NT Wright's words (excerpts from his commentary on Romans 9-11)

Paul… narrates, in other words, the covenant history of Israel, in a way that, at least in outline, is parallel to many other great retellings of this story in Jewish literature.
The whole passage is about the covenant faithfulness of Israel’s god.
The divine covenant purposes, it appears, are those that have been put into operation throughout the story. Israel’s god has been narrowing it down to a point, choosing this son of Abraham and not that, choosing some of the wilderness generation and not others, making Israel, in fact, the vessel of his wrath even as Pharaoh himself had been (9:21-23).
Paul’s train of thought as running something like this:
(a) Israel’s vocation to be the covenant people of the creator always envisaged that it would be the means of rescuing the whole world.
(b) This vocation could be, and was, distorted into the idea of Israel’s privileged position over against the rest of the world, but in Christ this distortion has been shown up for what it is.
(c) The divine intention was, always, to deal with the evil of the world (“sin,” personified as in chap. 7) by heaping it up into one place and there passing and executing sentence of judgment upon it.
(d) This “place” was always intended to be the Messiah himself.
(e) The necessary precondition for this judging of sin in the person of the Messiah was that Israel, the people of the Messiah, should itself become the place where sin was gathered together, in order that this burden might then be passed on to the Messiah alone.
(f) Israel was thus, as part of its covenant vocation, called to be the “vessels of wrath,” the place where the wrath of the creator against the wickedness of the whole creation would be gathered together in order that it be dealt with.
(g) This was never intended to be a permanent condition. Israel was like a bomb disposal squad called to take the devastating device to a safe place to be detonated, and then to leave it there. If Israel clings to its status of privilege, refusing to give it up, it is like the members of a bomb squad who are so proud of their important mission that they become reluctant to leave the bomb behind.
(h) There can therefore be no covenant future for those Israelites who refuse to abandon their “own,” that is, their ethnic, status of covenant membership (10:3). Christ is the end of that road, the final goal of the covenant purpose which always intended to deal with sin and its effects (10:4, with all its deliberate ambiguities in play).
(i) But those who see, in Christ, the clue to what the creator/covenant god has righteously been doing in Israel’s history, and who grasp this in faith—these Israelites can always regain their full covenant status, and when this happens it is to be a cause of great rejoicing within the community as a whole (ll:llff).
Paul has not told this story “in a vacuum.” He has set out his material in such a way as to make the point that the Gentile mission grows precisely out of this strange covenant purpose.
The rhetorical force of the entire exposition of the failure of Israel is not to give Gentile Christians a sense of smugness or self-satisfaction at their contrasting success, but to highlight and emphasize the fact that they owe the Israelites a huge debt of gratitude. On the other hand, the very fact of this transfer of privileges from Israel according to the flesh, to the Messiah, to the Jew-plus Gentile church, means that Israel according to the flesh ought to be jealous.
He is stressing, to a potentially anti-Jewish Roman church, that there can be no lapsing back into an inverted system of national privilege. He desires above all that the Roman church should understand his mission (for which he wanted Rome as his new base) in terms of the Jew-plus-Gentile strategy he intended to adopt, through which alone there could spring up the Jew-plus-
Gentile church, through which alone the new, united humanity, about which Paul cared so passionately, could be evidenced.22
The Roman church must not allow the latent, and sometimes visible, anti-Jewish sentiment in the proud pagan capital to infect them as Christians.
Paul’s great hope, in writing Romans, is (negatively) to quash any potential Gentile-Christian arrogance against Israel, and (positively) to enlist the Roman church’s enthusiastic and comprehending support for the fully-absorbed missionary program which he intends to implement both in the capital itself and also around the western Mediterranean.
Gentile Christians, in Rome and elsewhere, cannot lapse into that anti-Judaism which refuses to see Jews as legitimate beneficiaries of the creator’s action in Christ: the only story within which their own standing as Christians makes sense is precisely the Jewish story. They do not support the root; it supports them.
For I say that the Messiah became a servant to the circumcised, on behalf of the truthfulness of god, to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, and that the Gentiles might glorify the true god for mercy…