NOTES for Rom 8:11

What is that Kingdom which Jesus brought into the world? In brief, it is a space filled with the breath of God. The same breath that would later be called the Spirit, would be considered the third hypostasis of the Holy Trinity, and about which many theological treatises would be written.

And this breath, meanwhile, has its own history, going back to pre-Christian times: for the prophets were the first to speak of the breath of God, and they did not theologize, but simply sensed this breath not only in their heart, but in their whole being. But that was still only prehistory.

The real history begins on the day of Pentecost, when the breath of God bursts into the world, laying the beginning of that Kingdom whose unfolding fullness will become the meaning of all humanity's subsequent existence. And every Christian is to take a direct and immediate part in this. Paul does not say by accident that it is God who, by His breath, raises Jesus Himself from the dead. Death has no place only in the Kingdom; in the fallen world it is all-powerful, so that even the Messiah cannot escape its power. He is not subject to sin; death is not inevitable for Him. But if He is killed, then in the fallen world He dies just like any human being.

Such is the law of the fallen world that lies in evil: in it, death always has priority over life. But in the Kingdom everything is the opposite; here life has priority. In the Kingdom no one can be killed, and no one can die, unless he deliberately puts himself to death by giving sin power over himself, as happened with Ananias and Sapphira. It is no surprise that, dead in the fallen world, Jesus turns out to be alive in the Kingdom.

The Kingdom now enters the world, and the path of Christ's followers repeats His own: those who have entered the Kingdom die only in this world, and only insofar as it has not yet been transfigured. There are no dead in the Kingdom; here all are alive who have ever sought and awaited it, for in the Kingdom there is no past, present, and future, at least not as we know them in the world that has not yet been transfigured.

And at the end of time, when the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness, everyone who has ever lived on earth will face a choice: the former order of things is passing away; where should one go next? This is what the day of the last Judgment will be. The day when life, finally, becomes life to the end and in fullness, while death, alas, becomes full and final death.

The promise made by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper is fulfilled: the Comforter comes, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15), and the apostles testify to “the mighty works of God.”

This is the beginning of the Church, because here, through the action of the Holy Spirit, people find one common Father through true faith in the only-begotten Son and, becoming brothers and sisters, unite in glorifying God. We too can enter into this joy by praying in the words of Psalm 103.

The Lord commands us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. In ordinary life, wisdom and innocence are rarely found together. How, then, are we to live in this world full of violence and betrayal? We cannot invent a formula. There is therefore no point in wondering in advance how to behave in a critical situation. It is better to trust in the Spirit, who will give us an answer at the necessary moment. According to the Apostle, this Spirit lives in those who belong to Christ and live according to the spirit, those for whom He is Wonderful, Counselor, and Mighty God.

Developing the theme of deliverance from the "body of death," the apostle turns to the theme of the Kingdom, without which such liberation is impossible, and to the mission of the Savior, who brought the Kingdom into the world. He speaks of the Torah, which now, after Christ's coming into the world, can be transformed from an instrument for knowing sin, an instrument of death capable of killing, into the source of the life of the Kingdom by which the Risen One lives. That is why Paul distinguishes between the Torah of sin and death, on the one hand, and the Torah of the "breath of life," on the other (vv. 1-2).

The inner Torah, of which learned rabbis and theologians spoke in Paul's time, was generally expected to cleanse and sanctify the believer, but the ideal was still a person who had become, according to the commonly accepted definition of that era, a "living Torah." For Paul, however, the inner Torah, as we can see, is connected with that "body of death" from which one must be delivered, while the living Torah is the Savior Himself. Therefore anyone else can become it only by entrusting himself to the Risen One and receiving from Him that fullness of the life of the Kingdom without which no "living Torah" is possible. For Paul, the "living Torah" is the Torah of Christ and the Kingdom (vv. 14-17). And the earthly ministry of the Savior becomes for him the manifestation of the Kingdom as the living Torah (vv. 3-4). After all, in order to become a "living Torah" and reveal the fullness of righteousness of which the apostle speaks here, a person had to be completely freed from the power of sin; otherwise, instead of the fullness of the Torah's righteousness, he would show the world only the fullness of his own sinfulness.

Bodily existence permeated by sin weakened the action of the Torah on the human heart, and therefore the fullness of the Kingdom remained inaccessible even to those who, by human standards, showed the world examples of righteousness. Because of this sinfulness that weighed upon the human being, God had to make a special effort to show the world what fallen humanity was not capable of: the example of perfect, sinless humanity that contained within itself the fullness of God, and therefore the fullness of the Kingdom. And now everyone who has resolved to say a firm "no" to his own "body of death" has both the possibility of carrying out his intention and the place where he can find the life that he has nowhere to seek in our world, which has not yet been transfigured (vv. 5-10).

Thus the example shown to the world by the Savior becomes not merely an example, but a real power that changes the world and opens the Kingdom to everyone who seeks it and is ready to go to the end in that search.

The apostle continues his reflections on life according to the Spirit and life according to the flesh, which he had already begun in the previous chapter. If earlier he only identified the problem of this monstrous rupture between what the divine nature in a person wants and what his bodily nature does, here he is already speaking about how it can be overcome.

Paul believes that the flesh is sinful in its very essence; such is the law of the created order. Therefore only a true miracle can break the opposition within a person between his sinful nature and his divine nature. And the life of God in those who open their hearts to Him becomes such a miracle. If this happens, everything changes. "But if Christ is in us, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of righteousness."