Romans 15:8

Once more Paul urges both Jews and Gentiles to unity with each other. He agrees with the Jews that Christ was promised to them and came to them first and that the Gentiles were called later on, because of God's mercy. Nevertheless, both peoples have now been made into one.

Paul said this so that the Gentiles would understand that the Lord Christ had been sent to the Jews and so they would not be proud. Since the Jews rejected what had been sent to them, it happened that the gospel was also preached to the Gentiles, as is most clearly written in the Acts of the apostles, when the apostles say to the Jews: "It was necessary that the Word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you … judge yourselves unworthy … behold, we turn to the Gentiles."It also agrees with the Lord's own testimony, when he said: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" and: "It is not right for the children's bread to be thrown to the dogs." If the Gentiles think carefully, they will realize by their own faith, by which they now believe that to the pure all things are pure, that they should not offend those Jewish converts who, perhaps from weakness, dare not touch certain kinds of meat, fearing that it has been in contact with idols.

For I say that Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the sake of God's truth, to establish the promises of the Fathers. In what way Christ was a minister of the circumcision to establish the promises of the Fathers can be understood in a twofold manner. Either on the ground that he himself received circumcision in his own flesh, so that it might be most manifestly known that, coming from the seed of Abraham — to whom God had promised that in his seed all the Gentiles would be blessed — he fulfilled in himself the things that had been promised to the Fathers; and so that by this, according to the plan of the whole Epistle's arrangement, whereby he now curbs and restrains those who had believed from the circumcision, and now also those from the Gentiles who were exalting themselves against one another, he might teach that those who linger in the observances of the Law are not to be judged utterly, seeing that Christ too stood forth in his own flesh as a minister of circumcision. Or else in another way, so that Christ is said to have been a minister of that circumcision of which the same Apostle says: "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is that circumcision which is manifest in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit, not the letter, whose praise is not from men but from God"; and according to what the same Apostle says elsewhere: "In whom also you have been circumcised with a circumcision not made by hand, in the stripping away of the body of the flesh, but in the circumcision of Christ, buried together with him in baptism." Through circumcision of this kind, therefore, it is certain that the promises of the Fathers have been fulfilled.