Unto Caesar or Unto God
AM Psalm 20, 21:1-7(8-14) • PM Psalm 110:1-5(6-7), 116, 117
Amos 5:18-27 • Jude 17-25 • Matt. 22:15-22
In the reading from St. Matthew for today, enemies try to snare Jesus between, on the one hand, the stool-pidgeoning, collaborationist flatterers of Roman’s puppet-king Herod and, on the other hand, the rest of the Jewish people, who hated the Roman occupation with its tyranny of taxation without representation and its demand that their subjects acknowledge Caesar as a god. Jesus asks to see the coin that must be used for paying taxes, and, of course, it has Caesar’s image on it, and Jesus makes a larger point while skillfully answering the trap question: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but to God the things that are God’s.”
He thereby clears our conscience when we offer our money and services to the State as well as to God. Even the name of our mother church, the Church of England, implies simultaneous loyalty to church and state. The difficulty, however, occurs when Caesar competes with God for our cash, our service, and our souls. A pagan British Roman citizen named Alban, who sheltered a priest fleeing from persecution, was converted to Christianity by the priest’s pious example and arranged to be beheaded in place of the priest by the local representative of Caesar, thus becoming the first Christian martyr in the land that was to become England. (See Bede’s 8th century Ecclesiastical History of the English People for a much-embellished story of St. Alban.) Thomas More paid with his head for preferring God to Henry VIII, king of England and earthly founder of the Church of England. Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay taxes that would support the colonialist, pro-slavery Mexican War of 1846. When Mohammad Ali was drafted in 1964, where his duties would probably have been to tour the world giving exhibition-bouts for U.S. soldiers, he gave up his World Boxing championship and went into exile rather than support a war that violated his religious beliefs.
In the winter of 2016-17, protesters from all over the country, including Samantha Clare and other St. Paul’s worshipers, joined with Lakota-Sioux Indians enduring sub-zero weather to defend their water sources and sacred sites from the desecration of oil-pipeline construction at the Standing Rock reservation, where police and state militia sicked dogs on them and sprayed them with freezing water. In all of these cases the hatred of ordinary citizens with opposing views added to the punishment.
Defiance of the State is always controversial and usually unpopular. We remember with shame the popularity of segregation laws in Arkansas and the hatred that white people spewed out at children carrying their school books into Little Rock High School in 1957. Lord have mercy on us. Please give us the wisdom to know when human authority is in the wrong, the courage and dedication to defy abuse of power, and the loving kindness to appreciate those who risk all kinds of abuse for Your sake.
Written by John DuVal
Morning Reflection readers might make their own lists of heroes who challenged the authority of the State when it conflicted with the law of God.