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Pentecost 24
15/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Psalm 123
Matthew 25:14-30

In a sentence
The ‘talent’ the church is given to exercise is grace, which is to yield grace-fullness in us

As over the last couple of weeks, so also today the basic lesson of our gospel reading is, ‘Be prepared’. The suggestion is that God has in some way been absent and will return unexpectedly, and with God’s return comes the day of reckoning, or judgement. The three slaves seem to represent our two basic options while the master is away – to be fruitful with what is left to us, or not to be fruitful.

Once again, then, a moral understanding of the parable is possible. Believers are called to the living of a good life. Where we have an abundance, we are to share. Where there is despair, we are to be sources of hope. Where there is doubt we are to bring faith; where there is hatred, love; where there is injury, we are to bring pardon. We are, then, to give away more, and to receive more, in God’s special economy of grace.

But those who are now accustomed to hearing my sermons will have noticed that I usually acknowledge and then set aside the moral dimensions of readings like this one. This is not because the moral dimensions are unimportant, but because the basic moral compass of the Scriptures is not usually that much different from the moral compass of any society. What the Scriptures value in generosity, honesty, forgiveness, kindness, gentleness, self-control and so on, are also valued in the wider society.

This is to say that, for the most part, we already know what is required of us morally – whether we are believers or not. ‘Don’t waste your talent’ is what the footy coach or the music teacher says to a gifted but lazy student, as much as God might say it so a distracted community of faith. Labouring the point in preaching would be too much a waste of an opportunity. For while anyone can read the parable in this way, the community of faith which gathers to read it is not ‘anyone’. We are Christians. This is not simply Jesus the wonderful teacher we hear addressing us in this parable, but Jesus the wonder – the Jesus who has died, who is risen, and who will come again as the means of the grace of God to us. Jesus is the one who makes sense for us of the kingdom of God, who embodies in his own experience our judgement by God, and so who is the key to our understanding of how we stand before God.

This requires another way of hearing these parables. And so, last week we heard the call to be ready but also saw that Jesus himself can be seen to be the wise bridesmaid who awaits the coming of the bridegroom, and can be seen even as the oil given to us to burn as we await the approach of God. This is what we might call a christological reading, which yields a very difficult result from the important but more narrowly moral reading. A christological reading is not a ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ reading; it is more like an allegory of an allegory. We can read these texts in this way because, with the coming of Jesus in death and resurrection, they cease to be texts like others – simple moral teaching – and become texts about Christ himself – a revealing of the means of grace.

So, what does a christological reading of this parable of the three servants look like? It helps to begin by noting a problem in translation. The translation of the central word we have heard this morning is ‘talent’. The Greek word is in fact ‘talanton’, and is simply transliterated into English. The original meaning, however, was not our contemporary sense of ‘skills’ or ‘gifts’ or ‘abilities’, but ‘a thing weighed’ and, by extension, a quantity of money (silver or gold being weighed out to the required amount). Our modern translation, then, as the ‘parable of the talents’, can distract us by suggesting that the parable is about what we know today to be ‘talents’. The parable, however, only suggests that each of the slaves is given a measure of something with which they are then to do something more. A moral reading considers that something to be our gifts and abilities, our intellect or our money, or whatever it seems that we have in some special measure.

But if we read this as the church, so that the parable is now specifically about believers, the question is: What is the specific ‘talent’ the church has? What is it which is given to us in some special measure? To this it must be answered: the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ; or the intimate and childlike knowledge of God as Father, as Jesus himself knew God; or the gift of the Holy Spirit – all different ways of saying the same thing. And now the parable becomes something quite different from a simple reading about using our gifts and abilities wisely. Now it asks – in what measure have you been given grace, and what have you done specifically with this grace?

