Homily from Father Provincial for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings for Year A: Isaiah 45:1-6; I Thessalonians 1:1-5; Matthew 22:15-21
We can be grateful for this Gospel reading coming at a time when a highly charged election campaign in the US is dominating the headlines and a febrile atmosphere of political division is only too palpable in Britain. How Christians deal with worldly politics has always been a bone of contention, never more so than now. Jesus’ famous words, “Render unto Caesar” have long been taken by the Church as giving a certain space of legitimate autonomy to the secular jurisdiction. But just saying that leaves unanswered the question of what we modern Christians are supposed to do with our autonomy: do we simply assert our own rights and privileges, do we fight for the freedom of the Church or do we take a more universalist perspective? That’s the question which divides us today, sometimes violently. Does the Gospel get us beyond simply affirming our right to make up our own minds?
As a young priest I had a romantic notion that a Christian ought to deduce the right politics from their faith. I was offended by Catholics who followed a kind of class loyalty and voted Labour or Conservative according to inherited tribal affiliation. I remember rashly haranguing a group of distinguished Catholic journalists for their partisan covering of the Church’s affairs constantly analysing everything in terms of conservativism and progressivism.
There was a certain naivete about the idea that the Gospel could only spell out one form of politics. A dangerous naivete, even, because a politics that is charged with the conviction that it is God’s will does not make for the kinds of dialogue and compromise which a decent human society requires as one of its foundations. And yet a politics which has no regard for God is also dangerous in its own way. How do you cultivate a social fabric which is conscious of God and yet not intolerant and violent in pursuing an ostensibly godly agenda?
Jesus’ engagement with the politics of his day shows a way forward. The dominant question in first century Palestine was how to be a faithful Jew under imperial Roman rule. On the one hand you had the radical nationalists, the zealots who practised terrorism to liberate God’s people by force. The Pharisees were not men of violence but their sympathies lay in that direction. They lived out in their own religious lives a piety of separatism that said effectively “we are pure and undefiled by the presence of the ungodly nations among us”. You need to know that to hear the manipulativeness in the question to Jesus in the Gospel: we know you aren’t scared to speak out (as we are!): should we pay taxes to the Romans? Framed like this, Jesus is liable to being portrayed as a coward, a man beholden to merely human authority, and pagan authority at that. You hear echoes of the pharisees’ approach in those voices calling on the Bishops to defy the civil authorities.
On the other hand you had the scribes and the Temple elite who were in the pockets of the Romans and prized stability and peace above all. They were not zealous about the ancient laws of Israel but they knew that keeping the Temple going provided enough of a fig leaf to the legitimacy of their corrupt rule to keep the peace. This is the religiosity of lip-service, a faith that seeks identity without commitment. We know it well.
Jesus does not fit into this political standoff. He believes that being a Jew is demanding, means a total commitment to God. But it does not involve setting oneself apart from the world to make oneself pure, let alone a scapegoating of any group. His is the path of mercy, peace and reconciliation. And it is significant that in his band of disciples he included zealots and pharisees on the one hand as well as a tax collector, the ultimately lax Jew on the other. The early Church would have been a politically diverse group of people, even more so once Christianity opened up to the gentile world. It remains so today.
Our modern politics is post-revolutionary, the fruit of the great revolutions which took place in England, America and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are divided by our attitude to our national traditions and institutions. Conservatives look to the past and value the long slow incremental change which has made us free and flourishing, to the infinite number of insights and compromises embodied in law and custom. Progressives look forward to a future society in which everyone is finally set free, treated justly and equally. The dynamic which constantly balances the demands of past and future is a fundamentally healthy one. The achievement of justice in society is the work of every generation and always involves building afresh on old foundations. Like the art of standing still, which we have all perfected, it is a constant balancing act of left and right.
No single politics can capture all of this because human freedom is alive and active and refuses to allow itself to be predicted or manipulated. When Jesus says “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what belongs to God” I hear a cool-headed recognition of our obligation as Christians to hold together different perspectives and to keep open fundamental questions about what does indeed belong to God and what to Caesar. Jesus’ very refusal to settle the question put to him is the message: you’d better work this out!
That’s why the Church, though constantly struggling with the political ups and downs of human history, does not seek to impose herself as a theocratic power which imposes a divine law and sanctions those who contravene it. The Gospel is an assertion of the great project of God in which human beings assume their role of taking responsibility for themselves, for one another and for all of creation. At a time when it’s easy to forget the nobility of our great calling, and instead to get lost in cheap factionalism, let’s hear again the call to political responsibility and to the political virtues of mercy, peace and reconciliation.
Fr Damian Howard SJ