RENDER UNTO CAESAR, RENDER UNTO GOD

“Render unto Caesar, render unto God”

                                                     

          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.   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.

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.

          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.         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. The responsible exercise of that right is our duty, too. As for our duty to God, that remains unchanged and paramount.  That is not a matter of a democratic election. His claim upon us is still that of the unconditional self-surrender of Jesus Christ.

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