Main news for 18 May 2023

The Pharisees' question and Christ's answer about the tax to Caesar reveal an enormous difference in initial assumptions. Trying to catch the Lord, the Pharisees ask a question about priorities: what is more important, obedience to an alien but actually strong power, or national self-determination. It is important to note that both of these supposed values lie outside the religious sphere. More than that, Israel's history already knew by that time examples when national dignity required resistance, while the Lord through the mouth of a prophet called people to submit to the conqueror, because he was the Lord's instrument.

Further, the Pharisees expect that the Savior, proceeding from the idea that the Kingdom, that is, the sole rule of God, is above everything, will say that one should not obey earthly authorities. For precisely this case they called the Herodians along with them, so as immediately to hand the Lord over to those very authorities. But the whole point is that the Pharisees suppose that the Kingdom of God and the principate of Augustus are phenomena comparable in nature and scale, and that they can be correlated with one another within the framework of the proposed, even if crafty, alternative. For them the Kingdom of God is a politically successful earthly Israelite state headed by the expected Messiah.

But the Lord's answer leaves not one stone upon another of this Pharisaic assumption. The Kingdom of God and Caesar's kingdom appear in Christ's answer as two nonintersecting planes, incomparable with one another in scale. The Kingdom of God belongs to eternity and embraces everything that exists, while an earthly kingdom limited in time and space cannot even be its small likeness, just as a swarm of infusoria in a courtyard puddle cannot be a comparable likeness of Earth's biosphere. Thus Christ's answer completely rejects the Roman, and also later Jewish, sacralization of the earthly kingdom. Later the apostle Paul will give final explanations on this subject when he says that our citizenship is in heaven, and that we should obey earthly authorities only because and to the extent that they oppose evil and violence.

But the most important thing in Christ's words is the call to render God's things to God. Even the question of the relation between earthly and Heavenly kingdoms recedes into the background. The main thing is not how you arrange your earthly affairs and relationships; the main thing is how you build relationships with God. Whether to pay tax to Caesar is not such a simple and obvious question, but it can be solved. A person's life, however, is determined not by this, but by what he brings to God.