NOTES for Luk 20:19-47

For Jews at the beginning of the first century AD, the tax to Caesar was a humiliating sign of dependence on the Romans. If the Lord had said that it should be paid, He could have been accused of lacking patriotism (at that point the chief priests would urgently have become patriots). If He had said that it should not be paid, He could have been accused of inciting rebellion (in that case the chief priests would have had to present themselves as constructive collaborators with the Romans, which, in the end, is exactly what they did). Christ's answer is striking first of all because He clearly distinguishes the sphere of earthly ordering of life, to which all forms of national and supranational authority belong, from the sphere of the life of the spirit. The Lord does not reject the state and does not call for a religious reorganization of state governance. His answer places the life of the spirit and worldly authority on different planes.

On the one hand, this gives us the ability to see the real usefulness of authority for ensuring the normal life of society, as the apostles will later write in detail. On the other hand, Christ's answer frees His disciples from deifying authority and rejects the claims of earthly authorities over people's spiritual life. For that era this was an unprecedented revelation, and it was precisely for this that the Roman state persecuted Christians.

The most important thing in Christ's words is the call to render to God what is God's, to be no less concerned with fulfilling our duties before the Creator of the world than before its temporary rulers. And this is the hardest thing of all.

Before us is an attempted provocation carried out under a mask of piety. We see how false piety, severed from a genuine walk before God, turns into resistance to Him. The very construction of the sentence, which begins from afar and is strewn with false compliments, exposes the lack of straightforwardness in those asking the provocative question. But God is not mocked, and Christ not only escaped the trap laid for Him with dignity, but also set out, almost in passing, the principle on which relations between faith and the state should be founded.

Spiritual life and government belong to different spheres and must not be confused. Living in a state, we are called to obey its laws and not detach ourselves from the reality of civic life. But it is unacceptable to replace Gospel principles with political ones or to declare that every action of earthly rulers conforms to God’s will. In the days when the question was asked whether it was lawful to pay tribute to the Roman emperor, he demanded to be honored as a god. Christ does not object to paying taxes, which is the duty of every citizen, but if the emperor requires his subjects to commit a grave sin, no concession is permissible.

The question put to the Saviour in order to trap Him and place Him in an impossible position had nothing to do with whether taxes needed to be paid or evaded. Indeed, it could have been asked, and made sense, only in the particular circumstances of first-century AD Judaea. The issue was not whether one ought to pay taxes, but whether a devout Jew was permitted to do so.

Framing the question in this way might seem strange were it not for the particular circumstances. Judaea was then part of the Roman Empire, and taxes were collected by the Roman authorities for their own benefit. Hence the corresponding attitude towards tax collectors as collaborators, with all the consequences that followed. But while attitudes towards the collectors—the publicans—were clear enough, since they were seen as outcasts and renegades, the payment of taxes was a less clear-cut matter. The radical Zealots opposed any cooperation with the Roman authorities, including paying taxes, but this position automatically placed them outside the law: under Roman law, calling for refusal to pay taxes was tantamount to treason and rebellion.

The more moderate Pharisees held that, since payment was coerced and compulsory, taxes could nevertheless be paid to avoid death. Although the Zealots differed from the Pharisees on this point, they did not press them with unnecessary questions, at least publicly. All the more so since many Pharisees, while not daring to support the radicals openly, nevertheless sympathised with them in their hearts; and the Zealots knew that, if needed, they could always count on support from their less radical like-minded allies—within the bounds of what was possible, of course.

The provocative question was put to Jesus precisely to place Him in a situation where there was no ‘convenient’ answer: publicly calling on people to pay taxes to the Romans meant just as publicly recognising and approving the occupying power's rule, while calling for refusal to pay them was equivalent to calling for rebellion, with all the consequences of such a call. Yet Jesus, as always, answers completely ‘outside the rules’: He speaks not of politics but of the Kingdom. To whom does money belong? To the one who mints it? Then leave it to him.

For the Kingdom, the question of taxes is irrelevant: a person's life in the Kingdom does not depend in any way on whether they pay taxes or not, just as it does not depend on whom exactly they pay them to. All this concerns only what does not, and never will, extend beyond the untransfigured world. No money will ever become part of the Kingdom's life, and there will never be any taxes there. All taxes paid in this world will remain here. If so, one can remain an inhabitant of the Kingdom while paying taxes to any earthly government. Or paying them to none.

