Lectionary Commentaries for October 4, 2026
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

In Matthew 21, the Evangelist has crafted an electrically charged reflection on spiritual fruitfulness and divine power. It sparks in the incendiary moment when Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree and it withers where it stands (verses 18–19). Next, Jesus’s confrontation with chief priests and elders about the source of his authority (verses 23–27) wreathes the temple in a charged cloud of ambiguity; lightning threatens to strike, but the reader does not yet know where the bolt will hit.

The intensity builds, arcing across a gap in Jesus’s next parable: two sons decline and agree, respectively, to work in their father’s vineyard, but their behavior in each case contradicts the intention expressed (verses 28–32). That lacuna turns out to be the weak point in the ecology of the system, the gap between heaven and earth across which the divine lightning flashes, illuminating the landscape of sin and threatening catastrophic consequences for those who do not understand the power of God.

Jesus’s parable of the vineyard is rich in intertextual allusion. It draws on Isaiah 5:1–7, an oracle envisioning the destruction of Jerusalem due to the corruption of Israel’s leaders. Jerome of Stridon (died 420) notes the potential relevance of Psalm 80:8–13, which describes Israel as a magnificent vine left unprotected and ravaged by enemies.¹ The stakes are high.

The affective force of the parable is generated in no small part by the contrast in verbs of tending and verbs of death-dealing. The landowner plants the vines and fences them to protect them from animals. He digs a pit as the winepress; we may imagine a treading floor and a lower central pool to collect the juice. He builds a watchtower to guard against thieves and marauding enemies. These details paint a picture of judicious planning and care.

By contrast, the vineyard tenants seize, beat, kill, and stone emissaries sent to receive the harvest, then seize, throw out, and kill the landowner’s son. Their violence is startling. For the preacher who wishes to foreground the gift of grace we have in Christ, the violence of the crucifixion is ready to hand; some interpreters suggest that Matthew’s changing of the Markan sequence (Mark 12:8—beat, killed, threw out) is designed to reflect Jesus having been taken outside the walls of Jerusalem before being executed.

The chief priests and Pharisees recognize that Jesus’s critique is directed against them, as leaders who have failed to yield the fruit of the vineyard to the One to whom the harvest belongs. Matthew cherishes the Hebrew Scriptures. His witness to Jesus as the Messiah is saturated with references to Israel’s sacred texts; Matthew underscores that Jesus has been sent not to abolish but to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (5:17). Matthew is likely writing to believers who identify as Jewish Christians. His critique is not against Judaism as such but against those, entrusted with the precious fruit of the Torah and the Prophets, who have not given the fruit to God.

What might have been the intended correlates in Jesus’s vineyard analogy? Jerome and many have understood the tower to symbolize the Jerusalem temple; the messengers represent the prophets sent by God over the centuries to reform the believing community (2 Kings 17:13–14; Jeremiah 7:25; 26:5; 29:19; 35:15; 44:4; see also Isaiah 50:4-6; 53:3-9).² It is certain that John the Baptist and Jesus are depicted in Matthew as rejected prophets.

Preachers might find generative the perspective of Hilary of Poitiers (fourth century) that the vineyard’s wall stood for the protection afforded by “the nobility of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; that the prophets were “a kind of winepress into which [God] pours the fruitfulness of the Holy Spirit”; and that “with the tower [God] has built the eminence of the Law, which takes us from the bottom to the height of heaven and enables us to fathom Christ’s advent.”³ Other readings, too, are possible.

Jesus excoriates the scribes and Pharisees as lawless “snakes” in the lineage of “those who murdered the prophets,” violent malefactors who have betrayed their community and will be sentenced to hell. Jesus’s blistering polemic concludes with a politically incendiary faux lament—“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”—and the trenchant observation, “Your house is left to you, desolate” (Matthew 23:29–38), echoing Micah’s searing oracle against the Jerusalem leadership (Micah 3:9–12, quoted in Jeremiah 26:18; see Isaiah 5:8–9).

