NOTES for Rom 11:13-36

No one knows the Father. But the Lord reveals His Father to us, and not only reveals Him but also makes us His children. At the same time, the Apostle warns us against exalting ourselves above those who have not yet accepted Christ. On the contrary, God's children should be characterized more by His humility and gentleness. The meaning of these words is often distorted. To learn true humility, as we read the Gospel we must gaze upon Christ, who is truly humble and gentle in heart.

Among modern Christians there is a fairly widespread idea that one union-covenant with God somehow replaces another. Thus, the covenant with Noah was replaced by the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Abraham in turn by the covenant with Moses, then by the covenant with David, and the pyramid is crowned by the covenant concluded through Jesus Christ, the new, messianic, and final covenant, which cancels all the previous ones, which automatically cease to operate with the coming of Christ.

Perhaps that would be so if the matter concerned only a legal contract. Then such logic would be quite understandable and absolutely correct: if changes are made to a contract concluded by the parties at the initiative of one of them, then the previous version of the contract automatically ceases to be valid. But in this case we are not speaking of a contract in the legal sense, but of a union, of relationships binding God with His people and with individual representatives of that people.

And a union and relationships presuppose a certain dynamism; they can and must deepen and be filled with new content as they develop. And in this case a new stage of relationships by no means cancels or devalues the previous one. At least as long as the previous stage or previous stages remain relevant for even one person. And even the coming of Christ and the nearness of the Kingdom change nothing in principle here, because concrete people are what matter in this case.

Of course, the approaching Kingdom changes many things objectively, but a person remains a person. And if there are people on earth who remain at the stage, for example, of the covenant with Noah, then that covenant itself will remain relevant precisely for such people. What has been said is all the more true with regard to the covenant with Abraham or with Moses: after all, the Torah entered the world precisely through the covenant with Moses, and it remains relevant for Christians too, if, of course, we are speaking of the inner Torah. But those who stop at the Noahic covenant, or, like most Jews in Paul's day, at the Abrahamic covenant, cannot be considered rejected by God.

The door always remains open for them. They have passed through some part of the path in their relationship with God, stopping at a certain stage; however, this does not mean that their path is finished. God is always waiting for them. And the apostle is convinced: when those who have stopped use their opportunity to move farther and enter the Kingdom, it will be a great day in the history of the Church and in their own history. A day comparable to the day of the universal resurrection from the dead.

The path Israel, God's chosen people, walks is difficult. Often this path is "against the goads" (to quote the Lord's words to Paul himself), a path of resistance to God's will. The apostle has already said much about this in his letter, and his pain for his kinsmen according to the flesh, for his brothers and sisters, is very great. And yet, speaking about the reasons that led to Israel's falling away from God, Paul persistently reminds us: yes, they fell away, but God did not take His election from them; God calls them, and Christ died for them as well. More than that, it is very important for the apostle to convey to the Roman community, and through it to all other Christians converted from paganism, an essential warning: one must remember the fate of those who fell away from God and draw the proper conclusions from it. And the chief thing from which he wants to protect the newborn Church is the disease of boasting.

Our personal encounter with the Lord is always an immense gift. At first we walk around stunned by grace unexpectedly received. I think we all remember the happiness of realizing divine love and forgiveness, on the one hand, and the undeservedness of this gift, our unworthiness, on the other. Yet human beings are made in such a way that they easily and gladly remember the first, and just as easily forget the second. And when we look at our brothers and sisters who for one reason or another turn away from God and fall away from the Church, we want to say to ourselves: well, that will not happen to me; it cannot happen.

And here it is, the message to us from the apostle Paul: "They were broken off because of unbelief, but you stand by faith. Do not be proud, but fear." Do not look at your brother's path; "before his own Lord he stands or falls" (Rom. 14:4). He has his own relationship with God, and the Creator's design for each of us is completely unique. Look at yourself, watch yourself, and fear falling away from the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

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.

If we do not read chapter 11 of the Letter to the Romans and take it as a guide for action, we will later sit at the end of the table and remember chapter 14 of the Gospel of Luke. And that is the mildest possible outcome. For example, God said to Abraham: "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse." And the Lord never breaks His word.

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.

In the context of the epistle to Romans, Apostle Paul answers by this sentence to the question to know how God could allow the Jews to refuse to accept Him. But everyone, who reads attentively the words of the apostle, the words knock out from under any foundation for the judgments of people. Suddenly it turns out that it is completely impossible to condemn whoever can be, because the one who condemns is also concluded in unbelief, just as the one he wants to condemn.

And there is another important aspect in the words of the apostle. We conceive instinctively the history of the world as being a certain process of natural selection, separating the good from the bad, sheep from the billy goats. That’s how our history schoolbooks are written.

That’s how we consider peoples and social groups. That’s how we consider ourselves and our neighbors. It seems to us that people live, trying to make a way somewhere, where only deserving particulars are admitted. There are sheep, and billy goats wish not to push through anywhere, but just burn the candle at both ends... But it is not like that at all.

All have gone out the way, each on his road. From the point of view of the growth to greatness, the history of the world from the beginning turned out to be unsuccessful. And that’s why, as a healing balm on the wound, mercy spreads at once on all humanity. That’s why it is impossible to measure, how much "you grow on yourself ", by looking, how low have fallen the neighbors.

Reflecting on the historical fate of his people, Paul does not separate them from the Kingdom to which he bears witness. He does not doubt that the fate of the Jewish people precisely as the people of God is by no means over, that the Jews stumbled on the way into the Kingdom not in order to fall and never rise again (v. 11). The history of the Kingdom is paradoxical: former Gentiles go there ahead of those whom the Savior Himself called first, and the Jews' unwillingness to be first on this path only heats up the enthusiasm of those who are going. But the apostle is sure that at the end of time, when the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness, his tribesmen will enter it, so that neither the fullness of the Kingdom nor the resurrection itself will be possible without their participation (vv. 12-15).

Paul understands that the people of God, conceived by God even before He created the world, were conceived by God as a people sanctified by His presence, "holy," and this holiness was not the people's privilege, but part of God's plan for the salvation of the world and humanity. That is why it is not determined solely by the historical fate of the Jewish people, within whom God always finds the remnant that corresponds to His plan for what His people should be. In the apostle's expression, the people's "holy root" has not gone anywhere simply because it cannot disappear. Its disappearance would mean the failure of God's whole plan of salvation, and that is impossible by definition.

And if so, then the branches too are made holy by the holy root (v. 16). Paul, as we can see, remains faithful to the prophetic tradition where the attitude toward Gentiles is concerned. The ancient prophets said more than once that in the messianic Kingdom, the remnant of God's people would meet Gentiles who sought the true God and finally found Him. But the apostle understands that God's priorities have remained the same: His people remain His people, and the salvation of former Gentiles is possible only if they acknowledge the fact obvious to Paul, that there is and can be no other people of God besides the one whose history begins with the call of Abraham. To illustrate this position clearly, the apostle uses the image of grafting and cultivating a wild olive tree, something that would be completely impossible if, first, there did not exist a "good" olive tree, a cultivated variety, and if, second, no gardener were found who was able and willing to perform such an operation (vv. 17-24).

As we can see, for Paul the history of the people of God is one single spiritual process, in which the fate of the Jewish people, the ministry of the remnant, and the history of the Kingdom become one whole.