One possible reading of this parable, given its context of polemic between Jesus and the Pharisees and the way in which Jesus has charged the Pharisees with hypocrisy in various ways, is to see the Pharisees (and the religious establishment in general) as figured in the person of the third slave. That is, the grace which has been given them has yielded nothing – recall the charge Jesus makes that the Pharisees have received and rightly taught the law given to Moses, but have not themselves yielded the appropriate fruit of the grace in the gift of the law – humility and servanthood, as distinct from the self-exaltation which he names in their practice of righteousness (Matthew 23.1-12). The Pharisees’ response to God’s grace is contrasted in Matthew’s gospel with the response of others to grace – the meek, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (see Matthew 5.1-13). Those who would seem to be outside the reach of God have, because of that distance, received a greater abundance of grace and, Jesus suggests, have yielded even more grace in their now richly graced lives. This is in contrast to those who already had ‘enough’ of the grace of God and yet who have done nothing with it. They have not understood what they have been given and so neither recognise the gift of God or what it should yield when they receive it.

Now, if we don’t read these parables only as moral encouragement, we also don’t read them as history lessons. The story of Jesus and the Pharisees, and Jesus’ charges against the Pharisees, are only important if their story is also our story. As Gentiles, we are the first two slaves, given a particular abundance of grace, which yielded the further grace we see as the rise of the church with its gospel of God’s love for all. But, as now the religious establishment, we are also the third slave, prone to self-satisfaction, prone to mistake what is simply given as in fact a right, prone to mistake our election as God’s people as a sign of our specialness or righteousness.

It is to these dangers that the parable speaks: the talent you have is the grace which is Jesus Christ. In what way is that grace yielding grace in your lives? In what ways do we model the forgiveness which we claim is ours in Christ? In what ways is the abundance which is God’s for us reflected in our relationships with each other? These are rather abstract questions, but they will soon become very concrete for us here at Mark the Evangelist as we begin to ask about our property and our mission: what precisely have we been given, what its value is, and what might we be able to do with that? To think about these things as ‘grace to become yet more grace’ might free us up to imagine even greater possibilities than might otherwise have been the case.

We return here, in a sense, to the moral question, yet now it is not simply about doing the right thing but about the share we have in God’s work of grace. For we do not gather for worship to declare that we are good, but to be ‘made’ good by the gift of God’s grace, and then to take up a share in that work of making good in God’s ‘absence’. The proof of our right standing before God is not moral righteousness but that special kind of righteousness which comes with being adopted as the children of God, and then growing into our own particular God-likeness. This righteousness is not earned, it is given, and it is not then a possession but a thing to be used, a thing to affect the world, a thing to change relationships.

To receive grace is to become grace‑full – to become ‘gracing’ towards others; we might recall here the parable of the unforgiving servant – himself being forgiven an enormous debt but unable to forgive a friend a very small amount (Matthew 18.21-35). The grace of God is not ours it if does not make us the grace of God, make us those who do what God does, in such a way that it would be as if God were not ‘absent’ at all, as the parable of the master who goes abroad suggests.

What might the world – or even the just the church itself – be like if it did not think to wonder at the absence of God because God’s people were sufficient grace that God’s absence was not noted?

To be the people of God is to do as God does, to become a means of grace to each other and to the world around us. This is the proof (or the test) of our righteousness: whether or not it yields righteousness in others, the very thing God has given us.

By the grace of God, may we be found to pass that test in the day of reckoning, that the words ‘well done, good and faithful servant’ may be heard by our ears, and we may enter into the joy of God.

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Pentecost 23
8/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Psalm 78:1-7
Matthew 25:1-13

In a sentence
When God comes, it is to put to death death’s fearful hold on us and set us free for life

In the gospel today we hear an allegory of the arrival of God and the day of judgement. The bridegroom comes to collect his bride. The bridesmaids wait for him but he is delayed and some of them miss him because they are unprepared for the wait. The lesson is clear: ‘Be prepared, for you know neither the day nor the hour’ of God’s coming. Yet, whereas Jesus himself and certainly his early followers clearly expected an arrival of God somewhat analogous to the arrival of the bridegroom in the parable, we today have been waiting long enough now that we no longer expect God to arrive in this way.