Matthew weaves in Psalm 118:22 to undergird his Christology of a suffering Messiah: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Matthew 21:42; see Mark 12:10–11; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:7). In Christian tradition, Psalm 118:22 and Isaiah 53 have been taken as confirmation that the Messiah would experience violent affliction and execution. Matthew suggests that the religious authorities’ rejection of Jesus as prophet constitutes the grounds on which the kingdom of God will be removed from their oversight and given to others who can produce the fruits of that kingdom. Leaders in every spiritual tradition, including Christianity, would do well to heed that warning.

The question underlying Jesus’s parabolic teaching is as urgent today as it was in antiquity: How can believers produce the fruits of the kingdom? The preacher might explore this from several angles.

First, Jesus’s parable opens space for deep gratitude to God as the One who has tended the life of Israel and the life of the church: gratitude expressed in the believer’s spiritual practices, celebrated in the congregation’s public liturgy, and lived out in missional service.

Second, the preacher might lift up the unexpectedness of redemption in Christ, one rejected by systems fueled by the violence of earthly dominion. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” the risen Christ declares (Matthew 28:18). The matchless power of Christ is encountered in spiritual poverty, mercy, and peacemaking, as the Matthean beatitudes make clear—something relevant for the parable of the vineyard because of the culminating reference to persecution of the prophets (5:12).

Third, the preacher might seek to catalyze new energy for fruitfulness in their congregation’s ministries. The appalling violence of empires and malfeasance of leaders notwithstanding, the God who plants and tends every community of faith is mighty in love. Those who trust this will bear abundant fruit for the eschatological harvest.

Notes

1. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, FC 117 (Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 244.
2. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, 245.
3. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew, trans. D. H. Williams, FC 125 (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 229.

Isaiah 5:1–7 is a surprising little text that hinges on reversal of expectations. The form of the poem itself offers the first reversal. The poem begins with a misdirect: “Let me sing for my beloved, my love song concerning his vineyard” (verse 1). At first blush, this sounds like a tender song set in an idyllic pastoral setting. The poet speaks of a close companion. Often translated as “beloved,” the Hebrew word can also mean “friend.” In either case, the language is intimate. The poem fosters connection, inviting the hearer to listen with sympathy. 

Despite the gentle opening, expectations have been overturned by the end of the second verse. The focus has shifted attention away from the friend to his failing vineyard: “He expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded rotten grapes” (verse 2). This verse anticipates the poem’s conclusion already, in which a complete change in tone from tender invitation to harsh rebuke has taken place. We come to learn that the vineyard is a metaphor for the people of Judah, who are being indicted for their failure to enact justice and righteousness (verse 7). Yet despite the change in tone, the poet continues to emphasize the relational nature of the story, calling the people of Judah the Lord’s “cherished garden” (verse 7).

The metaphor of the failed vineyard becomes the second lens through which reversal is explored. The poet creates anticipation for expected outcomes through the image of planting and reaping. Ordinarily, the expectation is that a harvest will bring forth the fruit that has been sown. The text invites listeners to share in the hope for a successful harvest and the keen disappointment at the crop’s heartbreaking failure. The best location had been selected “on a very fertile hill” (verse 1). The owner had exerted maximal effort and exhibited good judgment (verse 2). Every care had been taken to ensure the best possible outcome, but the crop had not produced good fruit. 

The contrast painted between careful attempts at cultivation—clearing the area of stones, planting the choicest vines, and building a protective structure—and the disappointing results it produced are cause for lament. As a result, the once carefully cultivated and protected land will be abandoned and left vulnerable (verses 5–6). 

In the final verse, we encounter the third type of reversal, this time expressed through wordplay. We learn that the vineyard in question was not a garden at all, but God’s people. Surprisingly, it is the Lord’s expectations that have been thwarted. The Lord “expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!” (verse 7). One thing was anticipated (the enactment of justice and righteousness for the whole community), and the opposite outcome was experienced (bloodshed and a cry for help from the vulnerable). The text makes this point sharply through paired words that in Hebrew sound very similar: “justice” and “bloodshed”; “righteousness” and “a cry.” 

A gentle invitation to listen ends in sharp prophetic critique. The people have acted unjustly. Those in power have prevented the community as a whole from flourishing, despite God’s ongoing and attentive care.

