The lessons for Sunday (semi-continuous series) seem to me to converge around the tension between law and grace, of reaching out beyond the boundaries we set for ourselves (albeit sometimes in the name of God, often armed with manifold proof-texts .) In the Genesis story, Joseph is reconciled with the brothers who had intended to kill him, seeing the hand of God in what they had done. In Matthew, Jesus is pushed to extend his mission beyond the "lost sheep of the house of Israel." And in Paul, we hear the climax of his argument that God can not abandon the Jews, regardless of their rejection of Christ, because God is compassionate. At least one modern commentator (T. L. Donaldson, "Paul & the Gentiles" Fortress 1997) finds this to be the heart of the letter to the Romans. In a very helpful analysis, Bill Loader wrote the following:
We see here an understanding of God that senses the incoherence between  speaking of love and grace in the present and speaking of permanent rejection (and punishment) in the future. Christians have mostly lived with this incoherence and it helps explain the incoherence of much that Christians have done throughout history: espousing love and espousing hate simultaneously, even making it the basis for evangelism through threat and for atonement through seeing Jesus' death as the buying off of God's unrelenting hate (or rejection) by having it imposed only on Jesus. These are crude notions which have the effect of legitimising hate. Paul prises open new possibilities by suggesting God continues to be characterised by grace even into the future and so cannot abandon Israel, any more than a good parent would abandon a child.