We have not, however, quite dismissed the usefulness of parables like this one. For there is something else which approaches undeniably and unavoidably, and in a way quite like God’s approach. This thing is our biological death. As with the approach of God in the parable, so with our death: it is inevitable, but we know neither the day nor the hour (except, perhaps, in some cases of suicide). We can lay down certain probabilities at certain times, of course, but the angel of death is fickle and we just don’t know when she is going to come. Given that today God doesn’t seem likely to arrive like the bridegroom, but death does, there is an almost universal tendency in popular Christian thinking to equate our deaths with the moment of God’s judgement, such that in the instant that we fade from life here we appear before the throne of God for judgement. Whereas in the parable it is God who is moving, we are now the ones moving; by dying, we are brought to the day of judgement. Our parable then becomes a source of the familiar ‘hit-by-a-bus’ approach to evangelism: repent and believe, not because God is about to return but because you might be run over on the way home, and then have to face God, for it is when you die that God finally ‘gets’ you, when God unexpectedly but undeniably arrives in your life.

While we must reject this attempt to scare people into the fold, there is some truth in the idea that God and death come at the same moment. Yet it is not that God arrives with judgement when death comes. Rather, it is the other way around: when God arrives, death comes with him. This might seem surprising, for one thing ‘religion’ is supposed to be interested in is ‘life after death’, whether resurrection or re-incarnation. That is, ‘religion’ is held to equate an interest in God with the overcoming of death.

But there are two senses in which the arrival of God brings death.

The first sense is that, when God comes as God, when God comes as creator or, we might also say, when God reigns in our lives, we become truly the creatures we were intended to be. The simplest way of speaking of this is to say that we become truly God’s creatures when we acknowledge and live with God as creator. The important point here for our theme of death is that what distinguishes the divine creator and his creatures is mortality. Creatures ‘run out’ in a way that the creator does not. When God is truly God, we are truly mortal. So the coming of God is the coming of mortality.

Of course, we will die whether or not we acknowledge God. We have to say further, then, that when God comes God brings a revelation of our true mortality and a reconciliation to it: we are only creatures and not gods, and that’s OK.

The first sense in which we die when God comes is, then, that God’s presence makes us our true selves, which includes our mortality.

To fill this out, we have to turn to the second sense in which God’s arrival brings death. This has to do with the fact that the coming of God is not simply the arrival of an absent friend, but the arrival of the moment of judgement. This judgement is both a measuring and a setting right of what is found to be wrong. The judgement finds that we don’t much care simply to be creatures; mortality is painful, and we go to great lengths to keep it at bay, to deny this aspect of our true being. These lengths are the extent of our failures to love and serve. ‘Sin’ is the catch-all term for what we do to avoid death and the limitedness of being human.

These two senses in which God’s approach brings death are not limited to the moment of our biological death. We can become more creaturely and less constrained by death before we die, if it is the case that God has already approached us, and continues to.

And it is in the death of Jesus that we believe that God has come to us. Jesus’ life – including the way he died – was a kind of ‘death to death’ – a dying to the power which death exercises over most of us, in fear. Jesus’ life, then was the living of truly human, truly creaturely life. Of course, Jesus dies the death of any creature; one way or another he was always going to die if he was truly one of us. But he lives and dies without the fear of death. He lives in such a way as to deny death’s power over him, a power which robs the rest of us of our true freedom and our true humanity.

What might our lives look like if we did not fear rejection, being unsafe, dying young? Jesus lived reconciled to his humanity, seeing God and not his impending death as the thing to be feared. The way he lived, and so the way he died, denied death its fearful hold on us. In him, then, we have seen a perfected human life. ‘Perfection’ is now not ‘doing the right thing’ – in the sense of moralist achievement. Rather, perfection is living to the very end under God’s reign – which blesses our mortality – and not under the shadow of death, which curses it.

