A Circumcision of Faith

The circumcision of every male child on the 8th day after his birth ranks as one of the central most important rituals in the Jewish faith. It is a ritual that is challenging to comprehend completely, and you can plumb the depths of its essence and implications for a long, long time. Even the wisest and most literate of rabbis struggle to elucidate its full meaning in ways that have intuitive value. In fact, you can ask 10 different rabbis and 10 different Christian pastors what it all means, and you’ll probably get twenty different answers with lots of significant overlap. But one of the elements that almost everyone agrees upon, regardless of their Judaism or Christianity, is that in the ancient Hebrew world circumcision served as an outward identifying marker for the children of Abraham, and therefore an ethnic identifier of the people of God. 

While Paul always affirms the Jewish importance of circumcision, he blows out of the water its relevance as an outward identifier of someone who belongs to God. He does this in several places throughout the New Testament, but one of the first places he does this in the Christian canon is in Romans 2:28. In that verse, he explicitly states that one isn’t a Jew just because he has an outward physical sign which correlates with an obvious ethnic and cultural practice. Instead, he argues that real circumcision isn’t outward, or even physical at all.  Rather, Paul says circumcision is something spiritual, and a matter of the heart. A circumcised heart is one in which the ugly and undesirable elements of selfish, deceitful character have been removed, so that Godly behaviors naturally flow from the center of that person’s being. A person who belongs to God is identified not by what they look like, but how their behaviors are shaped by an inner being that has been circumcised from spiritual dross.  Interestingly, this very clear statement on the nature of circumcision comes on the heels of another clear passage in which he strongly asserts that people often unwittingly fall into the sin of hypocrisy when they judge others without considering how they might also be falling prey to the same kinds of sins as those who willingly suppress the truth of God. One of Paul’s strongest statements in Romans 2 occurs when he says that those who boast in their knowledge of the law, but also willingly break the law, cause the name of God to be blasphemed among the Gentiles (Romans 2:17-24).  Here Paul says that when you boast in the law,  you are associating yourself with God because the law is a product of God’s mind and mouth.  If you then live in opposition to that law you cause others – who may already naturally know good from evil even if they don’t know the Jewish law – to scorn the name of God. In other words, when they see someone claiming God's name walking the shadowy path of hypocrisy, they naturally reject God's name. As unbelievers who don't know the law, the "godly" hypocrite may be the only direct knowledge of God they have. Living like the hypocrite is a breach of one of the more important commandments in the Mosaic law (Exodus 20:7).  It is using the Lord’s name in vain! Any person who has a life characterized by that kind of willful pattern does not belong to the family of God, even if they have an important appendage that has been visibly circumcised since infancy.

God does not look on outward appearances as necessarily valuable.  People do. Instead, the Bible is filled to the brim with the concept of a circumcised heart in which people produce fruit that evidences their relationship with someone who is far higher than the principalities of the world we presently occupy.  God wants to see a heart of faith that trusts him enough to be surgically rid of all of the rubbish he hates.