by CCW | 15 November 2020 08:00
Link to the audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 23[1]
This ethical teaching speaks directly to the nature of our obligations towards one another and towards God. It seems straightforward and clear but as with most ethical teachings it is more about a way of thinking and acting regardless of circumstance and situation. Hence it is necessarily challenging. It is a kind of Solomonic judgment akin to Jesus’ equally famous words in the story of the woman taken in adultery: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” In other words, this ethical teaching calls us to account with respect to the love of God and the love of neighbour. It is about a distinction within a unity like the two tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments. Duties to one another are bound up in our duties to God. Such things belong to self-knowledge.
But what does that mean in our post-Christian culture and world? This New Testament saying becomes a critical part of a later discourse about the relationship between the sacred and the secular which plays out in such different ways at different times. There is, for example, Ambrose’s rebuke of the Emperor Theodosius, or the Investiture Controversy of the Middle Ages, or the Erastian mode where the church is a department of the state with or without restrictions on its teaching. Theology and politics are more often than not bound up with one another as the phrase cuius regio eius religiowhich defined early modern Europe reminds us – ‘whosever the region his the religion.’ But here in North America, Christ’s words usually refer to the so-called separation between church and state which is mostly misunderstood. In its modern and particularly American context, that separation means nothing more than that no ecclesiastical denomination, religious organisation or group would have any privileged standing politically speaking. In other words, no established church, state sponsored and with a certain special status. It doesn’t mean no religion or no sense of the idea of God or of ethical commitments. It is an endeavour to counter the sectarian forms of religion that have sometimes contributed to division and hatred.
Secular culture doesn’t necessarily mean an opposition to the sacred. There are also complementary relationships between the sacred and the secular even when there are profound differences between the animating principles of an existing political order and religion. Such is the context of this saying of Jesus. It belongs to a debate within the Judaism of Jesus’ day when the Jews were under the rule and authority of Rome. At issue is the relation between the Jewish Law and Roman authority. The Herodians were Jewish supporters of the Herodian dynasty and policies initiated under Herod Antipas – one of a number of persons with the name Herod in the New Testament. The setting is a kind of collusion between the Herodians and the Pharisees in an attempt to entangle Jesus in his talk; the Herodians hoping to entrap him into making anti-Roman statements, the Pharisees hoping to catch him out about the Torah, the Law.
“What do you think?” they ask. “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not?” Jesus, as Matthew indicates, sees through this ruse. “Perceiv[ing] their wickedness,” their malign intent, he asks “Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?” What does he mean? Why hypocrisy? Because under the guise of religion they are using civic politics to undermine religion, effectively making the question of civil obedience the measure of religious commitment. “Show me the tribute-money,” Jesus says, cutting right to the heart of the matter. The tribute-money is the currency of the day, the emblem of political authority which extends to the realm of the economic particularly in the form of taxes. But it also extends to the relation between political order and theology. The Roman empire is not a modern secular state; religion too is at the heart of the Roman world, particularly with respect to the divinity of the Emperor, symbolic of the whole order. There is, in other words, a kind of religious conflict as well as a tension between the sacred and the secular.
Jesus negotiates this divide brilliantly but the teaching here is not simply a rhetorical sleight of hand. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul teaches, but what does that mean with respect to our civic lives, the forms of our citizenship in the various cities of man? We are in the world but not of the world. The ethical teaching is about how we negotiate between either the competing or the complementary claims of the sacred and the secular. Ultimately, all authority belongs to God. As Jesus reminds Caesar’s man in Jerusalem, Pilate, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.”
The problem then and now is about collapsing heavenly or divine authority into the world of human affairs; a kind of divinizing or absolutizing of the state or, for that matter, of the individual. In John’s account of the Passion, Pilate goes on to ask the Jewish authorities, “shall I crucify your king?” to which they respond, “we have no king but Caesar,” a breath-taking disavowal of their religion, effectively denying their primary allegiance to the universal sovereignty of God. There is a similar crisis in our times when churches default to the authority of the state in matters of religion and think that whatever the state legislates the church must accept and even bless. But the state is not God. There are and there will be areas of profound disagreement in principle between the state and the ethical teachings of the church, for instance on matters pertaining to life and death, to morality, to thought and speech, or to what it means to be a person irrespective of identity claims not because of them. The far greater problem lies with the inability of the contemporary church to uphold the ethical teachings which it has received and which defines its life and witness to God and in the world. Only so does it have a voice, a voice through its life and commitment to the ethical, to the primacy of the Good; in short, to truths spoken in charity and which can shape and inform cultures. But Christians do not constitute a political faction or party.
It means learning a way of thinking theologically. The lessons at Morning Prayer today complement today’s eucharistic readings. The first lesson is from the apocryphal text of Ecclesiasticus, the Book of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, probably written in the late third, early second century BC. Its 18th chapter alludes to the later distinction between sacred and secular, spiritual and temporal. “He that liveth for ever created all things in general. /The Lord only is righteous, and there is none other than he, /Who governeth the world with the palm of his hand, and all things obey his will: for he is King of all, by his power dividing holy things among them from profane” (KJV). Things sacred are distinct from things profane; things profane are literally the things outside the temple. The power, the mercy and the goodness of God are incomparable and beyond our reckoning. Nothing can be taken away or added to the wondrous works of the Lord. The passage captures the contrast between God and man in a question: “what is man? … what is his good, and what is his evil?” The number of a man’s years are incomparable in relation to the days of eternity. “The mercy of man is toward his neighbour; but the mercy of the Lord is upon all flesh.” In his compassion, “he reproveth, and nurtureth, and teacheth, and bringeth again, as a shepherd his flock.” Such ideas belong to the infinite wisdom and mercy of God. As Portia will say in the Merchant of Venice, “earthly power doth then show likest God’s/ when mercy seasons justice.” Mercy perfects justice. This, too, suggests a form of the relationship between the sacred and the secular.
The second lesson from Luke makes it clear that Christian discipleship is far more than devotion to family and kin and even life itself. It is about bearing the cross and following Christ, first and foremost. It is not about collapsing God into the political agendas of our world and day or into any of our worldly pursuits. Such things are a kind of idolatry. We live for a higher principle which is the ground of all our other duties and obligations. State, family and self are not our real ends for they are not lasting. We don’t come to church to worship ourselves and those who are like-minded. Nor can religion be reduced to the personal; it is inescapably corporate in its theological rationale as a way of thinking and being.
We render to the temporal authorities of our day what belongs to them – respect for law and order and for the basic maintenance of the political and social structure through taxes. But the state is not omni-competent. Far from it. What we don’t render to the Caesars of our day is any kind of worship of the state or any kind of subservience of our inmost thoughts to its ideologies and confusions. For that is to confuse the things of God and Caesar. That would mean losing the understanding of ourselves as made in the image of God and as bearing the superscription of his love over us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 23, 2020
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