Sermon for Christmas Day 2014 at St Andrew’s, Cobham
Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-14

Happy Christmas! This is a special time, a time to celebrate. I’m not going to give you a hard time about being too preoccupied with presents and shopping, the razzmatazz of Christmas: I’m sure that a little of what you fancy does you good – provided you don’t spend more than you can really afford, as the Archbishop of York pointed out on the Andrew Marr show last week.

No, what I want to talk about is the baby Jesus. ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder’. That looks almost like a contradiction. On the one hand, he is a baby: the most vulnerable, the least powerful form of humanity. On the other, he is a king – ‘the government shall be upon his shoulder’.

Is the prophet Isaiah imagining a figure like Edward VI, a boy king? Jesus never became a king, even in that sense. There was only the ironic inscription on his cross, ‘This is Jesus, the king of the Jews’ [Matt. 27:37 and in all the other gospels]. There are scholars who have claimed that he was some kind of rebel leader, a Zealot, and certainly one way of understanding Jesus’ passion and death is that he was seen by the establishment, both in the Jewish client administration and in their Roman overlords, as being a potential troublemaker, almost a terrorist.

But really there’s no tradition, in the Bible or since, that Jesus was a powerful, secular leader. He wasn’t a general, he wasn’t a king in the tradition of the Jewish kings. Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgement and with justice… ‘, certainly doesn’t square with the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, life and death.

So much of what we learn from Jesus goes against the exercise of power. ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first’. ‘Love your enemies,’ and so on. But nevertheless, even though He didn’t throw His weight around or behave like a mighty warrior, He was the Son of God. How to show this: quite apart from the miracles in Jesus’ life – the virgin birth, His resurrection from the dead – another miracle is that Jesus hasn’t gone away.

Christianity is still huge; still the biggest religion, with the greatest number of believers worldwide, 2,000 years on. Apparently 3 million people in this country will go to their local parish church this Christmas – and then there are the Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, URCs and all the other denominations. I can’t think offhand of anything else which happened 2,000 years ago which still has the power to draw people out in such enormous numbers all round the world in celebration, in the same way as Christianity celebrates the birth of Christ.

Something clearly is going on. Arguably something more than we can hope to understand or explain. Any kind of collective hysteria or craze would have played itself out within a few years. This is God at work. We are celebrating the birth of the Son of God. Someone who was at the same time a man, human, and also divine: ‘Begotten, not created’.

We can understand what it is to be human – we understand babies. We like babies. A rather awful maiden aunt of mine once said, ‘I love babies – but I couldn’t eat a whole one!’ No, seriously. We know what a human being is.

But what is it to be God? I think if we think about it, we know more about what God does than about what God is. God is the ultimate creator, the creator of everything from nothing. We infer from that that God is all-powerful and all-knowing – omnipotent and omniscient.

So far, so good. But then if we try to work out what God is like, what God is, it’s much more difficult. Obviously as a result of the word-pictures in the Book of Revelation, and indeed as a result of the various pre-Christian myths – the Greek myths, the gods on Mount Olympus for example – the idea of God or gods, as supernatural beings living above the clouds or on the top of a very high mountain, was very commonly held. There is a lot of imagery in the Bible about God in heaven. We talk about our ‘Heavenly Father’.

So there is this picture of a benign old man with a great white beard in a golden throne room above the clouds. But of course, as our understanding has deepened – and certainly after man conquered space, and didn’t bump into God – there has come a realisation that God is not a benign old man with a white beard, sitting on top of the clouds. Indeed if he were located in time and space in that way, that would not square with his being the ultimate creator, omniscient and omnipotent, outside the laws of physics.

That’s where ‘In the beginning was the word’, gives an insight. ‘In the beginning was the word’ is a pretty clever way of talking about a pure principle, an essence of creation. No good to talk about a first man, or a supernatural man, some kind of superhero who started everything off – because then there is the question who started him off.

So it’s easier to identity what God does than what God is. Manifesting Himself as a baby meant that God rejected the idea that He was going to be a powerful general or a warlike king. Instead Jesus stood the concept of being God on its head. St Paul described him as having ’emptied himself’, emptied himself of all the trappings of His being the Son of God, and becoming instead a servant – the ‘Servant King’ as the hymn puts it. [Phil. 2:7]

How does this all work? It’s all very well us talking about the nature of God, but how does it affect our lives in practice? If we still have the idea that God is ‘deus ex machina’, a sort of Tardis which comes to the rescue of Dr Who when he’s in a sticky spot, then I think we’re always going to be disappointed.

If we pray to God simply that He will favour us, that He will fix everything for us, then clearly that won’t always work. Both the armies in the First World War were praying to the same God, and making the same prayer. As a matter of logic, one of them was going to be disappointed.

