This Sunday’s Gospel showcases one of those teachings people can always quote and think they understand what Jesus meant – until you talk to them about it: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)
The context of Jesus’s teaching was, of course, attempted entrapment: the Pharisees were seeking a “gotcha” moment where they could use Jesus’s words either to alienate him from the Jews or to get Him into trouble with the Romans. Asked about the “lawful[ness]” of paying taxes to the Romans, they knew that an affirmative response would divide Jesus from the vast majority of Israel chafing for almost a century under Roman occupation, while a negative one would be to challenge Rome’s government. Jesus evades the trap by speaking of the things of Caesar and the things of God – without explicitly saying what belongs to whom.
Jesus’s words were social teaching: a recognition of civil government and its autonomy. In that sense, they perdure as keystones of Catholic social ethics. But just as the words left behind a certain ambiguity in first-century Israel, so today – in a different world – many hearers read their own context into them.
Jesus recognizes that both God and Caesar are rulers who govern and whose subjects owe them certain obligations. Jesus is not saying that God and Caesar are the same kinds of rulers or that their relationship is symmetrical. It is not.
There are things due God and things due Caesar. But recognizing that some things are owed to Caesar does not mean they are not also owed to God. God and Caesar are not divvying up things in mutually exclusive ways. There is nothing that belongs to Caesar that did not first and still belongs above all to God – including Caesar himself.
To say otherwise is to fall into the errors of pagan Rome where, at various times, the emperor himself was turned into a god. Caesar is not God’s competitor or an alternate “power base.” In antiquity, what we today call “church” and “state” were not separated. The ruler was often regarded as God’s representative, though his all-too-frequent apotheosis was idolatry.
The idea of the ruler as divine representative is not far-fetched. The reason Israel did not have a king for so long was that God was its king and Israel His people. This was the essence of the Covenant. Of course, Israel eventually demanded a king so that “then we shall be like all the other nations.” (I Samuel 8:19-20) The demand was prophetic: with few exceptions, the kings of Israel and Judah dragged the people down to a moral level “such as all other nations.” (I Samuel 8:5)
But at its best, kingship in Israel was seen as representing God because the king was to lead Israel in God’s ways: that is why Solomon prays for wisdom “to govern your people, [so] that I may discern between good and evil.” (I Kings 3:9) The same concept is operative in the Western notion of the divine right of kings. The king is appointed by God not to exercise his own arbitrary will but to lead the people in the ways of righteousness. But both in Israel and the West, the reality rarely corresponded to the ideal.
Jesus’s response to the Pharisees was intended to recognize temporal authority, but not to the exclusion of divine primacy. Even kings, even Caesar, are subject to the Ten Commandments. Admitting the limited scope of what is due to Caesar is to recognize the legitimate autonomy of created things, a concept affirmed at Vatican II. (Gaudium et spes, no. 36)
The created world has its own proper, intrinsic order: in that sense, God is something of a divine watchmaker who inputs the working mechanisms into His creatures. But – it’s important here to distinguish legitimate autonomy of earthly things from Deism – God does not then walk away from Creation or history. The autonomy of earthly things is not an autonomy separate from, independent of, or ultimately not rooted in God: it is God’s design.
The “privacy” driving the Western world still hopes vainly to find a positive answer to the Psalmist’s query, “where can I flee from Your presence?” (Psalms 139:7) – including in “autonomies” radically divorced from God. That same “hope” lingers in how some read Jesus on the things of God and Caesar. It is a hope dating back to the Garden of Eden, when our first parents succumbed to the illusion that part of the Garden could be fenced off from the owner.
The modern notion of separation of church and state comes into play here, including how some read Jesus’s reply to the Pharisees. Caesar does not have unlimited autonomy vis-à-vis God. Civil life cannot be fenced off from God or His Law. Jesus certainly never intended His words to ground a naked public square from which Caesar could banish God for poaching on his “things.” It is the underlying assumption in the “personally opposed” caricatures of conscience espoused by various contemporary politicians who think the limited autonomy of public life gives their partisan ambitions a moral pass.
The best of America’s tradition affirms something quite different. Jefferson grounds the right of revolution in the principle that when “any form of government” becomes destructive of inalienable rights conferred by God, the people have “the right to alter or abolish it.” The Constitution seeks to constrain overreaching Caesars by dividing and enumerating powers. John Adams sums it up, observing, “[O]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Because only a “moral and religious people” will recognize that Caesar’s arms are too short to box with God.
