Give to Caesar what is Caesar's: Like all the things that corrupt

Mark 12:1-17

In the year 1646 a Puritan minister named Roger Williams began a novel experiment in the colony of Rhode Island, which had just been founded for this purpose. He was testing out the separation of church and state for the first time in America—really, for the first time anywhere in the western world. He was a religious leader who sought to divorce the church from the government because the church, he realized, never made the state more holy; the state only ever made the church more corrupt.

            As Christians, we live in two worlds: the world governed by human beings and the world governed by God. Now, when I talk about the kingdom of God here I’m not talking about heaven—not exactly. I am talking about all the ways that God rules our hearts and minds and souls here on earth compared with all the ways that human beings govern us. The tension between these two worlds makes our lives very challenging, but Jesus is here in today’s reading to offer us some wisdom on the topic. He is asked about paying taxes to the emperor. It’s a trap of a question, obviously. To answer in black and white with a “Yes” it’s right to pay the emperor, or “No” it’s wrong, would leave a sour taste in somebody’s mouth, which is pretty much the point. People who ask questions like these aren’t trying to learn anything; they’re trying to condemn somebody. But unlike most of us Jesus doesn’t fall into the black-and-white trap. He doesn’t stumble over his answer or qualify it; instead, he sets the paradigm straight. The kingdom of man and the kingdom of God are set apart by virtue of what they value. His answer leaves even his critics amazed. “Give to the emperor,” he says, “the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s,” or, maybe more familiar is “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

            Jesus affirms the legitimacy of some form of government. People need to take care of one another in some fashion. The Roman Empire was hardly a model government. Jesus undoubtedly saw many, many flaws in it; in the end he is killed at its hand; but, ultimately, the question about taxes is not what defines us as human beings. The coin with the emperor’s face is just a thing, a thing we put too much stock in. The things that are the emperor’s are not as important as we make them.

Roger Williams, in Rhode Island long ago, could appreciate this tension. Government and the church serve one another best when they are kept at arm’s length from each other. The church can’t make the state more holy, no matter how hard it tries. This was not a popular opinion in Williams’ day, and, really, it’s not all that popular of an opinion today either. John Winthrop, who formed the Plymouth colony, excommunicated Williams for undermining the theocracy that they were establishing in America. America was to be a “city on a hill;” the “New Jerusalem.” It sounds great on the surface, right? A country founded not just on religious principles but also religious law; one nation, under God, ruled according to godly principles.

The blind who see, but do not see

Mark 10:32-52

Faith and sight are an interesting pair. Sometimes we imagine they are opposites, like when you cannot see a thing so faith is what fills in the gap in your knowledge. Sometimes, however, their relationship is deeper and more complex.

In John’s Gospel we get a glimpse of why this may be. Yes, I know we are reading from the Gospel of Mark today, but I’m going to take a tangent into John before returning to Mark for, I think, a very good reason that will become apparent soon. A brief synopsis of the John story: Jesus sees a man born blind on the side of the road. The disciples then ask him a stupid question (this is usually what the disciples do): “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus responds, “Neither. He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Catch that? His lack of sight will reveal things to the world. Then Jesus goes on to explain that he is the light of the world, in short that he is the one who gives sight—true sight—to those in need of it. Then, finally, after all this explanation, he heals the man. This is very similar, though an expanded version of what happens in today’s reading in Mark. But in John’s Gospel the story continues. The Pharisees investigate the healing and find that since the man was born blind he must have been sinful, and since he was sinful he could not be healed, because only a righteous man would achieve such a feat—this is the kind of cyclical logic that would earn the Pharisees any political office of their choosing nowadays. Anyway, Jesus comes back to the man who was blind and now healed and they have a conversation about who Jesus really is—the kind of conversation Jesus is always having with his disciples in the Gospel of Mark. It’s then that Jesus utters a couple of his absolute best one-liners; the first one going like this: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

Who's the greatest?

Luke 9:30-37

Today’s reading from Luke marks a slight improvement in the disciples’ attitude from last Sunday. This time, on hearing Jesus talk about his death and resurrection, they still don’t understand him but rather than rebuking him openly they switch to the silent treatment. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if that’s an improvement or not. And, just to be sure that we get that the disciples aren’t very good at this whole disciple-ing thing, and to make matters much worse, they start to act like children arguing about who is the greatest as they walk toward Capernaum.

            I think this is a man thing. I can say this, I think, because I am one. I’ve known a lot of one-uppers, most of them men, and when I was younger I used to be one a lot more than I am now. There’s something about the transition to adulthood, finding our place in the world, that makes men (not only men, but mostly men) enter into these squabbles over and over again about truly stupid things.

            I knew a one-upper who was so bad in college that we used to make up outrageous, impossible things about ourselves or about people we knew or whatever and throw them out to see how he could possibly one-up that. It became a running gag that I’m not sure he was ever aware of. That was exceptional but not really that extraordinary. I’ve worked with enough high school youth to know that claiming superiority over one another is just the way they interact. 

            But I think we’d expect better of the disciples, which is probably unfair, because in spite of how they are portrayed in film and art these guys were actually 18, 19, 20, maybe 23, 24 years old. I’m not old enough to call people that age “kids” (ask me in twenty, thirty years) but they were young men. They were, in short, at precisely that age where competition forms the basis for their relationships. They didn’t bond over coffee at the corner store; they bonded over wrestling with each other or kicking each other’s butts at ping pong—that kind of thing.

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Take up your cross (but you probably won't)

Mark 8:27-9:8

The disciples in Mark are very stupid. Have you ever noticed this? It’s as if Jesus goes out of his way to collect average dunderheads and entrust them as his confidants and as the future of the faith post-crucifixion. Not only were these guys fishermen and tax collectors and various tradesmen, meaning they weren’t the best Bible students, they weren’t high-class, and they weren’t gifted in the way we generally talk about giftedness, but they also show it by continually misunderstanding who Jesus was and what he was up to.

Peter isn’t necessarily the worst about this but he is the most vocal so he tends to come out looking pretty bad. Jesus openly tells the disciples about his death and his resurrection—and let’s remember, this is the Jesus whom the disciples have been following and who they’ve seen not just heal the sick but raise the dead—but still they cannot make the leap of faith necessary to believe that somebody who could raise other dead people could himself be raised. Or, I guess, they just don’t want to see Jesus that way.

See, the disciples are good people, maybe simple people but good people, and they just don’t want Jesus to suffer and die. Their fault is their compassion, which is interesting, because Jesus calls them to a different kind of compassion. For most of us this is the hardest lesson, because it goes like this: It’s not enough to wish that somebody does not suffer, as Christians we are ordered to suffer with them. “Take up your cross and follow,” Jesus says. That is the true root of compassion—“passio”, Latin for suffer, and “com”, Latin for with—“suffer with.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer took this passage as his guiding principle while imprisoned in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. He wrote, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple he bids him come and die.” That’s the end result of picking up your cross. We tend to minimize it—like our children are our cross to bear, or our work is our cross to bear, or our terrible football team is our cross to bear—but that’s not enough. It’s the things that kill you that are your true crosses, and sometimes that might be your children—we’re getting kind of close there—but it’s even darker than that. It’s the things that seem to have no redeeming value whatsoever. “Take up your cross and follow” is the hardest commandment, and yet the most central to the life of being a disciple; the life to which all of us are called.