Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 Commentary

God’s “mercy” (eleos) is the shining center and beating heart of this Sunday’s (strangely) divided Epistolary Lesson. After all, while Paul uses the word only in this text’s second part, it’s also actually one of the unstated themes of its first half. In that way, God’s mercy serves as a kind of bridge between Romans 11:1-2a and 29-32.

Romans 9-10’s Paul has been deeply grieving widespread Israelite failure to “accept the good news” (9:16). Israelites had “heard” that good news (10:18). But though God graciously “held out” God’s “hands” to them “all day long” (10:21), many of them remained “disobedient and obstinate” (10:21). These assertions at least echo Paul’s claims in Romans 9:1-5.

All of this leads to Paul’s logical question in Romans 11:1: “Did God reject [aposato] his people [ton laon autou]?”* Many of Paul’s Israelite contemporaries stubbornly neither sought nor asked for God. So did God respond by refusing to have anything more to do with them? Disobedient and obstinate Israel has willfully refused to faithfully take God’s hand that God has graciously extended to her. So has God discarded her like so much worthless refuse?

“By no means [me genoito]!” Paul answers in Romans 11:1. “No way!” it’s as if he says. The New Living Translation of the Bible paraphrases the apostle’s response as, “Of course God didn’t reject God’s people!” The strength of his answer at least suggests that he can’t even imagine a scenario under which God would reject God’s Israelite people.

As proof of this, Paul offers himself as an example of God’s persistent mercy to a stubbornly sinful Jew. “I am an Israelite myself [kai ego Israelites],” he continues in Romans 11:1, “a descendant of Abraham [ek spermatos Abraam], from the tribe of Benjamin [phyles Beniamin].” Paul’s Israelite credentials are spotless. Had God rejected God’s Israelite people, God would also have rejected him.

As if to emphasize that point, in verse 2 the apostle repeats his assertion that God has not rejected God’s Israelite people whom God “foreknew” (proegno). Preachers will want to note several things about that somewhat mysterious insistence. First, Paul begins it with “Not” (ouk). It may be his way of underlining the strength of his insistence that God refuses to reject Israel. It’s almost as if the apostle says, “No way did God refuse God’s Israelite people.”

However, the apostle’s assertion that God didn’t reject the Israelites God foreknew may seem theologically loaded. Some Christians may see in it further evidence of God’s predestining love. Paul may, however, be saying little more than that God “knew” God’s Israelite people long before the Christ-event.

There is real wisdom in including all of Romans 11 (or larger chunks of it than just the Epistolary Lesson) in this Sunday’s Scriptural readings. But preachers will at the latest want to pick up its reading again in verse 29. There Paul continues his theme of God’s persistent love for God’s Israelite people. “God’s gifts [charismata] and his call [klesis],” he writes there, “are irrevocable” [ametameleta].” Eugene Peterson’s The Message paraphrases this insistence in a particularly poetic and evocative way: “God’s gifts and God’s call are under full warranty – never cancelled, never rescinded.”

It’s worth noting that Paul again privileges the word he seems to want to emphasize here. He begins his assertion in the Greek with the irrevocable nature of God’s gifts and call. The apostle literally insists that “Irrevocable are God’s gifts and call.” God, in other words, didn’t just gift and call Israel. God also refuses to take away those gifts and that call.

The apostle at this point for the first time in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson brings gentiles into its conversation. In verse 30 he reminds his Roman readers how they “were at one time disobedient to God [pote epeithesate to Theo].” Earlier they too, in other words, refused to receive God’s grace with faith in Jesus Christ. In that way Rome’s Christians were once no more faithfully obedient than God’s Israelite people.

But, the apostle goes on to write, the gentiles “have now received mercy [eleethete] as a result of their disobedience [apeitheia].” Here he connects Israel’s disobedience to God’s mercy to the gentiles. But preachers need to be careful about claiming causality. In the Greek, after all, Paul doesn’t literally link Israel’s disobedience to the mercy God has shown the gentiles. His assertions are, in fact, parallel. The apostle literally tells his Roman gentile readers, “You have been shown mercy; the Jews have been disobedient.”

Paul, in verse 31, mysteriously adds, “they too have become disobedient [epeithesan] in order that they too now receive mercy [eleethosin] as a result of God’s mercy to you.” This again seems to link the mercy God has shown the gentiles to the mercy God shows to the Jews.

Wise preachers will admit that this is a very difficult passage to fully understand. The biblical scholar Ephraim Radner calls it a “knotted Pauline reflection.” The relationship between God’s mercy to God’s Israelite people and God’s mercy to gentiles is, at least for 21^st century Christians, hazy at best.

One exegetical and homiletical approach might be to peer at verses 30-31’s haziness through the lens of verse 32’s relatively clarity. Although as soon as preachers assert that, we’ll have to admit to an incomplete comprehension of God’s “binding over” (synekleisin) of all people to “disobedience” (apeitheian).

This is, frankly, an extraordinarily difficult concept to fully understand. After all, Christians echo the Scriptures’ assertion that God is never the source or cause of sin (cf. James 1:13). It’s, candidly, hard to know how to reconcile that foundational profession with Paul’s claim that God has somehow literally “imprisoned” all people in disobedience.

Preachers will need the Spirit’s help to sort out how to help our hearers think through this. One place we might at least start, however, is here: When God bound all people to sin, God did little more than simply give people what they desired. Humanity naturally wishes to sin. So God allows some of us to go on deliberately sinning.

But, of course, God does that, says Paul in verse 32b, so that God might “have mercy on” (eleese) “them all” (pantas). In other words, whatever the immediate cause of human disobedience, God graciously turns it into a vehicle for God’s universal compassion – a literal meaning of eleese.

That assertion of God’s universal display of mercy may make some Christians nervous – until we remember that while mercy and salvation may be synonymous, they don’t have to be. God can, in fact, show all people mercy without necessarily saving all people. Preachers will need the Spirit’s help to view and sort through this in the light of their own theological tradition.

What, then, might this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s proclaimers do with all of this? We certainly want to keep our preaching about it centered on God’s work. This text offers no ethical commands. Paul doesn’t specifically tell his readers to do anything here. He simply celebrates God’s persistent faithfulness.

Yet we might also see in this a summons to deep gratitude to our persistent God. Romans 11 points to a God who is profoundly patient with those who prefer to reject God. This text offers hope for even the worst of sinners. As long as we live, God offers us the opportunity to receive God’s grace with our faith.

Romans 11 reminds Jesus’ friends that this hope extends to Jewish as well as gentile people. While Christians have all too often violently rejected Jewish people, God has not. God longs to show them mercy through the saving life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How can Christians show Jews anything less?

*Here and elsewhere I have added the Greek terms in brackets to the NIV English translation.

Illustration

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour tells the story of Jim, his widow Annie and Sister St. Savor. When Jim takes his own life, the Roman Catholic Church denies him both a funeral mass and burial in its cemetery.

His widow Annie “well understood that there would be no rules at all if there were no punishment for failure to follow them. Like any good mother, the Church had to cuff its children when they misbehaved. Make the punishment fit the crime.

“He’d murdered himself and murdered something in her as well. Who could argue for leniency? Who could expect absolution? Sister St. Savor did, of course. But the woman … had a mad heart. Mad for mercy, perhaps” (italics mine).