Against the Jews

Contents

1. 1The preacher asks his hearers, as Christ's heirs, to understand by the Spirit the new testament by which the inheritance passes to the Gentiles.
2. 2The preacher traces God's covenants from Adam to Noah, Abraham, and Moses, and charges Israel with rejecting God and persecuting the prophets who foretold Christ.
3. 3Because Israel killed the Son, as the wicked tenants did in the parable, the Son wrote a new testament and disinherited them, as Isaiah foretold.
4. 4The preacher contrasts the grief of creation at Christ's death with the people's unconcern, and Pilate's washing of his hands with the crowd's cry for his blood.
5. 5God rejected the festivals in which Christ was killed, and the risen Christ opened his new testament and invited all nations and all kinds of people to the inheritance.
6. 6Sinners and the lowly are welcome, while those who rejected Christ for Caesar were handed over to conquest, as Isaiah foretold, and God's strength passed to the nations.
7. 7The kingdom has passed from Jerusalem to the Gentile church, which carries Christ's cross, while Israel has lost its temple treasures and land and wanders in exile.
8. 8God still offers Israel forgiveness if it repents, and the Gentiles are to open Israel's own Scriptures to it.
9. 9Israel is invited to believe its own Scriptures, which foretell the law going out from Zion to the nations and God's reversal of the great and the humble.
10. 10The unlearned Gentile believers now teach the Scriptures to Israel's learned, who come to baptism and the Eucharist and take their place under a young minister.