“Our citizenship is in heaven”
We are “strangers and pilgrims” who seek “a better country, that is, an heavenly,” as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us in the Octave of All Saints’. That “better country” is what Paul means by “our citizenship in heaven”, for “we have here no continuing city.” Some worldly utopia is not our end, however we imagine it in the sense of being a human construct. What we desire is indeed a critical feature of our humanity but our desire for what is absolute and good is precisely beyond our constructing. Such is the delusion of thinking that we can make heaven on earth.
The readings today challenge our culture and church which assumes that the church and religion should mirror and reflect our ideological agendas. It doesn’t either anciently or now. Paul’s statement about our citizenship being in heaven points to the idea of how the things of this world have their truth and meaning only in God. The secular finds its truth only in the sacred; this is the strong teaching of these readings which transcend the opposition of sacred and secular to show the nature of their interrelation. It is neither a dogmatic assertion of the heavenly at the expense of the worldly nor is it mere relativism.
What is stated in the epistle is illustrated in the Gospel. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. The distinction is crucial to the understanding of our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in this world. Caesar here is symbolic of the powers of this world; in short, the secular. Yet it has its truth and purpose as belonging to the greater truth and power of God. As Jesus says to Pilate, “thou couldst have no power … except what has been given you from heaven.”
We have forgotten this and have turned the secular agendas of our world and day into forms of religion and cult. The institutional churches fall prey to the assumption that religion is only a reflection of cultural and social ideologies and agendas. This is the advocacy culture which demands not acceptance and toleration but the celebration of identities and interests that negate the givenness of creation and the transcendence of God. Paul’s claim that our citizenship is in heaven does not negate the forms of our secular or worldly lives but redeems them by suggesting that they only have their truth in God. “We have here no continuing city.”
“There is no permanence,” Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh in one of the oldest literary works of our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh. It is the answer to his great quest for wisdom. It emphasises the transitory and passing nature of human life. We literally cannot create anything of ultimate truth and value. To know this is to know that we are strangers and pilgrims who seek what only can come from God to us, from what is ultimate and everlasting in which the true meaning of our daily struggles is found. They all belong to the pilgrimage of our souls to God, to that absolute truth in which and by which we find the truth of all things, but each in their order and place.
The secular is not the enemy except when it becomes a competing religion that demands our subservience at the expense of our love for God, the Absolute. Jesus in the Gospel challenges the logical or epistemological problem, a kind of category mistake. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day attempt to trap Jesus about his relation to the Law. Where is your loyalty? To God and the Law or to the Roman authorities, read worldly authorities? The question itself reveals its own contradiction. The Pharisees attempt to put Jesus to the test by way of the currency of the Roman order to test his religious or spiritual identity. It is as if the secular were the measure of the sacred and holy.
It is entirely the other way round as Jesus makes clear in his celebrated response. It begins with his question about the Roman coinage: “whose is this image and superscription?” What do you see and read on the coin? It is the image of Caesar, the emperor of the earthly power of Roman authority, they say. They are right but as Jesus points out quite clearly, “render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”
This goes to the heart of Christian pilgrimage in the recognition that we are strangers and pilgrims in this world. The world is not and cannot be our end, our truth. The secular ultimately belongs to God but not as collapsed into God or vice versa in our contemporary attempts to make the things of God conform to the agendas and ideologies of our day; a kind of absolutizing of the finite which is idolatry.
What defines us? The image on the coin of the endlessly passing parade of secular agendas and ideologies or our being made in the image of God? The secular world belongs to God, too, but it is incomplete and insufficient as an end for us. We are called to something greater and more. Our lives and the meaning of our lives do not and cannot depend upon the ups and downs, the circumstance and happenstance of our world and day with its endlessly competing agendas. But neither are they without meaning and purpose in the sense that they ultimately come under God’s providence and justice; under the measure of the divine mercy which seasons justice.
In a way, these readings belong to the end of the Trinity season even as they begin to point us to Advent. We are recalled to the interplay of justification and sanctification as the principles that belong to the pilgrimage of our souls to that “Jerusalem which is above,” to our end and home with God in the City of God. The truth of the secular is found in the sacred, in God, and not the other way around. The idea that our citizenship is in heaven redeems us from the tyranny of the secular. It is the occasion for wonder, like the Pharisees who marvelled at what Jesus said “and left him, and went their way.”
I would like to think they went their way pondering on the wisdom of Christ’s words. That is what is wanted for us: to learn how to think the secular not as a competing religion, which it has become in the ideologies of identitarian politics, but as the secular world which finds its ultimate truth in God. Such is the redemption of desire and of all that belongs to our human pursuits and interests without which there are only endlessly competing divisions and claims.
“Our citizenship is in heaven”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 23, 2023