“My heart is filled with bitter sorrow and unending grief.” (Romans 9:2) How can such a gloomy statement so immediately follow the joyful outbursts of Romans 8? In short, the good news of Romans 5-8 has inadvertently created a problem for Paul. If God’s definitive act of rescue through the death and resurrection of Jesus is so completely true and sufficient and life-giving, then what is Paul to make of all his Jewish brothers and sisters who have not come along for the ride? If God’s love is indeed so unswerving, and if God’s claim upon his people is so permanent and without expiration date (which Romans 5-8 vigorously affirms), why does it seem like his commitment to Israel has expired?
As Romans 9 carries Paul into this theological mystery, he wrestles with it in a couple of ways. First, he makes constant appeals to Israel’s very scriptures. He immediately goes to the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He quotes from Genesis, Exodus, and Malachi. The title of “God’s people” was never meant to remain solely within the ethnic people of Israel (9:6-7). All along, God was clear that plain genealogy was never the basis of anything special (just ask Ishmael and Esau). And all along, God was stretching his calling to unexpected people. This is not a new development post-Jesus. This was always how the story was going.
Second, Paul establishes divine mercy as the central factor in all this. “I will show mercy to whomever I choose, and I will show compassion to whomever I choose,” God had said to Moses, now relayed from Paul to the Romans (9:14). God’s mercy is going to expand, not contract. God’s compassion is going to find more people to bless, not fewer. Jesus didn’t invent mercy. God was always merciful. That was always how the story went.
Oh, the beautiful, wonderful, frustrating, confounding, unpredictable, unstoppable mercy of God. It does not depend upon our good and bad actions (9:11, 16). We can neither choose it nor work for it. It goes where it wants to go. It does what it wants to do. It includes whomever it wants to include. That’s where Paul suddenly, abruptly swings our attention – not to the question of “who’s getting left behind?” but “who’s getting pulled in by the startling, unsettling mercy of God?” What parties have suddenly, graciously and mercifully found themselves at the table with Jesus? Who are the people that are now, against all odds, called his family?
This divine mercy is doing something that we don’t understand; it violates all our human calculations. It is doing something that we don’t always appreciate, because it is quite different than just adding up our good deeds, subtracting our bad deeds, and arriving at a reliable religious valuation. Part of us, maybe a big part of us, wishes that it did work like that. We want our calculating to add up. We want to have a basis for including some and excluding (or at least ignoring) others. But the mercy of God takes all those calculations and decisions out of our hands. And that mercy is more likely than not to bring more people to the table, not fewer.
Paul’s goal in Romans is to get different kinds of Christians together at one table in one fellowship as the one family of our one Lord Jesus. Finding out that family is bigger than we expected was always going to happen. So let us find excuses to include more people, not fewer. And when we find ourselves in fellowship with someone unexpected, let’s start by assuming that the mercy of God made it happen.
0 Comments