A very logical answer, isn't it? But is that so we cannot say we have one King, that all we have belongs to God? And so we should give nothing to Caesar (in a more common form - to the State)?

If everything for us really belonged to God, any thought, any act, not only ours, but also for all those who surround us; it would really have been the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of love; there would have been no properties, money (remember the Church's first days of existence), there would have been no violence, no crimes and in general no bad actions - and we wouldn't have needed the police, the army, the state employees, the government in whole. Then it's true, everything would be divine and belonging to God.

But such is not the case in practice. Let's look honestly how many our acts are motivated by love, and how many by something else. And if of us nobody is able of living according to God's will, then at least a certain human institutions maintaining order in the world, and not giving it to tumble in chaos are necessary; It is the money, government, "Caesar". Unfortunately, all these institutions always begin to claim that maintenance of order in the society doesn't enter their competence as regards the conscience, faith, man's spiritual freedom. And here, in all clearness the principle of Jesus should be applied: "unto God the things which be God's".

Jesus' opponents sometimes arranged for Him a kind of examination in the Jewish theology of their day. The question about a woman who had been married several times in her life was used by opponents of faith in the universal resurrection, chiefly representatives of the priesthood, as an argument in debate: indeed, whose wife would she be if she met all her husbands alive? This was one of those standard "difficult" questions from the Sadducees to the Pharisees, to which there were their own "elegant" answers. Jesus, as is not hard to guess, was being tested on His knowledge of such answers.

He speaks about something entirely different: the life of the Kingdom, which is completely unlike the life of the untransformed world with its laws. He wants to show those asking Him that trying to apply the coordinate system of the untransformed world to the life of the Kingdom is a path that is a dead end from the start. In the Kingdom there is no earthly marriage not because the differences between men and women disappear there, but because the very quality of life changes there; even humanity as such changes, in both of its modes, male and female.

The problem about which those who doubt the resurrection ask Jesus could arise only in the completely incredible case that the resurrection became not the triumph of the Kingdom with its new life, but merely the return of all the dead to their former, untransformed life. In the world where time and cause-and-effect relations are an absolute reality, where no effect can be the cause of itself and where time is irreversible, there is indeed no way out of the situation described by the Sadducean theologians. In the untransformed world it cannot occur: its laws do not allow it.

The world where it is possible is ordered differently; different laws operate there, there is no linear time so familiar to us, and therefore the situation can be resolved in the most unexpected way. Jesus gives two examples as illustrations: God, for whom there are no dead, so that for Him Abraham, Isaac, and other great spiritual leaders, long dead for us, are alive; and David, who calls his "lord" the One who in our untransformed world has not yet been born.

It is no wonder that Jesus' opponents fall silent: what He has said does not fit into any framework of any theological schemes. Neither does the Kingdom He brought into the world.

The question put to Christ in today's reading from Luke's Gospel by the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead, is not as groundless as it might first appear. Indeed, what answer can be given? What does the resurrection of the dead mean for this life, and how do relationships established here continue in it? But the Lord rejects earthly life as the point of reference, thus exposing the weakness of the Sadducees' position. They regard our present earthly life as primary and try to consider eternal life in relation to it. In that case, eternity looks like a kind of infinite extension of earthly life. The archaic beliefs of the ancient Semites emphatically avoided this idea; for them, the continuation of the family line was the image of eternity. This was the origin of the legal provision to which the Sadducees refer.

In their question, the Sadducees slyly combine their own highly abstract ideas about eternity with a rule of archaic law. They proceed from the unstated assumption that every letter of that law was dictated directly by God and contains the essence of Revelation for all time. Everything here is mistaken, and their sophisticated question therefore collapses before one simple argument from the Lord Jesus. In the parallel passage, the evangelist Matthew records Christ's rebuke: ‘You are mistaken, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ It is not like that at all, Christ tells the Sadducees. The main point of His reply is that eternity is not what they imagine. It is not the extension of this earthly life through time; on the contrary, earthly life in certain respects can be a likeness, a reflection of heavenly life. Precisely for this reason, by no means every institution that is necessary and meaningful in particular historical circumstances contains a seed of eternity.

