Today’s readings: Isaiah 45, 1.4-6; 1 Thessalonians 1, 1-5; Matthew 22, 15-21.
The relationship of Christians to the State is not reducible to the obligation of paying taxes although that is also a commitment, and tax evasion continues to be a grave sin and an unfortunate complacency in our culture. But nowadays, Caesar’s issue has broader and deeper ramifications for the individual believer and for the public role of the Church in a secularised and lay society.
In today’s gospel, Matthew passes from the conflicts Jesus perennially had with the religious authorities to the issue of rights and obligations citizens have towards the polis, the city. Jesus, steering away from any form of fundamentalism, lays down the principle that should regulate the role of religious institutions within the State. But a two thousand year history of Christianity demonstrates how difficult and tortuous that relationship was in its evolution and implementation.
From the experience of persecutions to the dominance of the Constantinian Church, from the attempts to recover the liberty of the Church at the time of Gregory VII to the Reformation solutions, the issue of the boundaries between Church and State marked substantially the history of Christianity. That issue proved to be among the most difficult to resolve till our times.
What ultimately features as central to its peaceful resolution in modern times is how we can come to terms with religious liberty and with the issue of freedom of conscience. It was actually freedom of conscience that was crucial in the times paving the way to the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath.
The presupposition of those interrogating Jesus in the gospel, which then remained the premise for much of the time and which influenced entire civilisations, was that of a theocracy: that all power and authority are in God. That premise, of course, holds no more ground. With the radical changes of mentality and perspective that entire societies have gone through, and eventually in the wake of secularisation, we no longer hold on to the theory that temporal power is subject to the spiritual power represented by the Church or whatever other religious institution.
We no longer think in terms of sacred and profane, as if the world we inhabit is ‘profane’ in the sense of being completely alien to God and to whatever falls under the spiritual domain. Today we invoke as the basic truth the separation between Church and State. But this cannot be reductively interpreted in the liberal sense of the word, meaning that the Church’s competency is merely ‘spiritual’ in the sense of ‘other-worldly’.
Separation between Church and State means autonomy, respective competence of both sides, and possibly collaboration in the name of the common good. As Rowan Williams writes in his book Faith in the Public Square, “The Christian faith is not a matter of vague philosophy but of unremitting challenge to what we think we know about human beings and their destiny”.
Even in a secularised world, religion and the Church still have a public role that cannot be undermined. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a schism in Western thought over the relationship between religion and modernity. It was almost taken as a granted assumption that modernity would marginalise religion. Today we all acknowledge that this did not happen.
Today’s gospel should make us think in terms of a conjoined faith and civil commitment. The political argument apart, the gospel of Jesus provokes us to take up responsibility for meaningful action and challenges us against commonplace reductive interpretations of what human identity amounts to.
We are all called to make room for the meanings of God in our lives. From that depends the kind of society we perpetuate. A society like ours in which the Christian imagination had atrophied to vanishing point would seriously be lacking a component that can give a sense of wholeness to our personal lives as well as to the form of social cohesion we badly need.