Returning to our parable of the coming of the bridegroom, Jesus is now himself the wise bridesmaid who properly awaits the groom’s arrival. He is the one who knows what is required, what the wait will be like, is prepared and so endures to the joyful moment when God comes.

The meaning of the parable, then, is not merely that we must – by ourselves – wait for the coming of God. Jesus is, rather, how we are to wait: looking not to our own efforts and securing our own survival but receiving the achievement of Jesus as our own. Jesus himself is the reserve of oil we are to burn as we await the approach of God and, with God, the fulfilment of our true selves.

To wait by the light of Jesus is to allow our experience of death to become like his by allowing our experience of God to become like his. This is just what we symbolise in our baptism – that what Jesus has endured and achieved is offered in God’s grace also to us. As he died, so do we die in our baptism that, as he now lives, so might we. As unprepared, imperfect and worthy of condemnation as we often might be, we are not left in the dark if Jesus himself is the inexhaustible fuel which burns in our lamps.

There is a moral dimension to the parable – that we are vigilant during the dark hours, that we are living in such a way that corresponds to the life of Jesus himself. Fearlessness in the face of death is the source of all acts of kindness and justice, advocacy and generosity. For such things call us to make a sacrifice of ourselves which we now can make because, by the grace of God, we are lamps filled with the oil which is Jesus, oil which never runs out.

Let us, then, seek this oil that we might keep burning, the light of Christ, and give thanks to God for the gift of such light and life.

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Pentecost 22
1/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
Matthew 23:1-12

In a sentence
Humility is letting go of self-righteousness and allowing that, whatever good we might do, our place with God is already guaranteed

Given how the Pharisees are portrayed in the gospels (however fair that might have been) it is perhaps surprising that Jesus here commends to us their teaching: they are the contemporary mouthpiece of Moses and so, as the teachers of the law of God, they are to be heard and respected.

At the same time, Jesus charges that they don’t practice what they preach. This is not that simple hypocrisy that says one thing and does something else – teaching not to steal, but themselves stealing. Any particular Pharisee might have failed in this way but, as a group, they were upright and moral people and, for the most, beyond reproach when it came to doing the ‘right’ thing.

Jesus criticises them, rather, for their exaltation of themselves – their interest in being seen to have observed the law, and this in pursuit of the reward of high status in their community.

What is at stake here is the purpose of the law. Jesus accuses the Pharisees of acting as if the purpose of the law was to secure a strong standing before others and before God. Whereas it is usually the case in human society that those who achieve great things are honoured for their greatness, Jesus inverts the whole thing: ‘the greatest among you will be your servant’. The law is not set aside here but it teaches now a radical humility. What the properly righteous know in their observance of the law is not social exaltation but servanthood, a humbling of self before God and others.

And yet it is not as simple as the simple saying of it might suggest. Matthew finishes off this teaching from Jesus with a summary which indicates what can be expected: ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ In this seemingly straightforward statement is revealed the real difficulty of Jesus’ teaching here – the problem of humility being linked to an exaltation.

If, as the gospels presume, our basic human desire is for a share in the peace and freedom of the kingdom of God, then it is very difficult not hear Jesus advising us to seek to be humble in order that we may enter God’s kingdom.

To see the problem here we might ask ourselves the question, Am I humble enough? To answer the question ‘Yes’ is to make the Pharisees’ mistake, holding that I have achieved true or sufficient humility to have ‘earned’ God’s reward. That being the case, I know that I must answer this question, ‘No’, for surely to say No is more humble than to say Yes.

But this won’t help me either, for what I am now trying to do is manipulate the teaching of Jesus. Clearly, it is ‘more’ humble to deny my humility, and by this means I might imagine that I can fool God into exalting me. Just as there are many people who strive after great things in order to be noticed and exalted in the eyes of others or even of God, there are many who adopt the posture of a ‘servant’ because it can also be a very effective way of securing control over a certain part of the world, a way of proving to us, to others and to God our worthiness of God’s ‘gift’.