Turning next to God's appearance to Moses at the burning bush, Christ says that the resurrection is real because that is who God is. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, and all are alive to Him. It follows that the source of resurrection for human beings is God Himself, not this or that phenomenon of earthly life. This is the key, central idea in the New Testament's teaching on salvation. Christ invites people to seek first God's Kingdom and His righteousness, to seek God Himself—not in some hypothetical future, but here and now. For Him, eternity is not the continuation of earthly life but the sovereign inbreaking of God's Kingdom into the human heart. This inbreaking of eternity transforms earthly life and subjects its laws to itself, as the example Christ gives shows. By earthly standards, Christ is David's descendant and cannot be greater than David himself. By the standards of eternity, however, He is Lord of all.

Luke’s brief account of Christ’s discussions with the Sadducees contains a number of very important things that the Lord reveals to us all. First of all, He says that the resurrection of the dead is a mystery that cannot be comprehended by rational means alone. Then, by recalling that God Himself calls Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the living, the Lord thereby emphasizes that the very fact of our salvation depends on God’s nature and His will. He said the same thing through Deutero-Isaiah, who insisted that God saves His people for His own sake, not because of human merit. This is important because salvation and resurrection thus appear to us as participation in the divine life, rather than merely the perpetuation of frail human existence. The Lord then reminds His listeners, not by chance, of the mystery of Christ’s divine humanity, which, though veiled, is nevertheless deeply attested by the prophets of the Old Testament. The entire conversation is therefore devoted to theosis, the phenomenon of the utmost importance to patristic theology: the human person’s reunion with the life of the Creator, which infinitely surpasses him.

People come to Jesus who denied the resurrection, believing that this earthly existence exhausts a person's whole life. Their attachment to earthly existence is shown by the very question they ask Him. It is a question filled with truly earthly particulars and details. Christ does not give a direct answer, but offers a completely new angle from which to consider the problem. He calls His listeners to take a position beyond time, the position of eternity. From precisely this point one can see the most important thing, which turns out not to be the clarification of family relationships in eternal life, but the fact that "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

Sometimes we ask the Lord questions and do not receive direct answers; our difficulties are not resolved through prayer, and the circumstances of life do not change from year to year. But despite this, we can sense peace and the presence of God within all this irresolution and complexity, if we learn even a little to see our life in the divine dimension.

The Sadducees propose considering a situation they regard beforehand as implausible in order to mock Christ, who in their eyes is certain to lose. They are “right in their own way” if one proceeds from their own concepts, which take no account of the reality Jesus reveals. In essence, we all risk becoming like the Sadducees when we close ourselves within our habitual notions and cease to trust the Lord, who constantly opens before us the world in its immeasurable richness and diversity.

Life after the resurrection is not what the Sadducees, those ancient rationalists, represent in their parody, and so their constructions were swept away. The key words here are: to Him all are alive. Yes, life with God is unlike earthly life as we know it, but our inability to imagine it does not negate the fact that death will not reign forever. The Resurrection lies ahead precisely because the Lord is the Giver of life.

Even people who have long believed often find it strange to read that we will rise again. We cannot avoid dying, because we sin, and sin cannot enter the Kingdom of God; but we cannot avoid living for ever if we are God’s children, and God is immortal. This means that, like God, we are immortal: we are alive. The living are those who can love, those who are free.

How much hope there is for us in the words, “For to Him all are alive”: if to God we are equally alive whether we live or have died, then perhaps even after death, with God’s help, we will be able to change something in our life and repent. What matters is the vector, the direction of our life here on earth. We know nothing about what will happen to us after death, but probably, if in this life we constantly strove toward evil, it will be difficult for us there to change our direction... Yet a lifelong desire to be with God will surely lead us after death into the Kingdom, to the One toward whom we have striven all our lives. Our freedom matters to God; He waits until we ourselves direct our steps toward Him, until we ourselves turn to Him. Only such love—love that is free—can be called love.

The resurrection of the dead has always raised a great number of questions, and many of them have been connected with the understanding of reality characteristic of the limited view of a fallen person living in a fallen world. The main problem here becomes the problem of human imagination and the habit of extrapolating the processes and models of the fallen world to a place where processes unfold differently and the models are unsuitable by definition.

For example, it sometimes happens that the need to explore other planets is "grounded" theologically precisely by the inevitability of the general resurrection: if, the supporters of this rather original theory claim, all generations that ever lived on Earth are resurrected, there will simply not be enough room for them on the planet; therefore, in order to settle them, they will necessarily have to resort to colonizing other planets, and that means preparation for the general resurrection presupposes both interplanetary travel and the colonization of planets suitable for life. For now, at the present stage of its technological development, as the supporters of this view maintain, humanity is not yet ready for the general resurrection. This very peculiar theory may appear amusing, but the arguments offered by its supporters are in essence not very different from those presented to Jesus by the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection. There, too, a picture is drawn that comes down to the same pseudo-problem as the "problem" of the Earth being "overpopulated" by resurrected people: the Sadducees who draw it begin from the idea that resurrection means a person's return to the life of the fallen world that he lives now. Resurrection here is conceived not as movement forward, but as movement backward.

