The limp is not normal...

I was recently taken to see a film about a group of people on a long march. It was a bit gruesome for my liking. If a person slowed down too much, they were shot. It reminded me of the Nazi death marches of the Second World War.

One thing from that film made an impression on me that I cannot forget. One of those on the march lost a shoe. As soon as I saw the shoe break apart and come off, I shuddered. “Oh no!”

And, as you can imagine, losing a shoe has huge implications. One injured foot affects the whole body. You compensate. Your knee twists. Your hip tightens. Your back aches. After a while, the whole body contorts and moves unnaturally.

When I think about the church, I see God’s vision for her to have beautiful feet (Rom.10). But the reality looks far less pretty. The church has been on a 2,000-year journey, and we have been missing a shoe from almost the start.

A grotesque limp has come to be accepted as a normal gait. Jewish believers in Jesus have been absent, invisible or marginal in much of the church’s life for centuries. And yet the church has survived. Missionaries have been sent, churches planted, and millions brought to faith.

But survival falls far short of “life in all its fullness”, and mission can carry on while the body limps along.

This is what troubles me. The church is so used to walking wounded that it calls the limp normal.

God’s design for mission is very different. He made Israel so that the nations would know Him. From Abraham onwards, God had the Gentiles in view. Israel was created for the sake of the world.

At the birth of the church, God showed it when he had Jewish believers carry the gospel into the Gentile world. Jewish apostles, Jewish evangelists and Jewish witnesses proclaimed a Jewish Messiah from Israel to the nations.

God put the shoe on the other foot – the Gentiles began to come in. And in Romans 10 and 11, Paul says Gentile believers were meant to provoke Israel to jealousy, so that more Jewish people would turn to Messiah. And when that happens, Paul says, it will be “life from the dead for the whole world.”

Israel blesses the nations. The nations provoke Israel. Israel’s restoration brings greater blessing to the world.

That is the mission movement God set in motion. One foot in front of the other – walking together as one new humanity in God’s mission.

So what happens when the Gentile church becomes content with its own hop? What happens when we worship Israel’s Messiah while having little expectation that Israel’s children should come to faith and stand beside us as brothers and sisters?

The body limps. It’s only by God’s grace that it hasn’t fallen over.

The church loses more than a Jewish mission field. It loses part of the very process by which God intends to bless the world.

This is why Jewish mission matters. Jewish people need salvation in Jesus, as every person does. But the issue reaches further. Jewish believers are part of God’s design for the church’s global mission.

The nations need Jewish witnesses. God’s mission has always meant Jewish believers carrying the light of Messiah to the nations, and the nations calling Jewish people back to Him.

A church that imagines itself quite happily without Jewish believers in it has accepted a smaller, weaker, poorer, hobbled version of what God wants.

Ephesians 2 makes this plain. Through the blood of Christ, those who were far away have been brought near. The dividing wall of hostility has been destroyed. God has created “one new humanity” out of the two.

Jews and Gentiles together in Messiah – that is the healthy church that Jesus died to create, rather than the hobbling one-shoed caricature of the body of Christ we have too often accepted.

So what now? The church must stop treating Jewish mission as a niche concern for enthusiasts and agencies. We must pray for Jewish people to be saved. We must recover the expectation that Jewish believers belong in the heart of the church’s life and mission if we truly want to see a world transformed by the love of Jesus.

The church has limped long enough. Please stop calling the limp normal. It is time to live in such a way that Jewish people are provoked to saving faith and Jewish believers are welcomed to stand alongside Gentile believers as part of God’s one new humanity.

Then we may begin to see what Paul foresaw – life from the dead for the whole world.