God realizes that we are overwhelmed by the sheer force of divinity. Part of god’s work in creation is the making of space for us to live, love, work and grow, without coercion.God shields Moses. God is furious and has tempted Moses with becoming the progenitor of a whole new people. Moses wants assurance that God will not be just with him but with all the people, not an angel, no no the presence of god t guide and stay and protect.
Moses as political leader-Moses has offered his very life to try to protect the people from the consequences o their betrayal of the command against idolatry. In the next chapter god’s character is announced slow to nager, merciful, gracious, extending steadfast love. that is god. That is the god of the Old and the New Testaments. This ineffable god, invisible, not to be picutred, allows Moses to catch sight of his glory.
Jesus himself is an extension of this gift to Moses, except that he is the tabernacle of the living god but liiving as a human being, so that we could draw close without being consumed like the Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Render to Caesar, a clever riposte is probably not a good place to start to build a political theology A friend of mine just used this passage n a stewardship campaign in arguing that we should render lots to the things of god, in his view, the church budget. OK in an ultimate sense the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, but as Paul himself reminds us governments are part of a subsidiary order that reflects a way of ordering human life in the chaos.(BOO and Conf?) I suppose our politics he become so debased that we need to say that Jesus is not forbidding the payment of taxes, and he lived under Roman oppression, not in a representative democracy. I would like to make it a biblical defense of separation of church and state, but I do not think it is fair to the text itself. As Paul said, we live in two overlapping worlds, our political arrangements of citizenship, but our dual citizenship is also in heaven. We hope that we have stable, secure free space to help decide political matters. Jesus’s clever riposte does not provide us with much a a working definition of how to divide what each inter-lapping realm may require. the way of god is not a forced march. many different paths can get us to the destination God wishes. some are precluded, of course, some preferred, perhaps, but god does not treat us as children. Adults have moral autonomy. God gives us the infinite compliment of thinking we are mature enough to make good moral decisions.
In Genesis, we are told we are made, all of us, in the image and likeness of God. Whose image on us-god’s in baptism, sign of the cross, the mark of god, 777. We give ourselves away to the world of Caesar for god. God is as near as every breath, but god won’t smother us. God does not countenance being used in a game of gothca either. At times, god will show us a way when we are in desperate need. Most of the time, god gives us the gift of space and room to work out our decisions on our own. Surely that can be done in prayerful discernment, using all of the intellectual and spiritual tools at our disposal, but the Spirit is more a a whisper than a commanding shout most of the time.God
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment