I want to speak about our second reading today: 4 verses from the end of Romans Chapter 11. This is St. Paul’s outburst of wonder and awe and amazement; Paul’s bowing down in silent worship before the unspeakable greatness of God; Paul’s proclamation of his own invincible faith and confidence - even as he recognises the severe limits to what he can know and understand of the inexhaustible mystery of God. We have come to the end of the long doctrinal exposition Paul has been working out from the beginning of Romans. That started out (cf. 1:18ff.) with a bleak analysis of mankind’s rebellion against God. God indeed intervened, by calling Abraham, and making a Covenant with Israel, and by giving the Law to Moses. But in Paul’s understanding, all this failed to reconcile us with God. Both Gentiles and Jews continued to sin: so the divine gifts of law and covenant only made the situation worse. But then God sent his only Son in Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, whether Jews or Gentiles, through our faith and baptism in Christ’s saving blood, we are justified before God, made acceptable to him, able to enjoy his fellowship, and even raised up in Christ to share his divine and eternal life.
In the verse before our passage today, Paul seems to sum up all he has been saying in a brief formula: God has consigned all men to disobedience, he says, in order that he may have mercy upon all (11:32).
I’m reminded rather of the end of a Beethoven symphony. In its course various interweaving themes have been traced out, some of them quite dark; but then at the end all is resolved and drawn together in a crashing and triumphant conclusion. The audience is left somehow stirred to the depths, and also wonderfully uplifted. We know we have been confronted by something really great, something of transcendent beauty and power. We may not really understand it, but it has somehow put us in touch with our own deepest and best selves, and even somehow pointed us towards God himself.
So here. All that disobedience; all that wickedness; all that infidelity, among both Gentiles and Jews! And to both alike, in Christ, God has shown completely gratuitous mercy: responding to our sin as if with an explosion of blessing. And as Paul wants to insist: all along God has known what he was doing. In Christ God’s purposes from the beginning have been both revealed and accomplished. No sin, no human or diabolical action, nothing whatever has been able to frustrate God’s design. God has always been - and still is! - faithful, and righteous, and good, and merciful.
The 4 verses of our doxology today are very carefully constructed, with various interweaving three-fold or trinitarian patterns. The overall structure is three-fold. There are two exclamations at the beginning, and two at the end, and in the middle three rhetorical questions. The three questions echo in reverse order the three attributes Paul ascribes to God’s depths – βαθος – that is, his knowledge and wisdom and riches. Then there are three prepositions to sum up God’s greatness: from him, and through him, and into him are all things!
The instinct of the Fathers of the Church was to link these prepositions with Persons of the Trinity. The Fathers knew of course that God cannot in any way be divided. Nevertheless, by appropriation, or with a certain natural fittingness, they could say that all things are from the Father, and through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. Similarly they could appropriate God’s knowledge to the Father, and his wisdom to the Son, and his riches to the Holy Spirit.
It's worth remarking that St. Paul does not explicitly do that here, and in fact does not here even mention Christ. Every word of this doxology could be merely or purely Jewish. The whole text is anyway saturated in scriptural allusions: especially from Deutero-Isaiah (cf. esp. Is 40:13, 28) and from the Book of Job (cf. e.g. Job 15:8 etc). So here, as always, Paul writes as a Jew. His message is that what God has done in Jesus Christ our Lord is completely consistent and coherent with the whole of salvation history; with all the Old Testament Scriptures; with God’s promises made once and never revoked. And the climax or outcome of it all is God’s glory! Christ gives glory to God; Israel exists to give glory to God; let us all, then, who have been redeemed in Christ, and have inherited all the promises made to Israel – let us give glory to God: for his love and goodness and mercy and majesty and power and wisdom and greatness, world without end, Amen!
There are two little points I’d like to make.
First: universalism, or the idea that eventually everyone without exception will be saved and spend eternity in heavenly bliss. It seems to me that this is the fundamental heresy or error or temptation of our age. It’s very widespread; maybe even the default among many believers these days. But it radically undermines the whole Gospel, and makes Jesus, and Paul, and ultimately even God himself to be a liar. In terms of purely human reason: if everyone is automatically saved, then our life on this earth is trivialised. What you do and what you believe is ultimately of no consequence. So all our suffering is pointless; and especially Christ’s suffering is pointless. People sometimes try to use our passage from Romans to argue for universalism: but that is to go flat contrary to the mind of the Apostle. It would anyway empty out Paul’s insight of its depth and complexity, and reduce it to a banality. For St. Augustine, Paul’s confession of ignorance here is focussed precisely on the question of why some are saved, and others not. It’s a question, says Augustine, we simply can’t ask; God’s business, not ours; a mystery we should not even try to penetrate, as with Paul we simply take our stand in faith on God’s wisdom and justice and goodness and mercy.
Then: simply the greatness of God. We very much need to emphasise that these days. For so many Christian believers nowadays, the idea of God’s transcendence and holiness and power and supreme greatness has become attenuated. I suppose largely as a result of science and technology, we feel we don’t really need God. So whether consciously or not, we reduce God, and recreate him in our own image, and try to tame him. We want God to be nice; a benign and harmless helper and encourager in the sky. We imagine this nice God somehow wringing his hands helplessly in face of the evil of this world. Worst of all, we make God subject to the laws of evolution, suggesting that God can change. And if God can change, then so can the moral law, which is jolly for us, who often feel rather constrained by that.
All this of course is just folly and madness, and actually blasphemous idolatry! No: God cannot, does not change. Nothing whatever affects God: he is pure act, and the source of absolutely everything whatever. Nothing nothing nothing is outside the power and providence and will of God. God uses evil, which is merely parasitic of being, in order to draw even greater good out of it. We see that above all in the Cross of Christ. That is our constant reference point: in that we see God’s love, God’s supreme goodness; God’s justice; God’s mercy. To him then be glory and thanksgiving and honour and praise for ever and ever. Amen!