NOTES for Rom 9:1-18

The Jewish people, like every people on earth, has its own history, partly conditioned by the same social laws by which the history of all peoples is conditioned. But besides this history common to all, the Jewish people, as the people of God, is part of another history: the history of the Covenant, the history of those relations of God with His people and with humanity as a whole that form an inwardly unified spiritual process. In this process, the Jewish people is the very axis on which everything rests and around which everything turns.

And in that capacity it will remain forever, until the Second Coming. But not everyone born a Jew automatically turns out to be a person of God. The history of Israel itself shows that the boundaries of the people of God and of the Jewish nation by no means always coincided. Strictly speaking, only after the Babylonian captivity, when Jewish identity became an ethno-confessional community, did it become possible to speak of the people of God at least formally: before the captivity, many Jews were essentially, and sometimes formally, pagans.

Moreover, such people were the majority then, which made the captivity itself inevitable. In captivity that remnant emerged of which the pre-exilic prophets had already spoken, and this remnant became the basis of the new, post-exilic Jewish people, which already existed as an ethno-confessional community where pagans, by definition, could not belong.

But then the Messiah came, and it turned out that religiosity alone was not enough: one had to live a full spiritual life in order to recognize Him and follow Him. And in any religious community, there are always more religious people than there are people living a spiritual life or seeking such a life. And again the selection of the remnant begins, now not according to a religious principle but according to a spiritual one: those for whom their own religiosity is dearer are not fit for the Kingdom.

But the covenant remains in force. God does not renounce an alliance once made. The Jews have gone farther on the path to the Kingdom than any other people, and no one will take that from them. True, in practical terms such an advantage changes nothing for them: what matters here is not going farther than others, but reaching the goal. This is what Paul hopes for and what he prays about. He wants the path his people have walked in part to be walked by them to the end. All the way to the Kingdom.

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.

In his letters Paul often says that salvation depends not on the human person but on God. Human efforts change nothing here and therefore are worth nothing. What does he mean? And does this mean that human activity in the matter of one's own salvation is useless? The question is not simple. In what sense does the apostle say that salvation depends only on God? Obviously in the same sense in which we might say that everything depends on Him. God in the world He created is absolute sovereign. Without His participation nothing good happens in the world at all.

That in which God does not participate directly automatically becomes evil, although this is not always visible at once. But Paul is speaking about the Kingdom. About God's Kingdom, where not only God's presence, not only His breath, but also His will are revealed in all fullness. By definition the human person is incapable not only of creating the Kingdom, but even of changing it by one iota if this change does not involve God's direct participation, the direct action of His will. Here the apostle is absolutely right: salvation is only from God. If He Himself does not open the doors of His Kingdom to a person, the person cannot open them by any efforts of his own.

And one can live in the Kingdom only with God's direct participation, in His immediate presence. But there is another side as well. Entering the Kingdom, becoming part of it, a person brings himself into its fullness. His own life. And the fullness of this human life depends not only on God but also on the person. And sometimes on the person more than on God. God is ready to open the fullness of the life of the Kingdom to everyone who seeks, but how much of this fullness a person can contain depends first of all on the person himself. God determines the measure of the fullness of the life of the Kingdom; we ourselves determine the measure of the fullness of our own life. The matter will not be delayed by God. It rests with us.