CAESAR AND GOD

 

CAESAR AND GOD

‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’ Simple! Well, maybe? But what actually belongs to Caesar? We have a reading from Isaiah that seems to resist an easy answer. God says to Cyrus, king of Persia, ‘I have called you though you do not know me. … I arm you that people may know that, apart from me, all is nothing.’

God is calling a pagan king to serve his purpose. The immediate aim is to restore Israel after the Babylonian exile but the implication is that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God’ (Rom 8:28). God is at work, not just in the Church, but everywhere and through all people. ‘I have called you though you do not know me’ applies to those people we meet each day who are doing the best they can in their circumstances even if they never raise their minds to breathe a prayer.

This is true of small everyday things but it also holds good for the bigger issues. We completely mess up in Darfur, Palestine or Ukraine and God cannot save us from our folly because he has given us freedom and if we misuse it, we have to bear the consequences. But God works so that, even if there are terrible consequences now, in the future there will be a good outcome. We have seen this time and time again as nations gradually see the futility of war and the exhilaration of working for peace.

And there are prophets continually stepping forward, often at great personal cost. Alexei Navalny is serving a long prison term in Russia for doing just this and an Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, has just spoken of the senselessness of Israel always resorting to force and never pausing to think of the rights of the Palestinians and listening to them. And we can turn our eyes to Zimbabwe and also see people ignored and persecuted because they speak for peace.

There is a lot that belongs to Caesar but we cannot rely on him for everything. This is not his world, his creation. If we ignore God, and rely totally on Caesar, we will not succeed because ‘the world cannot give’ the peace we seek (Jn 14:27). It is a gift that comes to those who seek it; it comes to crown our efforts not to substitute for them. So we need both: to ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’   

22 October 2023   Sunday 29A          Is 45:1…6   Thess 1:1-6     Mt 22: 15-21