Jesus compares resurrected people with angels, not in the sense that people, when rising, turn into angels (following that logic, one would have to suppose that when they die they turn into demons), but in the sense that the spiritual and natural condition of the resurrected person differs from the spiritual and natural condition of the fallen person no less than the condition and life of that same fallen person differ from the condition and life of an angel. The Savior does not speak in detail about this new life, perhaps because, as fallen people, most of us would not understand His descriptions anyway; but He quite unambiguously rejects the very possibility of transferring the logic and models of the fallen world to the Kingdom, that is, He rejects precisely what we are so inclined to do in our conversations and reflections about the Kingdom.

At times the aphoristic force of Jesus' sayings is so vivid that it sheds new light for us on something we had considered already unambiguously clear. The point is that we look from our human point of view, while Jesus looks from the point of view of the heavenly Father.

So it is in this case: people have always regarded death as almost the chief event in life, feared that event, and tried to understand what happens then... Even now Christians continue to argue seriously about whether one can pray for the dead, whether repentance after death is possible, and so on, thereby giving death some enormous, almost fatal significance.

But with one phrase Jesus puts everything in its place. From God's point of view, and this is the only true point of view, all this is our vanity, because for God there are no dead; all are alive to Him. Therefore our physical death changes nothing in the most important thing: our relationship with God. What happens then, and how it happens, is a secondary matter.

Today, when the story of the poor widow is told, it is not so much about money as about something far more important, of which money becomes a symbol. Money plays the same role in society that blood plays in the body. It flows and nourishes; it envelops society in a network like the web of vessels in our body; it connects us to one another as blood connects the different members. And so, when we give money, we seem to become donors. What does every donor feel after giving blood? Fatigue and weakness, which may last even a week or longer. Mercy likewise does not leave us without loss of blood. Does the Lord then want all our blood to be taken from us, “all she had to live on”? No. But the giving that leaves you weak, unwell, and facing other unpleasant things is Christianity itself; this is precisely what Nietzsche hated. Why have two half-dead people? Better to have one, but strong. There is such evident logic in this; it is so self-evident. If one forgets the soul... Why does a soul come to earth? Even when the Lord sees that a person is now being created who is destined for a painful lot of illness and poverty, say, when the parents are alcoholics, He sends a soul into that body. He cannot do otherwise, which means that this has meaning for Him. But does the Lord ask the soul whether it wants to enter this body? It cannot be otherwise; in any event, He gives His blessing. And then something takes place between that soul and God. Life is hard for the soul, yet it has its own mission here; it did not arrive here by accident. “Whoever believes in chance does not believe in God.” How can one fail to tremble before this miracle: the union of soul and body for the sake of meaning! How, then, can one refuse to give one’s blood, one’s money... if you are still standing while someone beside you can no longer stand?

Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman who had several husbands, each of whom died in turn, was of the same kind. Yet Jesus' answer proved completely unexpected. He immediately rejects not only the traditional solutions to the problem, but also the very perspective from which it is posed; He breaks, so to speak, the traditional paradigm of thought. And this is hardly surprising: for Jesus the world is the Kingdom. That is the only way He perceives it.

Such a perception does not come easily to us, whereas He was born with it. It is not that He is unable to look at the world differently, but such a view is unnatural to Him. That is why He sees unexpected and paradoxical answers to traditional questions. In this case too, the Saviour answers quite differently from what might have been expected. As always, He speaks of the Kingdom: there are no dead in it, just as there is no concept of marriage in the earthly sense. People do not, of course, become angels after the resurrection, but in some respects their life truly becomes more like the life of angels than that of people in the fallen world.

Everything is different in the Kingdom, entirely unlike what the overwhelming majority of Jesus' contemporaries imagined. For the fullness of life there is absolute: each person has his or her own fullness, yet for everyone it is absolute. There are no dead there, whereas our human mind imagines even the Kingdom within the familiar paradigm of life and death. We often imagine even immortality not as a new quality of being, but as the endless continuation of its present earthly quality, with all the relationships of this earthly life and all its problems, some of them truly insoluble if extended unchanged into infinity. This, in fact, is precisely what the Sadducees were doing when they presented their opponents with problems like the one they put to Jesus.

