NOTES for Rom 9:16

The apostle's words that God shows mercy and compassion to those to whom He chooses to show it, and not to those who deserve it or need it, may seem like ordinary arbitrariness, unrelated to justice and mercy even in the sense in which any normal person understands them. And perhaps it would be so if God's compassion and mercy were the same as human compassion and mercy.

In fact, however, there is a substantial difference between God and humanity in this respect. The point is not only that God's compassion and mercy have no boundaries or limits, while human compassion and mercy are limited by definition. The point is also that in God both mercy and compassion are not simply sympathy and understanding, as they often are with us. In God they are always effective; they are always a relationship that changes the person.

They change him so that in the end, when the person has been completely changed, he will be capable of full love and will need God's love, not His compassion and mercy. God's compassion and mercy are His spiritual tools, which He uses to pull a person out of the pit in which we all found ourselves after the fall. And since these are His tools and His work, He alone can know how, when, and toward whom they should be applied at a given moment.

And our ideas here may well fail to coincide with His plan. After all, one would have to know as much about another person as God knows about him in order to judge who at the moment most needs compassion and mercy. The same applies to who among the many in need requires direct help right here and now. Paul proposes leaving all this to God's discretion. In any case God sees better, and besides, one can be sure that He will succeed.

Beginning with chapter nine, the apostle Paul writes about something that has always been a matter of dispute among Christians. What is to be done about Israel? What happened to the promise? Why did Israel not recognize Christ? Who is better and more important: the converted Gentiles or the Jews who rejected the Messiah? Who is without sin? How should those who have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior regard Israel and the Jews? The apostle to the Gentiles will address all these questions one after another.

In today’s passage, two things call for particular attention. First, the promise given to Abraham is eternal and unbreakable. Nothing can make God unfaithful to His word. What was said once will endure for eternity, however much those to whom the promise was given, or those to whom it does not apply, may wish to cancel its force and forget it.

Second, Paul’s attitude toward his fellow countrymen draws our attention. Who among us is ready to say, “I could wish that I myself were cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kindred according to the flesh”? Is it within human power to consent to such a thing for the sake of those with whom one is connected only by the flesh—not even relatives, but merely a history, a land, and a tradition with which one is no longer united by faith? Apparently this longing to share the light of the Resurrection with those who seem to mean almost nothing to you is the principal mark of true apostleship.

Continuing the theme of the people of God, Paul again turns to the question of who belongs to it and where its boundaries run. The apostle recalls the age of the Patriarchs, when these boundaries were often defined by God in violation of traditional clan and tribal arrangements: brothers by blood turned out to be strangers in spirit, God's plans could be completely different even when the matter concerned closest relatives, and the most important role was by no means given to the eldest, as tradition prescribed (vv. 6-13). The ethno-religious boundaries of the people, which remain unchanged and unquestioned, may differ from its spiritual boundaries, and do in fact differ from them, which causes the apostle deep sorrow (vv. 1-5). But he understands that belonging or not belonging to the people of God does not depend on a human being or on human efforts (vv. 14-18).

This is not surprising: according to the commonly accepted view of that time, the creation of the people of God was already part of God's plans when He created the world. But when God conceived His people, He did not predetermine the fate of particular persons. He decided the question of who exactly would become part of His people, and how, on the basis only of His own considerations, known to Him alone. Now the apostle understands that something similar is happening with the birth of the Church as the new people of God: no human criteria, plans, or forecasts apply here. Even belonging to the Jewish people and to the Synagogue is not in itself a guarantee that a person will enter this new people. After all, the matter concerns the Kingdom and those who enter the Kingdom, and they are brought into it by the One who establishes His own deeply personal and absolutely unique relationship with each person who enters. One can seek an encounter with Christ, and one can await the Kingdom with trembling and hope, but whether the seeker will find what he seeks depends only on God's choice and will.