This dynamic leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no standing before God on the basis of choosing to be great or choosing to be humble. Serving others in genuine humility is both absolutely required and quite impossible, once we’ve actually heard this teaching of Jesus and turned it into just another law – being humble gets us right with God.

The problem here is the temptation to self-righteousness. Whenever I ask the question of myself, Am I ‘good enough’, or whenever we defend someone else with the argument that they are ‘good enough’, we fall into the deep moralism which consistently confounds our ability to hear the gospel. The call to be good is, of course, loud and clear; there is no softening of the demands of the law. The Pharisees and the scribes sit in the place of Moses and the commands of God they teach are good and right. Do these things!

But the temptation to assess myself or others as ‘good enough’ is almost irresistible, and it is this which Jesus challenges here.

Even if we who believe can find a way to resist it on our part, many of us will baulk when it comes to those we love but who do not believe. We tell ourselves that surely they are good enough, humble enough. For all our talk about justification by grace through faith, and not by our good works, when push comes to shove we take moral offence and fall back on just these good works: surely they – and we also mean surely we – are good enough for God to accept us.

But now we see how talk of grace contradicts humility as a ‘method’; humility does not earn points with God but must be tied up with grace, with the gift of God.

Humility is not a moral method; it is an openness to God’s gift. While still striving to live rightly, humility releases us from anxiety about social conformity, from being seen to be right. Humility declares that God loves me apart from what I do, and it asks you to love me in the same way.

This is very hard. It is difficult to let go of what others think because what others think is a major engine to how communities operate. It is in our personal lives, in our news reports and in our politics.

The gospel, then, reveals what we do not want to hear: that we are all Pharisees, in the sense that Jesus criticises. We need to relax a bit in our critique of those upright and moral men who clashed with Jesus so long ago because the reason we still listen to those stories today is that they are our stories – it is Jesus’ criticism of us we have heard today.

The gospel concerns the judgement of God: guilty of self-righteousness, of self-satisfaction, seen from the perspective of grace already received. The gospel does not distinguish between good and bad, between Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or atheists. It distinguishes, on the one hand, the self-righteous – the children of Adam who presume to judge what is good and what is bad (themselves included) – from, on the other hand, those who receive their righteousness as a gift: those Jesus would make his sisters and brothers, the communion of saints.

Let us indeed seek to live upright, righteous, God-honouring lives, and call others to do the same: do justice, love mercy.

But let this be done in humility, and for humility’s sake: the humility which does not presume to know about our own righteousness but which reflects that God already loves and accepts us, and will love and accept those we live with and serve.

Then we will be living the law, serving our neighbour, and honouring the God who calls us to just such a life and makes that life possible: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly within the grace of God.

To this God be all glory and honour, now and forever. Amen.

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Pentecost 21
25/10/2020

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
Matthew 22:34-46

In a sentence
Our love of each other is always coloured by the influence of a ‘higher power’ which tells us what love is; the question then is only whether that power gives the fullest of life to us and to all.

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind … You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.

With these two commandments Jesus summarises ‘all the law and the prophets’, and so indicates what it means to be a human being from a Jewish – or Christian – perspective: to be human is to love God, and to love those around us.

Jesus addresses, then, not only ‘religious’ people but all who consider themselves ‘human’. And so at this point we can’t hear him if we consider ourselves non-religious, and we will likely mishear him if we consider ourselves religious. For we don’t quite know what being a loving human person has to do with a relationship with God.

The dual love command is heard by many to be an optional religious command (love God) joined to a universal, non-optional secular one (love each other). Those who don’t believe in God – and many who do – hold that we don’t need God to be good to others. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to show that God might make no difference at all.

Consequently, believers find themselves in the position of being like non-believers in all things ethical except in the apparently optional love of God.