Using the strategy of reversal helps us to notice several important aspects of the text. In the first place, we are invited to see through God’s point of view. We see God’s love and care for the vineyard, and we feel the pain of hope unfulfilled. The vexing juxtaposition between expectation and reality is presented through an anguished rhetorical question: “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?” (verses 3–4). Those listening must conclude that no more could have been done. 

The people of Judah are invited into the role of arbiter in a dispute (verses 3–4). The poet has presented the vintner’s case, evoking the hearer’s empathy. It is only in the final verse that it becomes clear that the case is being brought against the people of Judah. If they have issued judgment, it is upon themselves. Given the series of “woes” that follows these verses, the critique appears aimed specifically at those who have profited at the expense of others. This is a critique of those who have amassed land, expanding their holdings by impoverishing others.

We experience God’s pathos. We see an image of God as an attentive and devoted gardener. We hear God’s longing for fruitfulness and thriving. And we witness God’s anguish at hopes for human community that have not come to fruition. 

The use of reversal also helps us better understand the people’s offense. Rather than detail the people’s crime at length, the spotlight is on the positive care of God, who has actively protected and provided. We notice God’s care, choosing the best materials, providing safety, and cultivating a fertile environment that allows for growth. The song’s elaborate metaphor, then, serves as a mirror image for the people’s own behavior. It suggests that the hearers’ failure is a failure to exhibit care and protection for the vulnerable. They have failed to create conditions in which all can flourish. They have failed to take protective measures to guard against harm. The people have actively thwarted God’s efforts intended to serve the good of all. 

Thus, the harsh prophetic critique offered in Isaiah 5 is also an invitation. It invites us to share in God’s love for the well-being of all in our own communities. It asks us to celebrate with joy God’s creative work in establishing the conditions for flourishing. And it calls for us to seek ways to actively participate with God’s creative work in the world. 

The Ten Commandments present God’s gracious intentions for a divinely liberated people formed through the Sinai covenant. The Decalogue, or “ten words” in Hebrew (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13;10:4), sets high standards for the Israelites’ religious, personal, and communal behavior and still instructs us today. For example, a little-known dimension of the prohibition against stealing (Exodus 20:15) is that it includes kidnapping and selling people into slavery (Exodus 21:16). This prohibition underscores the sinful legacy of slavery in US history with which we are still grappling.

For both church and synagogue, following the commandments is a response to God’s freeing power. Jews were freed from Egypt in the exodus, and Christians celebrate freedom from sin in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Over the centuries, Jews have adapted the 613 mitzvot (commandments), originally connected to agriculture in the land of Israel and to the Jerusalem Temple, to changing cultures and circumstances. Christianity’s love ethic similarly reaches across the breadth of human life. Obeying the commandments signals acceptance of the moral life that honors the one God.

In response to a question about the greatest commandment, Jesus quotes two scriptural verses, one to love God and the other to love the neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:4–6; Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–31; see also, Luke 10:25–28). The Ten Commandments are organized similarly, with commandments directed toward God first (Exodus 20:2–11), followed by commandments directed toward other people (Exodus 20:11–17).

Most commandments are prohibitions, placing limits on behavior to promote reverence for God and the common good. Two commandments, to observe the Sabbath and honor parents, are expressed in positive terms (Exodus 20:8–12).

The tablets engraved with the commandments become a symbol of the Sinai covenant. They are placed in the ark of the covenant during the wilderness wanderings (Exodus 16:33–34; 25:16; see also Hebrews 9:4) and later brought to the Jerusalem Temple with the ark’s relocation (1 Kings 8:9; 2 Chronicles 5:10).

The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Bible, with variations (Exodus 20:1–17; Deuteronomy 5:1–22), indicating that they circulated independently from early times. In both cases, the Decalogue appears before legal codes from different periods (the ancient Covenant Code in Exodus and the later Deuteronomistic Code in Deuteronomy). This common introduction identifies the case laws that follow as part of the Sinai covenant.

In the New Testament, the Ten Commandments continue to guide moral behavior. When Jesus cites the commandments in answering the rich ruler’s question about gaining eternal life (Luke 18:20; see also Matthew 19:18–19; Mark 10:19; Hosea 4:2), the ruler asserts that he has observed them since youth.