But He answers in His own way, from the Kingdom, from that fullness of true life which alone can be called life in the genuine sense of the word. And those who questioned Him fall silent. They have nothing more to say: the world disclosed to them in the Saviour's answers is too unlike the one to which they are accustomed, as different as heaven and earth.

The Lord points the Sadducees and scribes to the foundation for faith in the resurrection in the Book of Exodus: when God reveals Himself to Moses, He speaks not simply of the "continuity of tradition" from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but of the fact that faith, a person's bond with God, becomes the pledge of that person's eternal life. The idea of the soul's eternal existence in a spiritual world is foreign to Scripture; the continuation of life after death means bodily resurrection from the dead. This means that all who have ever found faith in God are alive, for He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

This fully applies to us as well. Do we realize that eternal life has already begun, that there will be no other life, and therefore everything we do now, we do in eternal life? It is very important to begin living "for real" not beyond the grave, but here, today. This is exactly what the Lord called "repentance" - a change in our attitude toward life, toward the world, toward ourselves, and toward God. Life begins in the context of eternity...

Today's reading brings us back once more to the theme of the Kingdom, but from a somewhat unexpected angle. It begins with a question asked by representatives of the priestly circles, the ‘Sadducees’, who are said to have rejected the teaching about resurrection (v. 27). Apparently, this rejection was connected with the fact that, because of historical circumstances, priestly circles traditionally regarded only the Torah proper, the Pentateuch, as Holy Scripture. They tended to view the prophetic books, which were part of Scripture for the Synagogue, instead as part of Tradition: interesting in some respects, but carrying little authority. Since almost everything the Bible says about resurrection is connected with the prophetic tradition, resurrection itself came to be regarded in priestly circles as an ingenious but highly questionable idea. The question the ‘Sadducees’ put to Jesus (vv. 28–33) was evidently one of the polemical questions that opponents of the teaching about resurrection would ask its supporters.

Jesus answers in a completely unexpected way, pointing to features of the Kingdom's nature that perhaps no one had considered within the ideas current at the time. Indeed, if one understands the Kingdom as a religious and political reality, and therefore as existing according to the laws of our as yet untransformed world, the question really is insoluble. Jesus points out to his questioners that the Kingdom's nature is entirely different: it is transfigured creation, of which transfigured humanity also becomes a part, and the laws of the untransformed world no longer apply to it (vv. 34–36).

This answer was apparently wholly unexpected for the ‘Sadducees’; meanwhile, Jesus offered them another argument, this time from the Pentateuch, whose authority they could not possibly contest (vv. 37–38): for God there are no dead. This assertion becomes intelligible in the context of the religious ideas traditional in the Gospel period, which included no developed concepts relating to the immortality of the soul. The afterlife was viewed rather pessimistically then, as in previous centuries: in dying, a person disappeared for ever; their shade went to the realm of shades, Sheol, sometimes called ‘hell’ in the Gospel in Greek—or, more precisely, ‘Hades’, which in Greek usage meant the same as ‘Sheol’ in Hebrew. Those in Sheol retained no memory either of the world of the living or of God; their only hope was resurrection at the end of time, in which, however, the ‘Sadducees’ did not believe. By pointing to the expression ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’, Jesus emphasises that for God there are no dead, that the Kingdom is not Sheol: in Sheol one can find only a pale semblance of life, whereas in the Kingdom there is life in all its fullness, beside which our untransformed world would seem a realm of shades.

Why does Jesus object to the Christ being called the Son of David, when this expression refers precisely to the Messiah who has come into the world? Most likely because, for many, it is merely a family designation for a descendant of King David, and such people therefore see Jesus exclusively in this capacity. We can thus understand how important it was for Him to show that the Messiah is Someone greater than the Son of David according to the flesh.

But Christ does not stop there. Revealing the deeper meaning of the psalm to His listeners, He gives a direct hint that the Messiah is more than a great prophet or a messenger from above equal, for example, to an angel. No, the Messiah is called Lord, and therefore equal to Him. Here we have one of Christ's testimonies to Himself as God.

