NOTES for Luk 20:19-26

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".

Today, even when we have no desire to “catch Jesus” in His words and simply ask Him honestly the questions that trouble us, we still often frame those questions in an “improper” form, sharply, as an “either-or.” Thus the simple question of whether to pay taxes becomes (not for everyone, of course, but for some) the dilemma: “Should I love the state with all my soul or hate it with all my soul?”... And the simple answer that the state may lay claim only to money, never to the soul, turns into the most difficult task of “rendering to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's.” In the same way, we are ready to construct the most astonishing conjectures about “life after death” and the “state of the departed,” yet cannot understand that for God there is no death and therefore no division between the dead and the living. Why is everything so difficult for us? Perhaps we simply lack experience of God's life and the ability to look at the world through His eyes.

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.