NOTES for Rom 10:9-18

How can this be: there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, if for all nine chapters before this the apostle Paul has been explaining to us how differently they are called and how different each one's path to God is? It would seem that we have only just sorted everything out and understood how destructive the pursuit of righteousness is...

But this looks paradoxical only from the outside. Paul is quite consistent with his own logic here and draws a very important line: the line between human righteousness and the righteousness of God. If we exist within a hierarchy of human righteousness, it is very easy to decide that it is attainable. Just make a little effort: do not eat this, do not drink that, pray two times, three times, five times, and so on per day, give alms, and before long you may feel cleaner, better, and more correct than others. And from inside this human logic of ours it is not even possible to explain why this is wrong.

But if God is righteous in our hierarchy, we will never attain His righteousness. Divine righteousness is beyond our ideas, immeasurably greater than we are, because His righteousness is Love. Love for each one of us, such Love that through it He gives His Son to the suffering of the cross for the sake of each one of us. And then we become frightened by our wrongness before God, by our sinfulness. Then we see that we have no wedding garment, that we are unworthy even to come near Him.

But Divine righteousness is also Forgiveness, for the sake of which Christ descends into hell and leads each one of us out of it. One need only want it, only call on the name of the Lord. Simply call for help, understanding that by ourselves we can do nothing, but that all things are possible for us with Christ.

And then it does not matter where we are from, what path brought us here, whether we have lived our whole life in the church or turned to God two days ago. What matters is whether, even for a moment, here and now, we are able to become bearers of His love and His peace, whether we are able to love our neighbor and in this way let Christ act in us and through us.

In virtue of the cultural heritage, upbringing, education, we conceive religion as a system of measures and actions oriented to establish a link with the Invisible and find life not limited by death. Various peoples and various periods elaborated various religious systems. Some didn’t ascend higher than bloody immolations and establishment of relationship with God "by notions". Others thought till the notion of ritual purity and dedicated all the energies of their soul to avoid abomination. Others again, by inspiration of the Almighty Himself, could grow up to the level of the moral monotheism...

But the words of Apostle Paul "whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered", as all the whole New Testament, are strangely antireligious.

The apostle on a broader scale leaves no place for "the system of measures", for all these things, with which people try to attract the benevolence of the Almighty. Whoever, says the apostle, will call on the name of God, will find life. In the New Testament ( as in The Old Testament), God presents to us quite defined conditions, but these conditions are such that we are incapable to meet them without His direct participation. Of what stand these words of the Christ "be perfect, as your Father Who is in Heaven is perfect ". And you can perform that only with God, and for that, it is necessary "to call on His name", as says the apostle.

The apostle quotes indeed here the prophet Joel and repeats again his main idea, but already under a Judeo-Christian polemic. The Jews, being also people as all of us, thought God has definite national preferences. It means that certain people are "people led by God", and all the rest in comparison with them is not worth a row of beans. Moreover, the Jews had reasons for thinking so...

And the words of the prophet Joel repeated by Apostle Paul, became the motto of a tremendous Christian universalism. Nothing on earth, even the elected of your people, gives you privileges before God. But then and nothing on earth, except your personal sin, prevents you from finding God.

This universalism is one of the greatest gifts of God to the world, of which we could hardly appreciate worthily. In any case, without it, it will be difficult to us to execute His commandment to love one another, as He loved us.

It is impossible to believe anyone if no one tells you about that person. So it is with Christ: you will not believe Him or entrust yourself to Him until you become acquainted with Him. The main meaning of Christian witness is precisely to give everyone the opportunity to become acquainted with Him. Of course, acquaintance by itself does not mean that a relationship of trust will arise. In fact, acquaintance by itself does not obligate us to any relationship at all: how many people do we have to meet? Not all of them become our friends afterward. But much depends on what the acquaintance was like and what the communication was like. One can communicate in different ways: seriously, or superficially. And if a person does not want real, deep relationships, they will not exist even after a very long acquaintance.

One can know a person for years and still not know that person at all. It is the same with God: one can know Him, and not know Him. Trust is born from what is heard, and hearing from the word of Christ, or from the word about Christ; the expression used by the apostle can be understood both ways. In any case, one is not so far from the other. For behind the word about Christ, if it is heard and if one trusts the one who speaks it, the word of Christ Himself will then surely begin to sound, provided, of course, that the person is ready to hear.