Today’s placement of the Ten Commandments on capitol grounds, in courthouses, and in schoolrooms elicits a great deal of controversy. They are powerful symbols of a core commitment to justice, rule of law, and ethical behavior. However, in addition to First Amendment concerns within the religious pluralism of the United States, there will always be a sharp dissonance whenever the Ten Commandments are enlisted to support human institutions. The wilderness setting of the Sinai covenant ensures that ultimate allegiance belongs to God alone, not to any human king, empire, or government.

The Sinai covenant in Exodus 19–24 (see also Deuteronomy) follows the political model of treaties made by powerful Hittite and Neo-Assyrian kings, for the purpose of exacting submission from weaker vassals. The purpose of the Sinai covenant is radically different. Rather than enforcing servitude, God initiates the Sinai covenant by self-identifying as liberator of the Israelites: “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:1).

As an icon of Western religious and cultural heritage, the Ten Commandments may lull us into a false sense of familiarity. Details reveal that this composition is from a different time and place, requiring creative adaptations for today.

The biblical text itself depicts “all the people” as experiencing the unmediated revelation of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1, 18; see also “your whole assembly,” Deuteronomy 5:22), suggesting an inclusive audience. However, the masculine singular commands are addressed only to male heads of agrarian households that include wives, children, and slaves and who hold wealth in houses, livestock, and land. Are these principles applicable for women and non-binary people, urban dwellers, youth, and people with limited means?

The polytheism assumed in the commandment to “have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) is also foreign to modern Jews and Christians. The exclusive worship of one deity among many assumed in this commandment is known as “henotheism.” In Western contexts where monotheism has prevailed, allegorical interpretations are often offered. Idolatry is extrapolated to apply to anything that competes with God, whether wealth, fame, pleasure, or work.

Even considering the strangeness of aspects of the Ten Commandments, Christians are called to wrestle with their meaning. One way to deepen our appreciation and implementation might be to select just one of the ten for reflection over the coming year. For example, an individual or church might focus on the fifth commandment: “You shall not murder.” Most Christians do not think of ourselves as potential murderers, but Martin Luther’s explanation of this commandment is expansive: “What does this mean? We are to fear and love God so that we neither endanger nor harm the lives of our neighbors but instead help and support them in all of life’s needs.”

Wrestling with this single commandment challenges us to address matters of faith and civic life. As people freed by Christ’s grace, how do we direct our freedom toward helping and supporting our neighbors and ensuring that life’s needs are met? Such considerations might include access to mental and physical health care, due process for immigrants, availability of shelter and basic food requirements, clean air and water, gainful employment in an age of global capitalism and AI, and employing diplomacy to resolve international conflicts.

Despite their apparent simplicity, the Ten Commandments can lead us ever deeper into the love of God and our neighbors that is the Christian vocation. They are indeed words for life.

Psalm 80 is a communal lament.¹

It seems to have been written in response to a disaster, most likely the fall and exile of the Northern Kingdom.² The lament is dire, yet full of hope. Repeatedly, it calls on God to “restore” and “save” (verses 2, 3, 7, 19), to “turn again” (verse 14) and “give us life” (verse 18). The psalm opens with a plea to God, the “Shepherd of Israel” (verses 1–3), to restore the people. It names God’s anger as the problem, resulting in the suffering of the people (verses 4–6). There follows a plea for restoration (verse 7).

From the psalm blossoms into a parable of Israel as a vineyard planted by God (verses 8–16). In this retelling of Israel’s history, the vine flourished under God’s care and became a blessing to all around it. But something went wrong. God broke down the walls that protected the vineyard. Predators trampled the vines and ate the fruit (verses 12–16). The psalm concludes with a prayer for Israel’s restoration (verses 17–19), asking that God may once more shine on the people and save them. The lectionary text includes both the plea for restoration (verse 7) and the parable of the vine (verses 7–15).

The theology of the psalm is about God’s character. And here we meet a God unconstrained by the bonds of niceness. Here is a God of love who cares passionately how people respond to that love. Since God wants to be in relationship with Israel, it matters how Israel responds. Although God’s love (and not Israel’s response or our response) is fundamental, the human response still has consequences. As a lover, God has to “play the ball where it lies,” which is often amid the brambles and thorns.

