NOTES for Rom 11:25-29

The apostle is fully convinced that Christ's coming and the beginning of the era of the new, messianic covenant in no way devalues the path that was traveled by the people of God in pre-Christian times, and by no means closes to Jews the possibility of entering the Kingdom and the Church later. At the same time Paul says that first the Church must be filled out by converts from the pagans, must increase in number. And the point here is not that pagans can become some kind of example for Jews or convince them of something by their mass conversion to Christ, even if such mass conversion were possible.

The point is that only the fullness of the Church, manifested to the world, can be truly convincing for those who have traveled a certain part of the way into the Kingdom and stopped in the confidence that they have already reached the goal. The issue is, of course, precisely the fullness of the whole Church. A Church not reducible to any communal movements, still less to any earthly structures and institutions, but representing the form of the Kingdom's existence on earth and the space of relations uniting the faithful with Christ. Sometimes such a Church is called heavenly, sometimes mystical, and neither definition can be considered complete.

The fullness of the Church includes not only heaven but also earth, not only those who have already completed the earthly stage of their Christian path but also those who are still continuing it. And fullness in one part of the Church, provided there is full Christian life, is manifested no less than in another, though in a different form. Nor, in essence, is there so very much mysticism in church life: it is proper to a divided world, when inhabitants of one part of it try to peer into another to which they have no access.

But the Church, the true Church and not the human institutions stuck to it, is always open in every sense; there is mystery in it, but no mysteriousness or esotericism so loved by many mystics. This true Church in all its fullness can become for those who have stopped on the way into the Kingdom a stimulus for further movement. Everything else is usually unconvincing for such people. Paul knows this from his own experience.

The spiritual life and history of the people of God are full of paradoxes. And the main paradox lies in how God's plans are fulfilled with the participation of those whom He considers His own. Strictly speaking, the situation Paul describes with regard to the Jewish people in their relation to the Church is only a particular case of this paradox. The paradox is that God most often carries out His plans with the participation of those who, though chosen by Him, nevertheless usually turn out, in the implementation of the plan, to be more of a burden than a help. So it was from the very beginning of Jewish history, from the very giving of the Torah, from Sinai itself.

It began with the story of the golden calf, after which God makes a paradoxical decision: the people do not deserve to enter the land promised long before to the fathers, but they must go precisely there, to the borders of that very land. Because the land was promised to Abraham. Because this is God's design, part of His still larger plan for the salvation of humanity. And, of course, because Moses does not renounce his people and does not refuse to lead them further. There is God's plan, and there is someone who understands it enough to participate in it consciously: this is the necessary minimum for carrying out God's plan. And the rest of the people, what are they? A burden? No.

Rather, they are a field of possibilities. One can never be certain that these possibilities will be realized, but in the field of God's attention, or in biblical language, God's memory, they will exist until the completion of the present great spiritual age. Until the second coming. Until the moment of the full triumph of the Kingdom. Only then will it be time to take stock. So the Jews, too, remain such a field of possibilities. Most of them do not accept the Messiah, just as the contemporaries of Moses often did not accept his words and his guidance.

They are enemies to Christians simply because they do not want the Christian path, do not accept it, preferring their own path. But for God they are unrevealed potential, an unrealized possibility. This is understandable: no one who has even once participated in the carrying out of God's plan drops out of God's attention forever. And what His attention will turn into in each concrete case is known to Him alone. We can only wait patiently. Perhaps until the end of time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Gospel of Luke gives us a lesson in humility. Humility is the opposite of pride: it is not fixation on ourselves, but attentiveness to others simply because they are more important. But it is not deliberate self-abasement either, which is also, at its core, turned toward one's beloved self. True humility is one expression of love, and how hard it is for us to receive it. That is, it is given easily, since it is one of the chief gifts of the Holy Spirit, but we accept it with enormous difficulty.

Today's parable of the wedding feast directly concerns the question of life, joy, and love. After all, we all strive for these things. We all need them. But one fine day, or more often than that, we face a choice: where should we seek life and joy? We can begin to build our own life and our own happiness, whether family happiness or some other kind. Or we can go to the wedding feast, a constant Gospel image of Christ's Kingdom. The choice is entirely free.

