Render unto Caesar

A few weeks ago Martin and I read a well-known story from the book of Luke in the Bible.  To set the scene, it occurred in the week before Jesus was executed, when Jews from all over Israel had gathered in Jerusalem for a religious festival.  Tensions were running high around Jesus - this new religious teacher loved by the crowds but who the religious establisment saw as heretical and deeply dangerous.

This is our story:

The religious leaders sent spies to keep a close watch on Jesus. The spies pretended to be honest. They hoped they could trap Jesus with something he would say. Then they could hand him over to the power and authority of the governor.

So the spies questioned Jesus. "Teacher," they said, "we know that you speak and teach what is right. We know you don't favor one person over another. You teach the way of God truthfully.  Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

Jesus saw they were trying to trick him. So he said to them, "Show me a silver coin. Whose picture and words are on it?"

"Caesar's," they replied

 He said to them, "Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. And give to God what belongs to God.

 They were not able to trap him with what he had said there in front of all the people. Amazed by his answer, they became silent.

Luke 20:20-26 NRIV

I know this story well and I've puzzled over it for years.  I've read it carefully in context, trying to understand what Jesus was trying to say.  I've even read articles about it, hoping that someone else's reflections would shed light on it.  This time, however, the meaning seemed so obvious that I'm struggling to remember what my problem was with it!

Martin and I are working our way through the book of Luke at the moment.  In recent weeks we've already puzzled our way through two earlier stories about money: the story of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1-14) and the story of three servants who were each entrusted with money while their master was away (Luke 19:11-26).  In the first of these stories, money was referred to as 'dishonest gains' ('wordly wealth' in the translation the links will take you to) and a thing of very little importance.  The point of that story was, if you could be faithful in using such an insignificant thing as money to achieve ends that really mattered, one day you would be given 'true' wealth that would really belong to you and would really last.  In the second story, servants who were able to significantly grow the vast sums of wealth their master had entrusted to them were described, again, as having been faithful in "a very small matter".

So it seems that, in the book of Luke, Jesus is presented as seeing money as a thing of very little importance.  It pales into insignificance beside the 'true wealth' which you get from God.

With that understanding already with us, the meaning of this latest episode seemed clear.  Caesar has put his image on these coins and he's instituted a taxation system: he clearly thinks money matters.  However, we know better: it's a thing of very little importance, and is definitely not to be confused with real wealth.  I think that Jesus is saying: if Caesar wants this silly money stuff, then give it to him - but give what really matters to God.

I find that challenging - not least because I don't see money as being of little importance at all.  Instead, I manage my money very carefully, very much acting like it matters a lot.  In addition, I live in a society where we struggle to value anything that doesn't have a dollar value.  But here is Jesus saying that money is a profoundly unimportant thing.

I guess that also sheds light on what he says in the famous 'sermon on the plain', also in the book of Luke.  Jesus says there that if someone steals from you, you musn't demand your property back - you shouldn't even stop them from taking more of it!  That makes more sense when you understand that, contrary to what you might think, the things that they can take this way don't really matter all that much and aren't really worth fighting for.

Something I find really exciting about this insight is that way that it has been built up as we've made our way through the book of Luke.  I'm so appreciating working my way through the Bible in whole books, rather than in scattered passages or verses taken from many different places.  These books are, after all, books.  The stories within them are episodes in a bigger story, not just entities in their own right, and Martin and I have been finding it immensely rewarding to read them as such :-)

Carrying your cross and counting the cost

The more I read the Bible, the more I find in it!

At the moment, Martin and I are making our way through the book of Luke: the second of the four books that tell us about Jesus' life on Earth.  Today's reading was from the end of chapter 14:

 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,  saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish

Luke 14:25-30, NIV

This passage contains two ideas that are very familiar to me: "take up your cross" and "count the cost before you take the plunge".  However, as seems to happen depressingly often, it now seems clear that neither of them mean quite what I thought they did.

In the society that Jesus' first hearers lived in, only one group of people went around carrying crosses: condemned prisoners.  When Jesus asked them to take up their crosses, he wasn't asking them to endure hardship, he was asking them to die, or at least knowingly take on that risk.  The earlier sentence actually says it even more clearly.  To put it in my own words, Jesus is saying "if you aren't willing to risk both your own death and that of the people you're responsible for looking after, then you just can't follow me".

Goodness!

As a matter of fact, I found reading these words on this morning to be oddly comforting.  In the last fortnight, our household has felt called by God to do something that carries a small risk of exposing one or all of us to considerable physical harm.  I'm disproportionately likely to be the recipient of any such harm, should such harm come.  This passage affirms my conviction that accepting such risks (and Martin and I allowing each other to accept them) is a normal part of following Jesus.

Once you've grapsed that that's what following Jesus is like, the bits about counting the cost before you start make perfect sense!  However, while I was familiar with the idea of counting the cost, I don't think I'd ever noticed just when you're supposed to do this.  You count it before you start following Jesus at all and not, as I had thought, before you agree to accept each particular risk.

Have you ever been in an evangelistic situation where people have been encouraged to do that?  Encouraged to count the cost, not of rejecting Jesus, but of actually following him?  I don't think I have.  Is that one of the reasons why so many people start following Jesus but then give up - that it was never made clear to them just what following Jesus might entail?  And peversely, would more teenagers and young people be interested in following Jesus if any expression of interest on their part was greeted with an exhortation to consider the potentially life-threatening consequences before making any rash choices?!

Exciting (and disconcerting) stuff, this Bible-reading!