This situation has arisen, at least in the West, because God seems too small to matter: we can get along quite well without this little extra addition to our lives together. ‘Let’s not let a little thing like God come between us’, the happy atheist tells us. Believers are, for the most part, confused by this because it seems to make sense: are there not many outside the religions who are morally better than many inside? Do we not want to encourage that good which happens without inserting God into the picture?

Yet the problem here is not really that God is too small to make a difference. Rather, in the churches and therefore in the world, God is usually too large. As an idea, God lacks the concreteness of the tangible human world. We can give an account of the world and our place in it without reference to God. A place might then be found for God at the beginning of all things and perhaps at the end. God is then at best the sphere within which the action takes place but otherwise not part of the action itself. Such knowledge of God is like the knowledge that the world is round when, in fact, for all intents and purposes, it is pretty flat just here. This God has no intrinsic connection to us, and so plays no part in what we do, whether in love or hatred.

So, is the love of God simply an optional extra for those who just happen to be religious? Yes, God is optional, if we mean the too-large God who sits outside of everything we do; No, if God is in fact much smaller than we usually imagine, and integral to everything we do.

We realise that God is a little smaller than usually suspected when we recognise that believer and non-believer alike already love some god or other, and that the pertinent question is not whether God should be ‘added’ to our loves, but asks about the nature and identity of that god which is already intimately active in our lives.

Whether it is explicit or not, believers and non-believers alike have a ‘first commandment’ of some sort which precedes the command to love others, and so tells them what it means to love others, whom to love, and how much. This prior commandment speaks about a higher concern, a higher loyalty, which shapes those relationships we have with other people. We might not identify this higher loyalty as a ‘god’, yet it functions that way for us as we give it something like divine status in our lives.

This higher loyalty is woven into our identity and interprets for us our race, our gender, our nationality, economic status, and so on. And so, on the basis of the spirit of the age in which we live, perhaps black skin ‘means’ something different from white skin, being a man gives different freedoms from being a woman, those with more money are subject to different laws from those with less. Within social systems that allow such differences, observing the social expectations the community sets in place for us what it means to love. To love someone is to act toward them according to how our culture tells us we should, given their age, sex, race, and status.

And so, for example, in Australia we try to love ‘one another’, but don’t so much love asylum seekers. We tell ourselves that we don’t have to love them as much as citizens because Australia – as a nation – is ‘ours’. By ‘ours’, of course, we mean Australia as the nation of those who took the land from someone else who also didn’t have to be loved as we love each other because the British empire was clearly more deserving of this place than those who were already here. Loyalty to our society and its economy, or values we have about skin colour or cultural formation, tell us what ‘love’ is. We have ‘love filters’ for race, culture, gender, education, age, and so on.

In acting according to well established social mores, we honour the god in the machine which permits or limits us in our relationships with others. It doesn’t go too far to say that we are ‘loving’ the spirit of our age as we act towards others according to the spirit’s rules of engagement.

It is too easy, then, to say that we can love each other without loving something else – without loving a ‘god’; we are already loving something else as we seek to love other people. In other words, there is always something between us and those we love (or not). We delude ourselves if we imagine that our efforts to love are innocent, and we refuse to take seriously the quiet whisperings of the powerful social, cultural and economic influences around us and within us. We tell ourselves that we do not need a god to tell us how to love but in reality it is precisely such gods as these which tell us what love is and is not. We may well have ‘invented’ the gods, in the sense of giving them names and building temples for them, but they were always there, intimately close, telling us who we are and how we should be. A simple, secular ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, then, without a reference to the other ‘loves’ which are not our neighbour, doesn’t tell the truth about us and love.

And so it becomes impossible to dismiss Jesus’ double love command as a religious option joined to a non-optional universal and secular one. The dual command to love does not prescribe a requirement for human beings but, implicitly, first describes our condition: your love of others is determined by a prior love, a prior set of conditions and qualifications of what is required of you.

