There are those who believe that God intervenes in human history in ways specifically designed to ‘save’ their lot. Such a view surely belongs to ancient history when most nations held this view, but we have to ask if such values truly represent the divine whom we believe enters into a relationship with us whereby we are encouraged, but never forced, to respond; and assuredly most of us don’t behave as we should most of the time. Our loving creator/sustainer God, like a caring parent, approaches us with possibilities and grace, never by domination, which is the point of the incarnation. Understanding this difference is fundamental to our embrace of Christianity and our openness to other faiths in the modern world. This has never been more imperative or important as we live in a world imploding in the Near and Middle East and the Ukraine.
Second Isaiah (45:1.4-6) comes from the time of the Babylonian Exile when in the 6th century BCE the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the elite were exiled into the expanding Babylonian empire. We might have expected the prophet to write of doom and gloom, and ‘I told you so’. This is not the case, for the Book, Chapters 40-55, largely speaks of God’s care and love for Israel and of the hope and future that lies ahead of the people; indeed, their time amongst the intellectual life of Babylon would prove to be fertile in enhancing religious thought for centuries. In verse 1 of our text, the prophet speaks for God of Cyrus, King of Persia, shortly to bring about the downfall of the Babylonian Empire. Persians had a very different policy to those they conquered, preferring to keep them in their homelands as obedient and grateful vassal states who paid their taxes and added to their ever-expanding military might, a policy we find copied by the Romans later in the west. History would witness the fruit of this policy, when in the early 5th century BCE vast Persian forces expanded ever further west, conquering what we know as Turkey, and so much of the Middle East including the great Greek diaspora. Things came to a head with their invasion of Greece under Xerxes and the doomed Spartan stand at Thermopile, and the enemy was only stopped with the Greek triumph at Salamis in 480 BCE where they sank the Persian fleet. In gratitude to their gods they rebuilt the Parthenon. The west would be dominated thereafter by Greek thought, not Persian. So we are speaking of opportunities by which nations rose and fell and discovered who they were amidst the chaos of their lives. God gives opportunities not directives.
Our Gospel, (Matthew 22:15-21) deals ostensibly with another question about taxes. Jesus remains in Jerusalem, and disputes with the Jewish leadership as we continue prior to his passion and death. We are reading on from last week’s parable of the kingdom with the king’s banquet, which we recall ended with the ungrateful guest who grabbed the goodies at the feast but rejected to pay any respect and gratitude towards the king, and suffered the dire consequences; here in Matthew clearly a comment on the Jewish rejection of the messiah. Here we find Pharisees and Herodians, two powerful groups in Judaism but normally enemies, since the latter supported the Herods, rulers imposed by Rome and pagan most of the time, but coming together to attempt to trap Jesus, by getting him either to support the hated Roman occupiers or refuse payment of their taxes and proclaiming himself a rebel. It was one of those ‘crunch’ moments in which Jesus has to act to defend himself and his followers, yet works not to force either opinion but to allow his interlocutors the graced freedom of God in their decision making; for God the Son cannot compel belief nor remove the abilities we are all given in our fundamental humanity to impose alternatives. Significantly, accounts of Jesus’ trial before Pilate all mention ‘false testimony’ against Jesus, and Luke 23 has an accusation that Jesus tried to persuade Jews to refuse payment of taxes to Rome, whereas the Gospels show him paying tax to the Romans. Significantly then in our text, this is reported quite differently, with Jesus distinguishing between the temporal order in which believers must comply with the laws of the state, and heavenly things which quite surpass earthly power but where we find our moments of divinity. In Israel at the time, Roman taxes were paid in Roman coin, hence the coin Jesus shows them with Caesar’s image. Offerings to the Temple were paid in Jewish coin and the Temple, as in so many things Jesus criticised, was a coin exchange – with charges going to the Temple! Jesus therefore used theoccasion to remind the Jewish elite that they seemed to be confusing that line between the temporal and the eternal.
In a time when Gaza lies in ruins, facing utter annihilation by Israel, and innocent Palestinians face imminent destruction, and Israel is faced with the horrors inflicted by Hamas, the teaching of Jesus is most apposite. Is it right to defend one’s own people with overwhelming force at the cost of genocide? Surely the call for proportionality, and the observing of the rules of war whereby non-combatants are not targeted either by bombing or a total lack of the necessities of life, is ever more relevant especially to our lives in the God who gives life to all. Peace can never be achieved with the total reduction of cities and their people, as we see with Mariopol and so many other places in the Ukraine, which only leaves enduring hatred between opposing forces.
In Thessalonians (1:1-5) we enter into one of Paul’s pieces of teaching to Christians for whom he had the happiest of memories. Actually the document is composed of two letters which got mixed up in ancient times. We start with a second letter, commonly known as B whilst the first, A (2:13-4:2) precedes it. This letter is full of support for a Christian community under persecution from the Gentile and of course pagan majority whose life style Christians were called to abandon, particularly its abuse of their own and others bodies; treatment of slaves; or their self-indulgent lifestyles. Paul had had to leave them, and writes from Athens. Letter B is written to encourage the community to continue in the ways of Christian living that they had learned from Paul and who tried to mirror Christ; hard working, conscientious; as clearly some, as the letter continues, just sat back and waited for the return of Jesus as saviour and ignored all that was happening in the world. Our invitation from the creator is to live and grow in the image of God the Son, which, as we have seen in the Gospels was always about our involvement with others to the glory of God. So Jesus’ invitation, whether to the Christians of Thessalonica in the 50’s CE, or to us today, is that we engage in the world, bringing Christ’s love and values to the forefront at every opportunity. Contrary to the views of some, Christian belief and practice is always directed to the salvation and outreach of others, and not fundamentally about preserving our own souls. We have Jesus as our model.
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