16 October

This is a risk-filled moment in the gospel.  In the language of our time, it’s a set-up.  Jesus is in a public place.  Around him is the usual mixture of people, some attracted to his teaching, others just curious.  Mingling with the group are some of his enemies.  He is too popular to attack openly so they try to trap him into saying something that can be used against him, something to show that he is subversive.  It’s a tactic as old as politics.  With wide-eyed innocence, someone asks the dangerous question prefaced by a stream of flattery.  “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not?”  There must have been a dead silence.  Anyone with any intelligence in the crowd would know what was at stake.  If the teacher said yes he would be making enemies at every level of Jewish life.  If he said no he would challenge the Roman occupation.

Jesus’ answer has come down through time.  It is the reply of a razor-sharp mind.  He holds up the coin and says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  Centuries roll away but the question and the reply remain.  Why?  Because the question and answer present men and women with an eternal equation which has to be worked out in human life. 

We all live somewhere between the two poles expressed as Caesar and God.  Each of us has to live in what we tend to call the real world, the world of nine to five.  Whether it is really the “real world” is another story.  Each of us has to decide what we give to the “Caesar” of our nine-to-five life.  Do we give everything, all our time, all our energy?  Do we make that part of our life an ultimate value; in a word, do we make it our God?  Or do we acknowledge that only God is ultimate and that this God demands our allegiance, our integrity, our trust, our worship.  That’s the real question. 

It is a matter of not looking at our lives as being divided into two worlds, the world of work and the world of worship, with God in the latter but not in the former – a sort of life with a set of compartments.  Thinking like that has long been the trap of our culture.  God is the God of both worlds.  Not until we realize this are we able to begin to work out the relationship between Caesar and God for our lives.  Even then, working out the balance of that equation is always difficult, and there are no neat answers.  The important thing is to realize that the equation must be continually worked at if we are to be responsible stewards of the one life we have to live.

Peace, 

Bob+