the Richland School, but he underwent a decisive turn and crisis after 1914, caused by his rejection of his theological teachers for port of the then Kaiser Wilhelm's war policy, and his seeking an authentic Christian theology that was alternative.

But later stated he could not have written his Roman's commentary, as it later evolved without Dostoevsky.

Thus, by the sixth German edition of his work, in 1928, Dostoevsky cited more often than Calvin or Luther, especially in discussion of Pope and eschatology, the question of God, faith, and freedom.

As Dyos Dostoevsky made clear, the ultimate issue is not anthropology but theology.

God is God.

Humans are not man gods, as Rashkolnikov imagines, but creatures crying for redemption.

Tonessen detects then in Dostoevsky an eschatological tension that Bath would make central.

Salvation comes from God, not human projects.

Just as in the Grand Inquisitor scene, Thonessen reads the church's temptation, the church's temptation, to domesticate a conscendent God, to control him, and relieve humans of their God given freedom and responsibility.

Precisely the basis, as it turns out, in Bart of his polemic against liberal theologians and ecclesial accommodation.

While the figure, of course, of Father Zosima exemplifies pastoral wisdom that leads people back into life's questions so that they might find Christ.

But returning specifically to our readings, the two readings we have before us today are both deep and have each occasioned, as I say, profound theological reflection throughout the history of the church.

But they also belong together in a very interesting way, and illuminate each other.

Both direct the church away from confidence in itself and towards the prior, faithful and merciful action of God.

In Romans 11, we find Paul's final answer to the problem developed across, as I say, the chapters 9 to 11.

The gospel has been proclaimed as the revelation of God's righteousness for Jew and Gentile alike, received by faith rather than secured by works.

Yet this creates an acute theological question, as we have seen.

If so many Israelites have not received Jesus' Messiah, has God's word failed?

Has the covenant with Abraham been revoked by human unbelief?

Paul's answer is emphatic, by no means.

God has not rejected his people.

Paul points first to himself as an Israelite, descended from Abraham and of the tribe of Benjamin, yet called by grace into the service of the Messiah.

His own apostolic vocation is not an exception that disproves Israel's significance, but rather a living sign that God's election has not been annulled.

Paul then recalls Elijah, who believed himself to be the sole remaining servant in his time of the God of Israel.

The Lord answered Elijah's despair by declaring that he had reserved seven thousand who had not our me to be.

So too Paul says, there is now a remnant chosen by grace.

The remnant is not an elite constituted by religious superiority or some kind of group enjoying a reward for spiritual performance.

Rather, it exists because God preserves a people for himself.

Yet Paul does not stop with the remnant.

Israel's stumbling is neither total nor final.

It has become, in the paradoxical providence of God, the occasion for the Gentiles' inclusion.

The gospel has gone out among the nations, but that Gentile inclusion is not a replacement of Israel or a cancellation of Israel's vocation.

Rather, Paul sees an ultimately mysterious sequence in which Israel's trespass occasions riches for the Gentiles, and Gentile inclusion is meant in turn to awaken Israel to a holy desire for the mercy now displayed among the nations.

The Church's mission to the Gentiles, therefore, does not remove it from Israel's story.

It draws the nations in to that story, in to the promises, scriptures, patriarchal inheritance, and indeed the Messiah, each of which are people of Israel's gift to the world.

That humble and dependent identity is further illumined by St.

Matthew's Gospel.

When Jesus asks at Caesarea Philippi, What do you say, or whom do you say that I am?

Peter alone confesses, You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.

Jesus is not merely another prophet, thus, within Israel's history, he is the Messiah promised to Israel, and he is the unique son of the living God.

And that phrase, son of the living God, matters, especially when heard alongside Romans 11.

The God whom Peter names is not a newly discovered deity detached from Israel's covenantal history.

He is the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who made promises, called a people, spoke through prophets, and has now revealed his Messiah.

Peter's confession is therefore not a repudiation of Israel, but the confession that Israel's God has fulfilled his purpose in Jesus.

Christian confession cannot be severed from Israel's scriptures or from God's irrevocable fidelity to the people through whom the Messiah came.

Moreover, Peter's confession is not presented as a human achievement.

Jesus tells him, Flesh and blood has not revealed this to me, but my Father in heaven.

Rather later, St.

Chrysostom rightly emphasizes that Peter speaks truly because the Father has revealed the truth to him.

This is Matthew's counterpart to Paul's language of grace.

Faith is genuinely Peter's confession, yet it is made possible by God's prior self-disclosure.

Just as the remnant in Romans exists by grace, so the foundational confession of the Church arises from grace.

The Church does not create the truth that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God.

It receives, confesses, guards, proclaims that truth, because the Father reveals the Son.

Jesus then utters, as we progress through the Gospel, the famous and much controverted phrase, You are Peter.

Yet Peter cannot be separated from the confession he has just made.

He is the rock, in a derivative sense, the apostolic confessor, through whom Christ establishes his church.

And the implications here are clear and important.

Namely, that the church is not built on Peter as some sort of autonomous religious authority, still less on the capacities of any later merely ecclesial institution.

Rather, it is built by Christ upon the revealed confession that identifies him, that is, as the Messiah and the Son of God.

In the words of the hymn, in other words, the Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord.

This is also, of course, the context in which Jesus then gives Peter the keys of the kingdom and the authority of binding and loosing.

The language of keys evokes the delegated stewardship we find in Isaiah chapter 22.

Isaiah 22 · chapter mention

Authority under the reign of the Davidic King, not independent or sovereignty alongside or above him.

Binding and loosing signify the Church's real responsibility to teach, to discern, to forgive, to reconcile, to discipline, admit and declare what faithful discipleship requires.

Yet, this authority is ministerial.

Heaven does not merely ratify what earthly leaders decide, rather, the church is called to make visible on earth the judgment, mercy, and truth of heaven.

Its authority is faithful only when it remains obedient, that is to say, to the Messiah, whom Peter confesses.

Nor is this authority Peter's private possession.

Matthew 18 extends binding and loosing to the disciples in the plural, all of them, collectively, within the concrete life of reconciliation, discipline, prayer, and gathered fellowship, which is the life of the church.

Peter's commission is distinct, but it is not an authorization for isolated ecclesial dominion.

He represents the Apostolic Church, a community that receives authority from Christ in order to serve Christ's kingdom.

The church has keys, but they are the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

It has authority, but that authority belongs under the lordship of the crucified and risen Messiah.

Matthew teaches that the church is constituted by a confession made possible by revelation.

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.

Romans teaches that Gentiles have been grafted into a life they did not originate and must therefore renounce arrogance towards the people of Israel, to whom those earliest promises of God were made.

Matthew teaches that ecclesial authority is entrusted to apostolic witnesses, not to create new truth, but to serve the truth revealed in Christ.

Both of today's readings end by relocating confidence.

Romans 11 refuses to ground Christian assurance in Gentile success, numerical dominance, or theological self-possession.

Matthew 16 refuses to ground the church in Peter's natural insight, personal strength, or autonomous authority.

The church lives rather because God keeps covenant, reveals the Son, calls people by grace, grafts in the outsider, humbles the proud, and builds his church against the powers of death, upon which it will prevail.

Its foundation is Christ, his confession is his messiahship and divine son.

Its authority is delegating service.

Its posture towards Israel is gratitude, repentance, and hope.

And its final response is to the mystery of God's purposes, one best captured, of course, in the Reverend Doxology.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, ever shall be, under the ages of ages.

Gloria Patriot Filio et Spiriti Sancto, Securat in Principio et Nunc et Semper, et in Sicula, Syculor.