NOTES for Rom 9:1-18

The Jewish people, like every people on earth, have their own history, partly shaped by the same social laws that shape the history of all peoples. But besides this history, common to all, the Jewish people, as the people of God, are part of another history: the history of the Covenant, the history of God's relations with His people and with humanity as a whole, relations that form an inwardly unified spiritual process. In this process the Jewish people become the very axis on which everything rests and around which everything turns.

And they will remain such until the second coming. But not everyone born a Jew automatically proves to be a person of God. The history of Israel itself shows that the boundaries of the people of God and of the Jewish nation did not always coincide. Strictly speaking, only after the Babylonian exile, when Jewry became an ethno-confessional community, did it become possible to speak of the people of God at least formally: before the exile many Jews were in essence, and sometimes formally, pagans.

Moreover, such people were then the majority, which made the exile itself inevitable. In exile the remnant of which the pre-exilic prophets had spoken was singled out, and that remnant became the foundation of the new, post-exilic Jewry, which already existed as an ethno-confessional community where pagans could not exist by definition. But then the Messiah came, and it turned out that religiosity alone was not enough: one had to live a full spiritual life in order to recognize Him and follow Him. And in every religious community there are always more religious people than people living a spiritual life or seeking such a life.

And again a remnant begins to be singled out, now not by a religious principle but by a spiritual one: those for whom their own religiosity is dearer are not fit for the Kingdom. But the covenant remains in force. God does not renounce a union once concluded. The Jews have gone farther on the way to the Kingdom than any other people, and no one will take that away from them. True, in practical terms this advantage changes nothing for them: what matters here is not to have gone farther than others, but to reach the goal. This is what Paul hopes for and prays about. He wants the road his people have traveled in part to be traveled by them to the end. All the way to the Kingdom.