Our love is shaped by our gods, our gods revealed in how we love. Rather than being a problem, then, the call to love God is now a question: on what basis do you love? To love (a) god is not to insert some vague spiritual dimension into our relationships. That dimension is already there, and is much more than ‘vague’ in its effects.

Jesus’ invitation is to love the particular God who is revealed in the way Jesus himself loved. This love was one of openness to all he encountered, while at the same refusing to be constrained by the lesser gods which had power over them.

This love was one which refused to deal in death as a means to an end, and so refused also to fear death when it was used by others as a means to limit him.

The exchange between Jesus and the God he loved is unconditionally concerned with life. This is what Jesus presents to us in miracles and teaching and his simple willingness to be with us, whoever we are: a lively light which reveals the shadows in our midst and invites us to step out of the dark into that light.

To grow in love is not simply to be nicer to those around us – although surely this would be a good thing! To grow in love is also to come to see what has made us less than the lovers we were created to be, and to suspect that there is yet more painful truth God will reveal about us. The command is there for a reason – we have not yet achieved love, of which the world in which we live is ample evidence.

If what God reveals about our love is painful, we do not fear that pain but embrace it. We embrace it not because the pain is good but because it might make us want to put behind us what has come between us and God, us and each other, and so made us less human than we could be.

Love embraces, exposes, heals. It is to this that God calls us, and this that God gives. Let us receive it with joy.

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Pentecost 20
18/10/2020

2 Corinthians 3:17-4:7
Psalm 99
Matthew 22:15-22

In a sentence
Life in this world – our decisions and actions – are in themselves uncertain; it is God who makes us right

‘Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.’

Ever since this almost throw-away line form Jesus, hares have been running everywhere concerning the relationship between the affairs of the world and the affairs of heaven. Those with power in the affairs of the world have typically wanted to remind the church that Jesus drew a line between God and the world and our responsibilities to each. Those with a sense that God would see the political world changed have often had to convince even the church that faith can ‘interfere’ – so to speak – in the business of the world.

The energy in those debates comes from a separation Jesus himself at least seems to make. Yet the original question is not about the separation of church and state (as we put it), and so neither could Jesus’ answer be. To pose a separation of the political sphere, the market and the religious cult was not something Israel could do. The prophets preached that allegiance to God is at the heart of the life of the nation, and was to be manifest in the palace, the people and the Temple.

The Pharisees don’t ask about the relationship of the political sphere and the religious sphere but about the relationship between a foreign power and the religion wrapped around it (on the one hand), and their own (subjugated) politics and religion (on the other).

The separation we too easily hear as being along the secular-religious line is, then, actually a question about how these gods and their respective politics interact. Can we know were God is in our complex personal, social, political and religious being, and so can we know what we must do when our convictions are in conflict with our context?

We would have to say that while those challengers went away ‘amazed’ at Jesus’ response, they weren’t any the wiser as to precisely where the ‘things of Caesar’ or the ‘things of God’ have their beginning and their end. We are left still asking ‘How much is enough?’ and ‘How much is too much?’

Yet this way of putting it reveals a concern hidden below the surface question of God versus Caesar. The Pharisees’ question really asks, What are the rules here and what do we have to do to keep ourselves safe from God? This is a concern with self-justification before God and before the world.

Jesus, however, refuses to give an answer which affirms this concern. This is because such an answer would violate the peculiar responsibility we have before each other and before God, and the dependence of those relationships on grace.

While it looks, then, as if Jesus dodges an undodgeable bullet with his own trick question about the head on the coin, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the Pharisees would have been not so much politically dangerous as catastrophic for faith. For faith indeed trusts in God but cannot show precisely were God is, and so cannot prove what God desires in any time or place. Jesus’ answer then, with its lack of clarity as to just where the things of God and the things of the emperor start and finish, could be re-expressed as, ‘Live dangerously – take the risk of making a decision here’.

This moves us from the specific question of God and Caesar to a more general question of how we can know whether our choices and actions are correct, and presses us away from considering this text in insolation from the gospel as a whole – as it is usually considered – towards that wider gospel perspective.

