Paul's letters often end with rather long lists of the names of those with whom God had brought him together in one way or another during his apostolic ministry. These names say nothing to us; they are not found anywhere except in Paul's own letters. His addressees were probably familiar with all the names the apostle mentions, or with the people who bore them. But what are they to us?

And yet the matter is not so simple. The Church exists not only in history, not only in time. It also exists above time. Above history. In the Kingdom, where there is no history as we know it, and none of the linear time to which we are accustomed. In the Kingdom, where no name and no person is forgotten, wherever and whenever that person lived, and wherever and whenever he met Christ and entered into the life of the Kingdom.

For Paul himself the Kingdom is an absolute and unconditional reality. And that means that for him there are no distances and no separations. Everyone with whom he has entered into relationship becomes his own forever. And not because the apostle has a good memory, though he probably had no problems with memory.

It is simply that all the relationships Paul formed with one person or another were part of the Kingdom. Because he had no other life. Therefore all of them belong to eternity no less than to time. Or even more: for the Kingdom is only projected into that stream of time in which we live, while in its fullness it exists where all such streams in all their multitude merge into the harmonious unity that we call eternity.

The uniqueness of relationship with each person and to each person is possible only from eternity, as a projection of relationships formed in eternity into that temporal stream which, through misunderstanding, we often consider the only reality. But for Paul the eternity of the Kingdom was far more real than the ever-slipping stream that we call reality. And in this eternity of the Kingdom he remembers all those with whom God brought him together and clearly sees all whom he remembers.

Passing on greetings and introducing those whom he wanted to introduce to the Roman Christians, Paul probably does not accidentally mention each person's merits and the role each of those introduced played in his life and ministry. After all, the ministry both of Paul himself and of those whom he introduces to the Roman church (as well as those to whom he sends greetings) was not simply church ministry. Above all, it was witness to the Kingdom and witness of the Kingdom. And such shared witness is what binds Christians in our not yet fully transformed world.

Properly speaking, only such a bond can be called spiritual in the strict sense of the word. In fact, any relationships between people in our transforming world remain purely natural, a matter of nature, until the breath of Christ and the Kingdom enters them, the breath that is, properly speaking, the "spirit" mentioned in the familiar Russian Synodal translation. And the breath of the Kingdom can enter interpersonal relationships only when the very life of those whom these relationships bind belongs to the Kingdom.

But in our not yet fully transformed world, to live in the Kingdom means to bear witness; it cannot be otherwise, for the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world is "not of this world." The world can see it only thanks to those who, like Jesus Himself, show it to the world. And the world also looks at the relationships of such witnesses with one another as witness, because if a person has become a witness of the Kingdom, his whole life becomes witness. Therefore any relationships of Christians with one another become a joint witness to the Kingdom, not only when two people preach together or carry out some other church ministry, but also when they simply appear together before people's eyes.

One could say that the very coexistence of Christians becomes a witness (or, if they forget this, an anti-witness) of the Kingdom. And Paul, understanding this perfectly, recalls above all those moments of common witness in which, as is clear, his connection with those he mentions in his letter was most vividly revealed. So even greetings and introductions become, under his pen, a witness to the Kingdom.

The final passage, which concludes the reading of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, may seem somewhat “technical.” From the depths of theology, the apostle turns to many specific people, mainly sending them greetings. But as in the biblical genealogies, there is an important meaning in this list of greetings.

When Christian doctrine is presented systematically in a textbook of dogmatic theology, it looks rather ponderous and carries a strong air of abstraction. This is, of course, a problem with textbooks rather than doctrine, but still... The list of greetings at the end of the letter to the Romans immediately brings all the apostle’s theological thought into the context of the real Church. Everything he said earlier ceases to be a stream of profound ideas and becomes something practical, passed from one person to others so that they may live by it.

Moreover, practically all the people mentioned by the apostle are united by one thing: they belong to the Church. Each in a different way, they serve to build it up. This service is no less important than Paul’s theological discourse, which without it would indeed risk becoming an abstraction.