NOTES for Rom 16:1-16
Paul's letters often end with rather long lists of the names of those with whom God had brought him together in one way or another during his apostolic ministry. These names say nothing to us; they are not found anywhere except in Paul's own letters. His addressees were probably familiar with all the names the apostle mentions, or with the people who bore them. But what are they to us?
And yet the matter is not so simple. The Church exists not only in history, not only in time. It also exists above time. Above history. In the Kingdom, where there is no history as we know it, and none of the linear time to which we are accustomed. In the Kingdom, where no name and no person is forgotten, wherever and whenever that person lived, and wherever and whenever he met Christ and entered into the life of the Kingdom.
For Paul himself the Kingdom is an absolute and unconditional reality. And that means that for him there are no distances and no separations. Everyone with whom he has entered into relationship becomes his own forever. And not because the apostle has a good memory, though he probably had no problems with memory.
It is simply that all the relationships Paul formed with one person or another were part of the Kingdom. Because he had no other life. Therefore all of them belong to eternity no less than to time. Or even more: for the Kingdom is only projected into that stream of time in which we live, while in its fullness it exists where all such streams in all their multitude merge into the harmonious unity that we call eternity.
The uniqueness of relationship with each person and to each person is possible only from eternity, as a projection of relationships formed in eternity into that temporal stream which, through misunderstanding, we often consider the only reality. But for Paul the eternity of the Kingdom was far more real than the ever-slipping stream that we call reality. And in this eternity of the Kingdom he remembers all those with whom God brought him together and clearly sees all whom he remembers.