In warning against the hypocrisy of the scribes, Christ did not give a long list of unworthy deeds but mentioned one: the unjust treatment of widows. We will understand why this particular sin is singled out if we remember that widows were among the most deprived groups in society. They often lacked both the strength and the material means to obtain food, so the hypocrites' desire to profit at their expense was especially repugnant, surpassing their other outrages.

This must be why, immediately after these words, Christ drew the disciples' attention to a widow whose offering was negligible in face value but exceeded the rich donations given ‘out of abundance’...

Luke repeatedly emphasises the persistence with which representatives of the official religious circles ask Jesus the same question again and again: ‘By what authority do you do these things?’ (vv. 1–2). And again and again, Jesus does not answer directly. Yet, from a human point of view, the question could be considered quite appropriate: Jesus has just entered Jerusalem in triumph, and an enthusiastic crowd has greeted him as the Messiah; now, once more, he is behaving in a wholly incomprehensible way, and no one knows what to expect next from this strange Man who persistently refuses to fit into any framework.

Jesus, of course, does not refuse to answer in order to surround himself and the situation with an air of mystery, which he always avoided. Evidently, he does not answer because his mission really did not fit the frameworks familiar to his questioners. He is the Messiah, but not the Messiah the people expected; he could also be called a Teacher, but not in the sense in which religious circles used that word. Of course, those frameworks could have been expanded, but only with the questioners' agreement. Jesus tries to do this; it is no accident that he asks them about John's washing or ‘baptism’. An honest answer to this question determines how far Jesus' interlocutors will be able to understand and accept not only John but Jesus himself. But they refuse to answer, preferring to evade a difficult and unwelcome question; Jesus then understands that further conversation is useless (vv. 3–8).

His only answer is the parable of the vineyard (vv. 9–16), whose meaning, judging by their response ‘May it never be!’, his hearers understood perfectly. But Jesus leaves his listeners no false hopes: his remark about the cornerstone makes everything unmistakably clear (vv. 17–18). It is then that they want to kill Jesus, to get rid of this uncompromising Preacher (vv. 19–20), who, as has now become entirely clear, will not leave them alone or make any compromise. They also tried to trap him through his refusal to compromise (vv. 21–22): their question deliberately put the respondent in a losing position. To answer ‘yes’ meant being branded a traitor and collaborator; to answer ‘no’ was, under Roman law, tantamount to calling for rebellion, with all the consequences that entailed.

Here too, Jesus remains true to himself: he bears witness to the Kingdom, but not the Kingdom his hearers dream of; he bears witness to the one he himself has brought into the world. Thus, fitting into no framework and accepting no compromise, the Saviour who brought the Kingdom into the world gradually found himself alone, and his mission became a way of the Cross.

Such is the difficult fate of Christian revelation: all the time, everyone who could fish something out of it for himself tried to use it for his own purposes. But its true divinity consists in this, that these attempts never succeeded completely, and sooner or later they failed.

Such also is the fate of those who try to present the Christian gospel as a textbook of revolution and Christ as the chief revolutionary of all times and peoples. Such attempts have been made more than once in the history of European culture. Yet precisely to them one can present the words of today's Gospel reading: "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's." The apostles Paul and Peter were probably inspired by these words when they spoke the following words to the people of God. "Therefore be subject to every human authority for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors" (1 Pet 2:13). "Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist have been established by God" (Rom 13:1).

Only in one case is submission to the authorities impossible: when authority appropriates divine powers for itself; what is God's can be given only to God. That is why the early Christians went, on the one hand, against the words of Peter and Paul, but on the other hand, if one looks more deeply at all three quotations mentioned here, it becomes clear that they were walking the only true path.

Should a Christian pay taxes? Christ's words about tribute to Caesar have often been understood as justification for a kind of “reasonable balance” between secular and religious life. Caesar, it is said, has his claims on us, and God has His. But Caesar and God are incomparable, both in their power and in our responsibility before them. God alone created us and gives us life. God alone must we serve and worship. We have received everything from God.

Many people think that we must first render “to Caesar what is Caesar's,” and then give God whatever remains. But if we first render to God His “due” (and we owe Him far more than we possess—remember the parable of the talents), what will be left for poor Caesar? Of course, a Christian must take part in the life of society, including paying taxes to the state, but this is not service to Caesar (one cannot serve two masters); it is service to society, to people, to our neighbours, and therefore service to love and to God. Thus Jesus' words about tribute continue His parable of the vineyard: we cultivate God's vineyard and must give Him its fruit.