NOTES for Rom 9:1-5

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.

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.