At first God’s face shines like the sun, in life-giving warmth and holiness, giving the people life. That tender care is seen in God taking the vine out of Egypt, for no living thing is more vulnerable than an uprooted plant before it is transplanted into new soil. Such a plant is completely dependent on the gardener. So God cleared the ground for the vine and tended it. God’s blessing made the vine flourish and spread until it covered the land. This loving, tending, blessing God is what most people want to hear about.

Then the story takes a hard turn: God has broken down the walls of the vineyard, leaving the beloved vine to be ravaged by predators. What could be the cause of this sudden turn from the loving, protecting God to the angry God who breaks down the wall and turns away? Verse 12 asks why God has broken down the walls of the vineyard. Perhaps (as verse 18 hints) the garden is desolate because the people have sinned and turned away from God.

The preacher need not move too quickly to answer the “why” question. Part of the psalm’s power, writes James Luther Mays, is its “anguish and bewilderment” over the “contradiction between what God began and what he has now done, leaving [the vineyard] exposed for strangers to gather the fruit of the vine and for wild animals to ravage the vine (verses 12–13).” Put another way, if God is the problem, God must also be the solution. Thus, “the prayer concentrates … on the one thing and one thing alone—the divine Thou.” The congregation must look beyond even its own repentance “to a kind of repentance of God—his turning away from wrath to grace.”³

One of the most intriguing things about this psalm is in verse 14, where the psalmist asks God to “turn again,” or repent, and look with love on the people once more. For some, the thought that God might change course, turn around, or repent is disturbing. Yet the God of the Bible is emphatically a God in relationship.

And to be in relationship calls for continual adjustment, like sailing or gardening or parenting. If God cannot “turn” and “remember” us, then we are praying into empty space, changing our own minds perhaps but not communicating with anything or anyone beyond ourselves. There is hope in a prayer that asks God to “turn again.”

The image of God as gardener (vinedresser) and the people as the garden or vineyard is found in many places in the Bible, including two of the other lectionary texts for today. Isaiah 5:1–7 (often called “the song of the vineyard”) describes God’s relationship with Israel and Judah. This is reinterpreted in Matthew 21:36–46 (also Mark 12:1–12 and Luke 20:9–19) in the parable of the wicked tenants in the vineyard.⁴

Psalm 80 may be used together with the first lesson and gospel lesson as an enrichment to the biblical imagery of the vineyard. If used as the main text for preaching, Psalm 80 will easily support a three-stage sermon:

1. Thanksgiving for God’s love in the past.
2. Naming our grief in times of loss or abandonment.
3. Confessing our hope that God’s mercy will shine on us once more.

The message of Psalm 80 is expressed very well in a hymn from the Sacred Harp.⁵ The language is old, but the plea for renewal still rings true. In this hymn, “plantation” means any farm or planting and is not connected with Southern slavery. Here each person and congregation is a plantation, in which the gospel is planted.

Savior, visit thy plantation, grant us, Lord, a gracious rain.
All will come to desolation unless Thou return again.
Lord, revive us, oh revive us. All our hope must come from Thee.
Lord, revive us, oh revive us. All our hope must come from Thee.

Keep no longer at a distance, shine upon us from on high,
Lest for want of thine assistance, every plant should droop and die.
Lord, revive us, oh revive us. All our hope must come from Thee.
Lord, revive us, oh revive us. All our hope must come from Thee.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for October 5, 2014.
2. New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 4 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 998, 999.
3. James Luther Mays, Psalms, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 263.
4. New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 4 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 964.
5. The Sacred Harp, Denson Edition (Atlanta: Sacred Harp Publishing, 1991), 335.

Sometimes it is worth pondering what the lectionary reading excludes.

Today’s text from Philippians 3 picks up partway through verse 4—in other words, right in the middle of Paul’s train of thought. The first few verses of the chapter feature some rude and argumentative language (“Dogs! Mutilators!”). Omitting these verses certainly makes the passage easier to read in church. But it also divorces Paul’s theological argument from the real-life dispute to which it belongs. It makes it easy to forget that Paul was writing a letter—a letter that was not addressed to us.

Circumcision of the heart

At the beginning of chapter 3, the tone of Paul’s letter shifts so abruptly that some interpreters suspect that Philippians 3:2–21 was originally a separate letter.¹ Verse 1 is a warm summons to rejoice. Verse 2 is a sharply worded warning: “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!”

