We the People: Israel and the Catholicity of Jesus

ed from the flesh of Israel, the identity of the people of God becomes a weightless concept, easy to lift from people, carry for a while, wield as a weapon, and leave behind for others to fight over. With the recent atomization of all identity claims, concepts of the identity of the people of God have grown particularly light. Identity is now something people can simply choose for themselves. Or it is their sexual orientation or socioeconomic status or profession or political party. All the while it remains their religion or nationality or ethnicity or culture. It is no surprise, then, that readers of the New Testament detect “competing identities” all over the place. “Israel” has come to be conceived and read as a weapon in this chaotic competition, supposedly available for rival communities or persons to deny to one another and claim for themselves as “the true Israel.” But if this were the case, then we would have in the New Testament a radical departure from the scriptures of Israel that it claims everywhere to be following (i.e., the Tanakh or Old Testament). As we’ve seen, “Israel” is no such identity in those scriptures. It is a people in the flesh, shaped over generations by the electing power of the God of Israel. It is not itself a concept and certainly not a weightless one. It is the name of that people. It cannot be lifted from those who have been seized by it in time. It is not predicated on any timeless purity of that people, a purity in and out of which communities or persons are supposedly constantly passing by virtue of their adequacy to God, now gaining, now losing their “identity.” It is not a self-constituted identity. Nor