When speaking of the Kingdom, Jesus never tires of reminding His listeners that they still have to enter it and that this will not happen by itself. For the sake of the Kingdom one must leave everything behind and be ready to take up the cross. These words of the Saviour were perfectly clear: His listeners still remembered how, a little over a century before the events of the Gospel, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus in the then independent Judea, those who took part in an uprising against the government and demanded that the authorities strictly observe the norms of the Torah in the country were crucified. The rebels wanted one thing: the Kingdom, the kind they knew about, of course. And for its sake they gave up everything. Their ideas about it bore little resemblance to what Jesus speaks of, but He holds up their determination as an example to His listeners. They truly did leave everything behind.

Not like the characters in Jesus' parable who refuse to come to the feast, for reasons that might seem perfectly reasonable, but still refuse and lose what matters most. Their places are taken by those who have nothing in this world and no reason to decline. Is it a matter of priorities? Yes, of course, priorities too, but not priorities alone. It is no accident that Jesus speaks of a feast, of the first and the last, and of the places that many strive to occupy even at the risk of being driven from them.

The Kingdom is not a place, a structure or a hierarchy. The Kingdom is a state in which one can abide, but which one absolutely cannot, so to speak, fix in place, however much one may wish to do so. The desire to occupy better or worse places comes from this. For in the Kingdom there are, in fact, no good or bad places. There is only one criterion: is a person in his or her own place, in the very place God intended, or in one chosen personally because it seemed more suitable?

This also gives rise to the question: should one go to the feast or to the field just purchased? The wedding feast is a symbol of the Kingdom. If a person does not know which to choose, it means that he does not know what the Kingdom is. If he did know, it would never occur to him to compare the importance of the life he lives with anything he owns. Life is fullness, whereas a purchased field, possessions and even family are merely derivatives of that fullness. What matters here is not to confuse the part with the whole or the principal with the secondary. Only one thing can help us do this: the experience of the true life of the Kingdom, that very life which is salvation.

The meal in the house of one of the Pharisees, because of its rich symbolic meaning--a feast as the Messianic Kingdom--immediately gives Jesus material for new parables about the Kingdom He came to proclaim to people.

Fish, as the saying goes, look for deeper water, and people look for a better place. None of the invited guests wants to sit with a man disfigured by dropsy; let him come another day, since seeking healing on the Sabbath is a sin. Feasting is best with friends and neighbors whom you know, who smell pleasant, and who will not let your rich dishes disappear without return; they too will invite you to a "return dinner." And if you are a guest, it would also be good to sit at the head of the table, closer to the generous host.

This is ordinary human life, but for every situation Jesus finds the apt word, without moralizing or angry denunciations. He simply, as if joking, shows us, sitting with Him at table in the Pharisee's house, the whole absurdity of our normal life when one looks at it "from the point of view" of God's Kingdom.

Jesus clearly does not encourage the struggle for first place. What about the last place? It is not hard to imagine an amusing scene: good Christians, following their Teacher's instruction, racing one another to take seats farther away from the stage, platform, pulpit, or head table. But is this what Jesus wants from us? There is, after all, only one first place and only one last place. And He does not tell us to seek the last place instead of the first. He seems to call us not to care at all about which place we receive. Indeed, He will have no difficulty finding us wherever we happen to be. If we are asked to move closer to the stage, that is no problem: we will move. But then, at least, we will not have to fight for this place that is more prestigious in human eyes, wasting precious time on trifles. Jesus does not care where we sit: He already knows our worth. Indifference to places, meanwhile, helps protect us from a sense of our own importance, which can sometimes be quite dangerous. For ultimately it is precisely this feeling that makes us watch the people around us carefully during a prayer gathering instead of praying, and note their mistakes, or what we take to be mistakes, with a deep sense of religious self-satisfaction. Thus, imperceptibly, we leave the path of righteousness for the path of sin and judgment and, admiring ourselves, pass by the Kingdom that is close at hand.

Usually people taking their first steps in knowing Scripture rejoice at the apparent clarity of this text. How good it is, they think, that "the one who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted." And they try with all their strength to learn the science of humility. But soon they discover that humility is not such a simple thing. That there is inward humility and outward humility. That there is humility as the antithesis of insolence, and there is humility as the antithesis of boldness.

It would seem that the ideal of humility is the Mother of God: "...let it be to me according to Your word (Luke 1:38)". But we address her with the words: "Rejoice, boldness of mortals before God" (Akathist to the Mother of God, Ikos 3). In other words, we must understand what true humility is, which at the proper time gives way to true boldness, and what is the desire to exalt oneself, whether before people or before God, for the sake of elevating one's own person. Here everything is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Let us reflect on this prayerfully.