Labels like “dogs” and “evil workers” are all-purpose denunciations.² They tell us only that Paul was angry. “Mutilation” is more specific, and helps us understand why. The Greek word here is katatomē, which ordinarily refers to a notch or a groove or a sheered face of rock—in other words, the scar that is left when something has been cut. But here it is a play on words. Paul’s katatomē (“cutting”) is a sarcastic twist on the word peritomē—that is, circumcision.

The implication is clear: Beware the workers of evil and their false circumcision. Other Christian teachers have apparently been inviting gentile followers of Christ to be circumcised in accordance with God’s command to Abraham. As Paul’s heated language makes plain, he does not want such teachers to get a hearing in Philippi.

In retrospect, it is tempting to view the dispute between Paul and his circumcising rivals as a debate about how Jewish the gospel of Christ should be. I count everything as loss, Paul says—circumcision, Israelite identity, kinship with the tribe of Benjamin, legal observance, et cetera (3:7). Out with Judaism, in with Christ—this is how Paul’s language has often been understood.

When Paul was writing, however, no one could have envisioned a Christian gospel that was not also an invitation to join the people of Israel—least of all Paul. The question Paul and his rivals were debating is not whether gentile believers should become part of the family of Abraham, but how.

Here it is telling that Paul reserves the term “circumcision” (peritomē) for those on his side of the dispute: “For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh” (3:3). True circumcision, he implies, is a matter of the heart and the spirit, not of the flesh (see also Romans 2:29).

The basic idea was not a new one, nor was it unique to followers of Christ. Deuteronomy, too, had envisioned a circumcision of the heart marking a people who wholeheartedly love and serve their God (30:6). Jeremiah picked up Deuteronomy’s image and supplemented it with his own: a new covenant, written on Israel’s heart (4:4; 31:31–34).

Clearly, then, when Paul alludes to a spiritual circumcision, he is not criticizing Jews or repudiating Judaism. He is, rather, reiterating and extending an old prophetic dream. Paul believes that Jeremiah’s vision of a new covenant and a circumcision of the heart has now been fulfilled in Christ. To circumcise gentiles now would mean failing to recognize the new thing God has done. In Christ, God has already purified gentile hearts by faith and grafted believers into the people of Israel. Why initiate adoption proceedings for those who are already Abraham’s children (Galatians 3:7, 29)?

Losses and gains

It is in the context of this dispute that Paul begins to tally his gains and losses. The imagery of verses 7–11 is financial, with language drawn from the world of accounting.³ Paul’s qualifications and achievements as a faithful Jew would ordinarily be counted among his assets. But Paul has had a taste of the Spirit (3:3)—a down payment on the glory to come (2 Corinthians 5:5)—and he is no longer in the market for what now seem like “fleshly” commodities. The only acquisition he cares about is Christ.

So Paul compares the two sides of his ledger. On the one hand, there is the knowledge of Christ, which also means sharing in Christ’s righteousness, suffering, and resurrection life. On the other hand, there is circumcision, legal observance, his status as a Pharisee, and so on—in short, everything on which he had previously based his identity.

For Paul, the math is simple: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (3:8). The problem with the message of Paul’s rival teachers, then, is not that it is somehow too Jewish. The problem is that circumcision isn’t Christ.

One suspects Paul would apply the same calculation to the various trappings of Christian cultural identity. For example, to conflate racial identity with devotion to Christ is quite literally to put one’s confidence in the flesh. Such things are worthless—“rubbish,” as Paul puts it—compared to the knowledge of Christ.

Notes

1. For a summary of the debate, see Angela Standhartinger, “Philippians and Philemon,” in T&T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul, ed. Ryan S. Schellenberg and Heidi Wendt (T&T Clark, 2022), 356–57.
2. “Dogs” was not a term used by Jews to deride unclean gentiles, as many commentators have claimed. See Mark D. Nanos, “Paul’s Reversal of Jews Calling Gentiles ‘Dogs’ (Philippians 3:2): 1600 Years of an Ideological Tale Wagging an Exegetical Dog?,” Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009): 448–82.
3. Jennifer Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (Yale University Press, 2021), 71–73.