RENDER UNTO CAESAR

“Render unto Caesar, render unto God”

Colonial vs. Covenantal

          Before making his pronouncement, Jesus asked for a denarius, the coin with which the tribute was paid. This was minted silver in Rome with the image and inscription of the reigning emperor on it. The issuing authority was Caesar, carrying its claim over its users.

But Jesus had to remind them that anterior to Caesar’s claim, was that of Yahweh who had inscribed his image on the very heart of his people. “I shall be your God and you will be my people.”  We need to understand here that at the time of Jesus the Jewish world-view was essentially religious and did not separate the religious from the political as we do today. Jesus reminded them that while Caesar’s claim over them was colonial, God’s claim was covenantal. Jesus’ punch-line, “Render to Caesar…render to God”, did not mean that there are some things which belong to Caesar and others which belong to God, as if reality were divisible into “secular” and “sacred.” What he meant was that any obligation to Caesar stands under and is judged by a paramount obligation: to acknowledge the sovereignty of the supreme Sovereign. In practice, the people in Jesus’ time acknowledged and accepted the benefits of the Roman government of which the denarius was a symbol. Jesus himself conversed freely with the centurion and the Roman builder of the synagogue. Hence, it was permissible, indeed a duty, to pay their tribute as long as this did not encroach on what they owed to the overriding authority of God.

Politicians and Jesus

          Most politicians, when they are interviewed, are masters of evasion. They will answer a different question, instead, or make vague promises, or resort to a string of largely irrelevant statistics. Even though Jesus here did not give a straight answer, he went to the heart of the matter and gave a response that has helped Christians to sort out their priorities ever since. Notice that Jesus was not saying that resistance to authority was never permissible; much less was he saying that there are areas in life where the emperor’s writ runs and God’s does not. Doing one’s duties to the state authorities is not a denial of one’s duties towards God. One’s duty to the state is, in fact, swept up into and obtains its meaning from one’s transcendent tribute to God. Duty to the state and duty to God, though qualitatively different, condition one another, like love of God and love of neighbour.

Government and People

          The words of the Gospel have, as it were, their own life, traipsing across the centuries and the myriad cultures of man, conveying the eternal values of the obedience and the self-sacrificing love of the Eternal Man from Nazareth. Today’s world is seemingly quite different from Jesus’. The doctrine of the divine right of kings has come and gone, and in its place there is a constitutional harmony of obligations between government and people.

          What we should not fail to recognise is that those whom we elect do have claims on us, and we owe them their proper measure of allegiance and respect, not least by providing the conditions for the proper implementation of law and order. It is unfortunate that politicians spend so much time discrediting each other, and do not seem to realise that in doing so they are undermining the foundation of their own authority. Nevertheless, we ought still to be prepared to pay those in authority what is due to them. The fact that we can remove them in four or five years’ time, as the case may be, is neither here nor there. The responsible exercise of that right is our duty, too. As for our duty to God, that remains unchanged and paramount. The anti-authoritarian spirit of our age makes it difficult for people to understand that even God can demand or expect obedience, certainly some recognition. That is not a matter of a democratic election. His claim upon us is still that of the unconditional self-surrender of Jesus Christ.

Dear Sebastian,

My article above, written in 2005 and published in THE HERALD, will provide the mentality with which to approach your question: $ vs. God.

The $ is fluctuating and unpredictable; God is stable and indefectibly loving.

Money is a good thing if used for development of self and the nation.

The dynamic of development must be under the supreme claim of God who has inscribed this dynamism in our very nature and can be discovered by reason aided by Divine Revelation.

There are two ways of overcoming our limitation: by domination or by dialogue. The choice is yours. God chose the way of dialogue by the Covenant, finally fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

The almighty $ must be submitted to the law of God.

Remember how those people handed Jesus a denarius bearing the image of Caesar, little knowing that they had surrendered all politico-economic power into the supreme authority of the Lord of nations, Jesus Christ. From then on all money and market economies will be judged by the critique of the Cross of Jesus, namely, surrender to God and service of the neighbour.

The world has cut its moorings from the rule of God and is drifting into the mad rush for money and hedonism, which explains the rising spiral of suicides and crimes. This includes the depredations on the ecology, forcing us to ask the question, “What kind of world are we leaving our children and grandchildren?”

With sincere good wishes,

Fr. Mervyn Carapiet