And here problems sometimes arise. It happens that a person does not want to hear, because sometimes it is simply easier to pretend that nothing has been heard. Such a peculiar selective deafness is at times very useful to deceitful people. But conscious deceit is not always hidden here: sometimes a person unconsciously turns on this mechanism of a kind of mental filtering. For example, when he senses that if he takes what he has heard seriously, his life will have to change, and change radically. And he does not want to change, and is afraid. Then the protective mechanisms turn on, the very filters about which a person does not think and which he may not even know about precisely because they work automatically. Yet this automatic system is initially turned on by the person himself, by his fear or his laziness. Therefore Paul speaks in this case about human responsibility, for in the end it is precisely a person's position that determines whether mechanisms will start working in his soul that reliably separate their owner from God, from Christ, and from the Kingdom, or whether they will not.

Continuing the conversation about righteousness, Paul returns again to the theme of choice. For him it is obvious that the question of belonging or not belonging to the people of God is determined by readiness to accept the witness about the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world. Of course, no faith can be spoken of if there is no witness; witness remains the foundation without which there is no speaking of the spread of the Kingdom in our world, still not fully transformed (vv. 14-15). But, on the other hand, acceptance of the Kingdom can only be voluntary, and therefore each person decides for himself whether he will listen to the witness or not.

Of course, much here depends on the witness itself. It is no accident that the apostle speaks of faithfulness connected with "hearing," that is, with the ability to hear, and connects hearing with the word of God, with the revelation without which it is impossible not only to enter the Kingdom, but even simply to understand what is being discussed and where the witness is calling the listener (vv. 16-17). Witness to the Kingdom, by definition, is never a purely human matter; this applies both to the one who bears witness and to the one who hears the witness and accepts it.

But revelation is given only to the one who seeks a meeting with God and is ready to accept what God will reveal to him. It is no accident that the apostle speaks of stubbornness as the main obstacle to accepting witness, meaning not only the witness of the apostles about the Kingdom, but also the witnesses of the prophets of old about what God expected from His people in those days (vv. 18-21). As we can see, the reason for rejecting witness has been the same in every age, and in the end it came down to what the listener chose: his own ideas, or the generally accepted ideas, about God and about what He expects from a person, or the witness of those to whom the will of God had been revealed directly. Earlier the issue was the choice of a path; now the issue was the Kingdom. But both then and now, this choice determined a person's fate before God, and therefore his fate in eternity.

The prophet Joel, whom the apostle Paul quotes, speaks of “that day” when the Lord will pour out his Spirit and thereby make salvation possible. That day has now come, and Paul shows that salvation does not happen automatically, without our participation. What is required is not only our personal action—calling, believing, hearing—but also interpersonal action—preaching—which means that we are also needed for the salvation of others! Paul then continues his logical chain and directs us once again to the true source of salvation: ultimately it is not we, but God, who gives us his word.

Continuing his reflection on true and false righteousness, Paul says of his fellow Jews that they were very zealous in their desire to please God. The problem, according to the apostle, was that their efforts were aimed in the wrong direction, and the zealots themselves did not think about that (vv. 2-3). That is why the apostle prays for his fellow Jews: he feels sorry for them and sorry that so much effort is being wasted (v. 1). He speaks of the main problem with false righteousness: its adherents were, as we can see, sure that righteousness was exclusively or chiefly a human matter (v. 3). That is why they missed the main point: the crown and fullness of the Torah is the Messiah, the Christ sent by God, and without meeting Him such fullness is impossible in principle (v. 4). For Paul, righteousness and the Torah are inseparable from the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world, and every attempt to gain it in some other way is, for him, an attempt made with unfit means. Recalling the well-known summons of the Torah (Deut. 29:11-14), the apostle reinterprets it, applying it to Christ, to His death, and to His resurrection (vv. 5-8). For him, the Torah has meaning only when it helps one follow Christ and leads into the Kingdom. And this path is impossible without two things: faithfulness and witness (vv. 9-10).

Indeed, the inner Torah, about which so much was said in Paul's day in rabbinic circles, is unthinkable without unconditional faithfulness to God. And for the apostle it is unthinkable without faithfulness to Christ and to the Kingdom that He brought into the world. Witness, in essence, turns out to be the natural state of everyone who lives in the Kingdom. For our world, not yet transformed, the Kingdom is something of an entirely different nature, and anyone who lives by it will necessarily become an expression of the reality by which he lives. And if the witness is not only in words, if the witness is truly sharing in what he speaks about, such witness cannot be confused with anything else. For Paul, both faithfulness and witness turn out to be not so much conditions for gaining the Kingdom as signs of its presence, so that with a high degree of confidence one can say of everyone accompanied by them that he lives in the Kingdom. These are precisely the signs that distinguish the new people of God, those who live in the Kingdom and bear witness to it. And here there is no longer any difference between a Jew who has reached the fullness of righteousness and a recent Gentile who has received the Kingdom (vv. 11-13).