NOTES for Rom 11:29

God's gifts and calling go together, as a pair. This means, first, that God's calling is not impossible for us, because it is always accompanied by the corresponding gifts He gives. Second, God's gifts are never meaningless or aimless, for they are given for the fulfillment of a definite calling.

And besides, let us reflect on the irrevocability of the gifts and the calling. As a rule, we are inclined toward one of two extremes: either to think that God is so much master of His promises that "if He wanted, He gave, and if He wanted, He took back," or to think that once He has promised, it is already "in our pocket," whatever we do. In fact here, as always, there is a paradox. God is faithful to His promises and does not cancel them, but in the fulfillment of promises, both about gifts and about calling, there are always two sides: His giving and our receiving. His giving is irrevocable, but the second side is also necessary: our consent to receive both the gifts and the calling.

Speaking about the salvation of his people, Paul connects it with the end of time, with that triumph of the Kingdom which is impossible without the participation in it of the people of God in their fullness. The apostle understands perfectly well that the main meaning of the present age is the coming of the Kingdom, which is being revealed in the world more and more fully. Each person's attitude toward this process is determined only by that person's own choice, so Jews, like representatives of any other people, can turn out to be either its participants or its opponents, and Paul is forced to note with sorrow that most of his fellow countrymen chose the second (v. 28). Their own religion and tradition proved more important to them than the Kingdom.

But in an eschatological perspective, what matters is not only the choice of a particular person, which determines above all that person's own path, but also God's plan for His people, which can radically change the fate of everyone connected with them. God does not change promises once given and does not break covenants once made; therefore His covenant with the Jewish people continues to be in force, and the destiny of everyone who belongs to the Jewish people cannot be considered outside the context of this covenant, which has by no means been broken (vv. 28-29).

The apostle hopes that the Savior's return at the end of time will become for the Jewish people what God's visitation became for them during the Babylonian exile. There in Babylon, the history of pre-exilic Jewry truly ended; but precisely there, in Babylon, during the exile, a new Jewry was born in a miraculous way, simply because God had not abandoned the remnant of His people, and all Jewish history of the following centuries goes back to it. And just as everything that happened then happened only because God does not change His plans for His people, so at the Savior's return the history of the Jewish people will begin anew with their transformation, precisely because God is faithful to His promises and to the covenants He has made (vv. 25-27).

In the end, no person and no people has earned the Kingdom; all alike receive it by God's mercy (vv. 30-32). If that is so, then only at the end of time, when the Savior returns and the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness, will the destiny of every person and every people be determined.

We live in a world where everyone is for himself. In our life the main thing is to become independent; we so love to speak about independence. In this world each of us is like a tiny particle going its own way. In this atomized society, the most important thing disappears, the thing that makes a person human: mercy, compassion, a sense of responsibility for those nearby. Somewhere something terrible is happening, people are dying, but our concern lasts exactly as long as a news broadcast. At best, another half hour; at the very best, a couple of days. After all, it is somewhere over there; it has no relation to us. More than that, the contemplation of someone else's misfortune, someone else's catastrophe, replaces compassion in us.

But however many walls we build to separate ourselves from other people, however much we try to shut ourselves up in our cozy little world, we will not cancel the fact that the Lord intended our world in a completely different way. In reality we are all connected with one another, and something terrible happening at the other end of the world still concerns us, because the death of each of us changes our world irreparably. More than that, the fact that our world presents such a sad sight is also our fault, our responsibility. This does not mean that we should tear our hair out or fall into depression, but it does mean that we must recognize the measure of our personal responsibility and try not to shift it onto others. And even in those moments when we can do nothing to help, we can always pray for others.

If we do not read chapter 11 of the Letter to the Romans and take it as a guide for action, we will later sit at the end of the table and remember chapter 14 of the Gospel of Luke. And that is the mildest possible outcome. For example, God said to Abraham: "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse." And the Lord never breaks His word.

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.