New Philadelphia News Across the Pastor’s Desk A person recently asked me what Paul meant when he talked about “circumcision of the heart.” To answer that question we must look at the history of circumcision as the sign of the covenant God made with Israel. In Genesis 17 God gave circumcision to Abraham and his descendants as the sign of the Covenant God made with him. Abraham was circumcised at the age of 90, and all his descendants after him. In Exodus 4:24f after Moses’s wonderful performance before Pharaoh, God almost killed Moses because he had failed to circumcise his own son. The life of Moses was spared only after his wife, Zipporah, performed the deed for him. To most Jews, circumcision was the most sacred of rights, the very symbol of their relationship to God and their nationhood. There is a powerful scene in James A. Michner’s book, “The Source,” in which a Jewish father, Jehubabel sees his son Menelaus naked in a Greek athletic contest. It is bad enough that Menelaus is naked--something forbidden by the Law; but he has also had his circumcision reversed, which is an excruciatingly painful process, so painful in fact that it caused some who had undergone it to commit suicide rather than bear the pain of it. And this exhibition by Menelaus takes place at a time when Jews have been denied the right to circumcise their children in accordance with the Law. As he sees his son so disgraced, Jehubabel remembers the word of YHWH through Moses: “And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant …” Almost without thinking Jehubabel grabs a cane with a knob at the end and strikes his son Menelaus a blow, knocking him to the ground, and eventually killing him. I realized this is just a novel, but Michner’s historical research is impeccable. In the period he describes, the scene is well within the realm of possibility. Suffice it to say that circumcision was the foundation of
Israel’s covenant with God, without which, one lost all standing before God. Now consider that the first Christians were mostly Jews, and they were already circumcised. Then the second wave of believers came along, and many of them were gentiles, non-Jews, and the men and boys among them had never been circumcised. This created quite a controversy. Was it possible to become a Christian (and receive baptism) without first becoming a Jew (and receiving circumcision). Remember, Jesus the Jewish Christians were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, or king of Israel. According to Acts 15, the first apostolic council decided to allow gentiles to become Christians without first becoming Jews. In retrospect this action was extraordinarily farsighted. Today there are roughly 20 million Jews in the world, and 2 Billion Christians, a figure almost exactly 1,000,000 time as large. What if the council had not dared to make this bold stand? Perhaps you know the rest of the story. There was unrest in the church. Some continued to insist upon circumcision (Galatians 5:11, etc.) while St. Paul, the apostle to the gentiles and his disciples compared baptism to circumcision (Col. 2:11-15) implying that baptism had become far more important in the eyes of Christians, and eventually Paul expressed the idea that circumcision of the flesh, once something so critical to the heart and soul of Judaism, now had no value at all, but had given place to “circumcision of the heart.” Thus, in Romans 2:28-29 St. Paul writes: 28 For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. 29 He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. His praise is not from men but from God. What then is circumcision of the heart? It is nothing less than submission to God, and acceptance of the New Covenant he has made with humankind in person of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that the prophet Jeremiah prophesied this radical change when he wrote: 31 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house