NOTES for Rom 11:13-36

Throughout the Epistle to the Romans, including today’s passage, the apostle Paul speaks at length and in detail about the destiny of Israel and the attitude of Christians toward it. Alas, over the past two thousand years the problem has lost none of its urgency, and antisemitism remains one of the serious spiritual illnesses of Christians. In ancient Rome, it did not yet have a distinctly religious coloring. But in countries belonging to Christian civilization—medieval Spain, Germany before 1945, and our own country—a supposedly Christian justification has been mixed into it.

The apostle Paul considers the problem of Christians’ attitude toward Jews from different sides. In today’s passage, he offers us an image important to him: the cultivated and the wild olive tree. Himself a Jew of Jews, the apostle understands the cultivated olive tree to mean both the entire spiritual tradition of the Old Covenant and, above all, the apostles and the majority of the first generation of Christians. They were all Jews, and it is to them that we owe our faith. If you, a wild olive tree, he tells us—Christians from among the Gentiles—have been grafted in where branches of the cultivated olive tree were broken off, then it is unseemly for you to exalt yourself over its whole root. Do not be proud, the apostle says, but fear. For we can fall away just as the Jews can.

In the spirit of the universalism of the New Covenant, the apostle Paul explains God’s severity and kindness solely by people’s falling away or remaining faithful. This means that national identity is irrelevant here. Every person, Gentile no less than Jew, can reject the gift of God’s grace. Thus, from the apostle’s point of view, antisemitism has no theological basis. It follows just as clearly that, like every form of xenophobia, antisemitism does not, to put it mildly, become a Christian.