At the heart of the gospel story is the crucifixion of Jesus, and this is also at the heart of how we should read our text today. For a deep irony is revealed in the crucifixion when we look back from it to the challenge the Pharisees put to Jesus in today’s reading. If the religious leaders wanted to know how to separate God and Caesar, in the crucifixion they unite God and Caesar in a single offering. The crucifixion is precisely a ‘rendering to God’ in the form of a ‘rendering’ to Caesar. Jesus is arrested, tried and presented to the imperial power for Godly reasons – so far as the religious authorities understand God. Jesus is a blasphemer and is handed over to be destroyed, for God’s sake. This destruction, however, is brought about by giving Jesus to the Romans, for the religious leaders have no authority to make such an offering to God. The death of Jesus is a rendering of him up to God by giving him up to the emperor.

The religious authorities, then, with their proposal that righteousness would separate God and Caesar, combine them to bring about the desired end of Jesus in a kind of ‘unGodly Godliness’.

And yet there is that other ‘rendering’ here – that which Jesus himself makes – also a two-in-one giving to God and to Caesar. On the one hand, Jesus’ life is given up to God: everything he does is from and to God. On the other hand, this is done within an ordinary historical context with its particular empire of needs, desires and powers. So the incarnation itself – the presence of the kingdom of God in a manger or on the dusty roads of Palestine – is an offering to God in the form of a baby in the hay or those roads and all who travel them. Jesus gives to God in the ways and means that are possible to him in that time and place.

Jesus’ unswerving path to the cross, then, is an offering to God in the form of the religious convictions and political powers of the day. It is, we might say, a ‘Godly unGodliness’, the reverse of what the religious authorities have done. Yet the Godly and the unGodly are so thoroughly intertwined that no one can see that the cross is righteous – that it is Godly – because there is no formula in which ‘die on a cross’ equals ‘righteousness’.

Jesus’ offering to God is a life lived in the midst of a world with its many gods and many caesars, within which it is never possible to prove how much the god should get and how much the world should get. And yet his particular performance of that life is declared by the resurrection to be righteous – not because at every point along the way Jesus did exactly the thing God was looking for but because everything was done trusting in the God who makes things right.

Or, to put it differently, to believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to live before God in the world, believing that God has put you here for a reason and trusting that God will declare your earnest response righteous.

The Pharisees’ dangerous question is not really about Gods and emperors. It is about how where righteousness is to be found when we must act, unable to prove to others that this is the right course of action. This is at the heart of any tough decision we have to make.

Our political leaders today are in the midst of this as they wonder when to relax the Covid-19 lockdown, balancing the desire to minimize its impact on life and health with the need for social and economic re-wakening. They – and we – will not know they have done the best thing but only that they have responded in a particular way to that gloriously ambiguous command, ‘Love one another’.

We will not know that we have made the most ‘faithful’ response to the anticipated rise in global temperatures over the next century – despite the eternal confidence of opposition parties that they do know. We will know only that we made a response, and God have mercy on us.

We will not know that we have donated enough money, spent enough time, been patient long enough; we will know only that we have given, spent, waited some…

How then, can we act under these circumstances? Is it faithful to pay ‘unGodly’ taxes? Can we protect ourselves against God in this way?

The gospel is that God knows that we cannot know, even as we beat ourselves up with the thought that we should know or assure ourselves that we do. God knows that there is no ‘protection’ from God in this way.

If God knows this, then God’s call to life is, ‘Live dangerously, take the risk of making a decision here’, for God knows that there are no guarantees in this world other than God himself. So God is OK with what we do as we seek to live a Godly life, peppered with prayers for mercy.

God’s knowledge of us and continuing love for us nonetheless is our freedom to give to God what is God’s and to the world what is the world’s, in everything that we do.

Those who love and serve God as God loves and serve them are free to do what they will.