NOTES for Rom 10:1-13

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).

Paul recalls a passage from the Book of Deuteronomy that says the Torah is not in heaven and not on the seabed, that it is accessible to a person if only the person himself wants to follow it. The meaning of the passage is quite transparent: a person does not have to justify himself by saying that the Torah is too difficult for him, or that it is too high or too deep for his understanding. It can and must be in a person's heart and on his lips. Here it is quite possible that the issue is not only following the Torah, but also witness.

The apostle in this context allegorically interprets the words about heaven and the sea abyss as referring to Christ's death and His resurrection from the dead. By this he makes clear that people who do not want to see the reality connected with Christ and the Kingdom are, most of all, being dishonest. They precisely do not want to see what they could easily see if they wished. Paul also points to the reasons for this unwillingness. The matter is how a person understands righteousness. The apostle does not deny the zeal of his compatriots and fellow believers in what concerns God and religious life. But this zeal is often connected with a misunderstanding of foundational things. In particular, of what righteousness is.

Paul contrasts God's righteousness with human righteousness. It is obvious to him that the fullness and completion of the Torah is the Messiah, Christ. In any case, if we are speaking about the inner Torah: for the path of the inner Torah ends with a person's becoming a living Torah, and apart from Christ no one has ever shown the world an example of a living Torah. Therefore one who seeks the fullness of righteousness and the living Torah must inevitably go after Christ, if only he is honest with himself: for precisely and only together with Christ and in His Kingdom can he hope to find what he is seeking. But this is only if the search is honest and uncompromising. Meanwhile, in Paul's time it had become a commonplace of Jewish religious life to point to the obvious fact that the living Torah is an ideal unattainable for a person.

Everyone reconciled themselves to this as inevitable, making the inner Torah the goal, which was at least somewhat realizable in the life of an ordinary person. And righteousness came to mean not the unattainable ideal, but the real practice of real spiritual and ascetic life. Religious people approved such righteousness, although not all chose this path for themselves: after all, it was a kind of competition in which anyone could take part, but in which no one could hope to win the prize.

Religious and ascetic sport in a religious environment is an entirely respectable and encouraged occupation. But only until someone lays claim to the main prize. Until someone begins to play seriously, with the main goal in mind. At best everyone will look at such a person as a daring upstart, and at worst as an enemy of the religion whose boundaries he has outgrown, daring to do what others do not dare. This is understandable: the goal is always beyond religion. Any religion. It is in the Kingdom. Where Christ is, the Son of God, rejected by the religious people of His era, who preferred their religion to Him.

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.

The entire life of Saint Andrew the First-Called is described in this passage from the Letter to the Romans. In his own life, he experienced the principle by which this law operates: “But how are they to call upon Him in whom they have not believed? How are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” He believed and followed Jesus with astonishing speed. The Gospel gives us nothing but a single sentence from the Savior, after which Andrew and Peter immediately left their boat, net, and fish and went to catch people. Thereafter, although he seldom appears on the pages of Scripture, Andrew spent his whole life going out and preaching so that people might believe and, having believed, call upon the name of Jesus and be saved. The apostle’s life and death give us the basic rules of conduct for an evangelist: 1. Bring the Good News to everyone; 2. Remember that a person is free not to accept the message; 3. Do not expect visible and rapid fruits from your labor.