NOTES for Rom 11:25-36

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.

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.