NOTES for Rom 2:28-29

Perhaps the whole of a Christian's life consists in recognizing that we cannot be compared with God — in wisdom, justice or mercy — and in thanking God for being different from us and for all that He has done for our sake… And what is interesting is that God does not gloss over these differences. He does not pat us on the head, saying, ‘Oh, My poor dears! There, there, you are good all the same…’ No, our God is not like that. He does not hide from us that we are ill — in fact, mortally ill. He tells us outright that we are ‘evil’ (see Matt. 7:11). As the Apostle Paul would later say, echoing David, the king and psalmist: ‘No one seeks God; all have turned aside, every one has become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one’ (Rom. 3:11–12; see Ps. 14, 53). And Paul clearly recognizes that he is exactly the same (see Rom. 3:9, 1 Tim. 1:15). The Lord, however, sees us far better than we see ourselves. That is precisely why He can speak of what is good in us, despite the overall sad picture (see Matt. 7:11). And only He — who knows even what we can become — invites us to turn to Him all the same, asking above all for Him Himself and for His Kingdom. And He will not fail to answer our request: He will come and make each of us a new person (see Rom. 6:10–11).

According to the Apostle Paul, the voice of conscience resounds in every person—it is the natural moral law written in his heart, proceeding from God who created humankind. Of course, the Law given to Israel through Moses speaks more loudly, but what matters is that no one is far from the word of God. The problem is not that we do not know what is right, but that we do not follow the right path! Why? Because we are always seeking our own will rather than God’s; hence the deceitfulness and hardness of heart of which the Savior speaks.

From following the Torah Paul moves to another theme connected with the Torah: religion and religiosity. The apostle, as we can see, understands the difference between the Torah as a properly spiritual reality and the religion it gives rise to. Judaism as a religion is indeed unthinkable without the Torah. But the Torah itself is greater than Judaism.

Moreover, observance of the religious prescriptions of Judaism does not yet guarantee what the same Jewish tradition calls "keeping the Torah": one can be a religious person and at the same time a violator of the Torah, and then religiosity in itself loses all meaning. Or one can be not religious at all, like the Gentiles, but follow the "natural" Torah, and those who follow such a "natural" Torah may turn out to be closer to God than Jews who are confident in their religious piety.

Of course, when speaking of Gentiles, Paul has in mind not worshipers of some pagan cults, but rather those whom we today would call secular people, since most of those who were called pagans in Paul's time were religiously indifferent. There were, of course, real religious pagans too, but they would hardly have been among the apostle's listeners, and certainly would not have become Christians.

What matters to Paul above all is following the inner Torah, not the external forms of the Jewish religion. He understands perfectly well, of course, that precisely the attempt to follow the inner Torah will reveal human sinfulness faster than anything else, and this process itself becomes judgment for the person. But it does not follow from this either that the Torah itself is bad, or that one needs to sin deliberately in order to reveal one's own sinfulness to the end.

The inner Torah reveals it sufficiently as it is, and to sin consciously only means increasing the measure of sinfulness in one's life. One must simply not refuse the path that presupposes following the inner Torah, even if such a path becomes judgment for the person. And in this sense Jews as the people of God have an advantage over every other people: it was precisely to the Jews as God's people that the Torah was given for reflection, understanding, and conscious following.

Without the Jewish people, there would have been not only no Judaism as a religion, but also no way of the Torah, without which full knowledge of God is impossible. And if not all Jews walk this way, the way of the Torah is a matter of a person's personal, voluntary choice. A person can be forced to fulfill religious norms and prescriptions, but he cannot be compelled to take a spiritual path, to do the spiritual work without which that path does not exist. And even if many of Paul's fellow believers turn out to be merely religious formalists, their formalism in no way devalues either the Torah or the spiritual path that it presupposes.

As long ago as two thousand years ago, both the Lord and the apostle Paul warned us: always and in every age, ever since the Fall, human beings have been at odds with themselves. Now the mind is at odds with the heart, now the soul with the body, now convictions with actions, now conscience with the way one lives… Most people are desperately lacking in wholeness of life — a wholeness in which everything within a person is in its proper place; in which, as does sometimes happen, you look at someone and realize that there is something within them for which it would be worth giving a very great deal (see Rom. 2:29). There is an inner core, not fleeting or transient, but a true foundation that nothing can shake (see Matt. 7:24–27). Not something that merely seems unshakeable, but something that will remain so even at the Last Judgment. It is precisely for a whole person that ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no’ (see Matt. 5:37). If such a person teaches at all, they teach what they themselves practise. Their actions do not dishonour their faith and convictions (see Rom. 2:21, 24). Of course, one might say that, realistically, this picture is ideal and practically unattainable. But the difficulty is precisely that this is not so. Its being an ideal cannot serve as our excuse before God, because God knows that this is not so. He was human, and He knows from within that wholeness is possible. And it is precisely because Christ has opened the way to such a life for us that He ‘will judge people's secret deeds through Jesus Christ’ — the measure of our holiness.