Sunday, April 9, 2023

N. T. Wright on Romans 9:17-18

  

9:17-18. The same point is made graphically with another scene from the exodus narrative that of Moses before Pharaoh. Again Paul first quotes the passage (in this case, Exod 9:16) and then draws the implication. As with Israel after the golden calf, Pharaoh is guilty; God could have punished him at once, God has, instead, “made him to stand,” “raised him up” in this sense, rather than cutting him off instantly. The reason is so that God’s power might be displayed in him, and that God’s name might be made known in all the world. The moral Paul draws in the next verse shows that he regards God’s “making Pharaoh to stand” as the equivalent of “hardening”; Exod 9:16, that is, picks up 9:12 (“the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s hart”), itself part of a longer sequence (Exod 4:21; 7:3, 13, 22; 8:15, 32; 9:35; 10:1; 14:8; cf. Deut 2:30; Josh 11:20; Isa 63:17). What God has done to Pharaoh is not arbitrary. Pharaoh has already enslaved God’s people and resisted the call to set them free. God has in view not the protracted punishment of Pharaoh for its own sake, but the worldwide proclamation of God’s power and name. This is how the language of “hardening” works in at least one strand of Second Temple Jewish thinking. (See the suggestive 2 Macc 6:12-16: God’s suspension of judgment means that the pagan nations will thereby reach the full measure of their sins, v. 14; cf. Gen 15:16; Wis 19:4. Israel, meanwhile, though chastened, is eventually granted mercy.) We ought at this point to hear echoes of earlier statements regarding Israel’s disobedience (1:18-23; 2:1-11, 17:24), and to detect a line of thought that runs from those passages, through the present one, on to the decisive 11:25-26.

 

Paul is not, then, using the example of Pharaoh to explain that God has the right o show mercy, or to harden someone’s heart, out of mere caprice. Nor is it simply that God has the right to do this sort of thing when someone is standing in the way of the glorious purpose that has been promised. The sense of this passage is gained form its place within the larger story line from 9:6-10:21—that is, as part of the story of Israel itself, told to explain what is now happening to Paul’s “Kinsfolk according to the flesh.” God’s action upon Pharaoh was part of the means, not only of rescuing Israel from slavery, but of declaring God’s name to the world. IN much the same way, as Paul will explain in 11:11-14, God’s action at the present time upon Israel “according to the flesh” is part of the means of brining the gospel to the nations, of declaring God’s name—and, now, the name of the Lord, the name of Jesus Christ!—to the nations (10:9-13). This in turn precipitates the questions of 11:1 and 11, which deal with the problem that remains at the end of it all. Reading this part of Romans is like riding a bicycle: If you stand still for more than a moment, forgetting the onward movement both of the story of 9:6-10:21 and of the letter as a whole, you are liable to lose your balance—or, perhaps, to accuse Paul of losing his. (N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, 12 vols. [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002], 10:639)