Israel, the Church, and the Family of God

Opening: A phrase you already say

Every time the Creed is prayed at Mass, you profess belief in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” What you may not often pause to notice is how thoroughly that Church understands herself to be in continuity with Israel — not a replacement for the people of God, but their continuation. The Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium devotes an entire chapter to “The People of God,” tracing a direct line from the covenant at Sinai to the Church gathered from every nation. This is not a modern accommodation. It is how the Church has always read her own story, and it turns out to be exactly how the book of Revelation reads it too.

This session takes on a passage that can sound, on first hearing, uncomfortable: Revelation’s sharp words about a “synagogue of Satan.” Read carefully, in its own historical setting, it becomes something else entirely — a family argument within the people of God, not a rejection of Israel. And it hands Catholics a chance to see, in Scripture itself, the same vision the Church has taught for two thousand years and reaffirmed with particular clarity since Vatican II.

The historical situation behind the hard words

In the Roman Empire, Judaism was a long-tolerated religion — Jews could practice their faith freely, provided they remained politically loyal to the emperor in other respects. Early on, Christians were widely regarded as simply another Jewish sect. But Christians refused to offer worship to the emperor, and that refusal put the wider Jewish community under uncomfortable pressure by association: if Rome came to see “Christian” and “Jewish” as indistinguishable, the toleration Jewish communities had long enjoyed could be jeopardized by a movement they hadn’t asked to be associated with.

This is part of why, in some cities, local Jewish communities reported Christians to Roman authorities — not out of some essential hostility to Jesus as such, but as a way of drawing a clear legal and social line between themselves and a movement that was making trouble for Rome. We see this tension surface concretely in two of the seven letters: Smyrna and Philadelphia. In both cities, local Jewish opponents actively worked against the church, apparently reporting or denouncing Christians for testifying that Jesus is Lord. That is the specific, local conflict behind John’s sharp phrase, “synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9; 3:9) — a description of particular opponents in particular cities, not a verdict on the Jewish people as such.

Notice, too, what John says will happen to those same opponents in Philadelphia: one day they will “bow down” before the church (Revelation 3:9). Read in context, this is not a picture of Jewish people someday submitting to an institution. It is a hope that they come to recognize and accept Jesus — the very thing the conflict was about in the first place.

The same dynamic appears in chapter 11. The two witnesses are killed in a city given the spiritual names “Sodom” and “Egypt” — clearly Jerusalem, since that is where their Lord was crucified. What’s striking is what is deliberately withheld: John avoids naming the city “Jerusalem” outright. Even in judgment, the text handles Israel’s holy city with a kind of restraint.

What Revelation never does

Here is the point this whole session wants to make unmistakably clear: nowhere does Revelation turn against ethnic Israel as such. Its concern from beginning to end is a person’s relationship to Jesus — not bloodline, not ethnicity. And far from setting the church over against Israel, Revelation consistently pictures the church as part of Israel.

Consider the evidence. The twenty-four elders around God’s throne in Revelation 4 are best understood as representing the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles together — one body, not two competing ones. In the New Jerusalem, the names of the twelve tribes and the names of the twelve apostles are engraved side by side, on gates and foundations alike (Revelation 21:12–14) — a permanent architectural statement that these are not rival peoples but one people, seen from two angles.

Even heaven itself is never portrayed as some placeless, generic realm. It comes to us as the New Jerusalem — an unmistakably Jewish image, rooted in Israel’s own prophetic hope. And nearly every honorific title the Old Testament gives to Israel is, in the New Testament, applied to the church: beloved son, bride, temple, kingdom of priests. Jew and Gentile together form one end-time Israel, gathered in Christ.

The Catholic Church’s own teaching says the same thing

If this sounds like exactly what you’ve heard preached and taught in Catholic contexts, that’s because it is. Lumen Gentium describes the Church as the People of God in direct continuity with Israel — a people whom “God did not choose… as individuals… but rather formed… into a people,” recalling how Israel itself was first constituted as God’s own possession, and describing the Church as the New Israel journeying toward the eschatological Jerusalem. This is mainstream, conciliar Catholic teaching, not a fringe theological opinion. Revelation’s own imagery — the tribes and apostles named together, the New Jerusalem as the shape heaven itself takes — reads like Scripture anticipating exactly what the Church would come to teach about herself centuries later.

And the Church has been equally clear about the other half of this picture. Nostra Aetate, promulgated at the same council, insists that the covenant God made with the Jewish people has never been revoked, deplores hatred and persecution of Jews in any form, and firmly rejects any reading of Scripture — including passages as sharp as “synagogue of Satan” — that would turn a specific first-century local conflict into a blanket judgment on the Jewish people. The Catechism, following this same line, treats the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people with careful respect, refusing any theology of replacement that would erase Israel’s ongoing place in God’s plan.

Put simply: Revelation is not asking the Church to choose between being in continuity with Israel and having genuine, historically specific conflicts with some Jewish communities in Smyrna and Philadelphia. Both things were true at once. That is exactly the tension the Catholic Church has learned, especially since Vatican II, to hold with honesty rather than resolve by favoring one truth over the other.

Living this

• Do I ever think of the Church as having replaced Israel, rather than being joined to it? Where did that instinct come from, and does it hold up against what Revelation and Lumen Gentium actually say?
• How do I talk about disagreements — within my own parish, between Catholics and other Christians, between Christians and Jewish neighbors — in a way that reflects family conflict rather than final rejection?
• Revelation’s harshest language was aimed at specific opponents in specific cities, not entire peoples. Where in my own speech do I collapse a specific grievance into a sweeping judgment about a whole group?
• Do I know what the Church actually teaches about her relationship to the Jewish people today? Would it help to read Nostra Aetate for myself?

Closing

The Church you belong to has never taught that God discarded Israel and started over with someone else. She has taught, from her own earliest reflection on Scripture down through Vatican II, that the Church is Israel’s continuation and fulfillment — one people of God, gathered now from every nation, its foundations and gates bearing tribal and apostolic names side by side forever. Revelation does not need correcting to say this; it is already saying it. Go from here holding both halves of the truth together, as the Church herself does: proud continuity with Israel, and humble care never to let old, specific conflicts curdle into judgments they were never meant to carry.

For preparation

Discussion questions:

1. Before today, how would you have explained the phrase “synagogue of Satan”? Does knowing the historical background in Smyrna and Philadelphia change how you’d explain it now?
2. Why does it matter that the twelve tribes and twelve apostles are named together on the gates and foundations of the New Jerusalem, rather than in two separate lists?
3. Read a short excerpt from Lumen Gentium’s chapter on the People of God (or Nostra Aetate, paragraph 4) together. What surprises you about how directly the Council speaks about continuity with Israel?
4. How can a parish hold “we are in continuity with Israel” and “the Church must never foster anti-Jewish attitudes” together, in practice, in how it teaches and preaches?

Hymn suggestions:

• “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” (with its echoes of the heavenly Jerusalem)
• “Jerusalem, My Happy Home”
• “City of God”
• A setting of Psalm 87 (“Glorious things of you are spoken, Zion, city of our God”)