I think there’s a danger that, if one continues along those lines, one’ll end up disappointed and disillusioned. It’s noticeable that, at the end of the First World War, there was a rise in atheism. How could God allow the dreadful things which happened? Didn’t He listen to all those prayers? But the first chapter of St John’s Gospel gives us a clue. ‘In the beginning was the word’ – and that’s not a man with a white beard above the clouds.

When I was preparing the prayers for the Nine Lessons and Carols at St Mary’s in Stoke D’Abernon the other day, I started off by writing prayers for peace, for all those people who are unwell or in difficulty, who are suffering hunger, being refugees or homeless. In that first draft of the prayers, I was calling on God to fix things. I didn’t know how He was going to fix things, but I was sure that He had a way of doing it.

Then I thought about it: I thought about the baby. How could a baby leap in and tackle all those intractable problems? I changed my prayers. Instead of asking God to do things, I asked Him to help us to do what was necessary. We have the wealth to feed the hungry; we have the medical skill to heal the sick; we have spare rooms and spare houses to shelter the homeless.

All we need is the Holy Spirit to come and inspire us, to fill us with God’s love. ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’; ‘Make me a channel of your peace’. ‘God be in my head’. St Paul talked about being ‘in Christ’ – meaning, having Christ in you.

I wish you a very happy Christmas, with lots to eat: but I want you to have some Jesus in there too. Remember my maiden aunt. Love that baby – could you – at least in a Eucharistic way – eat a whole one? Draw near with faith!

Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 21st December 2014, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Romans 1:1-7. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle,… To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints …

Sixty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, St Paul is writing to the Romans, giving them his version of the Gospel: ‘… the gospel of God, … Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord’.

We know that there was a strong Christian community in Rome, which itself was a massive city, over a million people even 2,000 years ago, which had become the centre of the ancient world. In 64AD, the emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire which took place in that year in Rome. It’s in the Roman historian Tacitus, in his Annals, 15.44.2.

The Christians in Rome, by definition, knew the gospel – otherwise they wouldn’t have been Christians. Paul goes on, in his letter to the Romans, to set out most of his understanding of Christianity: he deals principally with what he calls ‘righteousness’: whether the Jews, as the chosen people of God, are righteous, and the Gentiles are not; how God has righteously dealt with Israel, and how righteousness shows itself in the lives of true believers.

‘Righteousness’ may not be an adequate word for what St Paul is talking about; the opposite of righteousness, sin, is being separated from God, being forsaken by God. To be righteous is to be in tune with God.

St Paul distinguishes between Jesus as a man, and Jesus as the Son of God. Divine Jesus is ‘a spiritual being, transcendent, something altogether greater than a human being’. He says that the evidence for that, the sign by which one recognises Jesus’ divinity, is the fact that he was raised from the dead.

But that’s really the Easter message; now at Christmas, we are just about to embark on the Christmas story: God with us, Immanuel. ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.’ That’s what St Matthew says in his gospel: it refers back to our first lesson, the passage from the prophet Isaiah, ch. 7, which says, ‘The LORD himself will give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’

That sign, Isaiah’s sign, was given not about a messiah, but in the context of Jerusalem being threatened by two warlike kings: King Rezin of Syria and King Pekah of Israel. A saviour, a great leader, will come to protect Jerusalem.Six hundred years later, St Paul pointed out that the gospel, the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ, was forecast in the Jewish holy scripture, the Old Testament: he wrote about ‘The gospel of God, .. Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures’.

So what Isaiah prophesied, as a sign given to the people of Judah, of Jerusalem, to indicate that their God was with them, and that the two kings threatening them would come to a sticky end, was reinterpreted by St Paul, and the early Christians. It moved on to being taken as a sign, a prophecy, of the Messiah, the Son of God. St Matthew also, in his gospel, linked Isaiah’s prophecy with Jesus.

In the letter to the Romans you have a skeleton outline of Christianity, from the earliest prophecies in Isaiah to Jesus’ death and resurrection, as recounted by St Paul.

I wonder what it would look like, if St Paul was writing today, writing a letter setting out the gospel to the saints in Stoke D’Abernon.

We here today are not particularly concerned about some of St Paul’s themes. Whether you need to be Jewish, to be circumcised and so on, in order to be saved; it doesn’t really bother us.

But some things that Paul was writing about to the Romans are still relevant to our lives today. Righteousness, justification, being all right with God, is still a big thing – not being separated from God, not being cast out into the outer darkness. To be saved from that terrible fate, St Paul emphasises the need to believe and trust in Jesus.

St Paul preaches justification by faith; not by good works. Believe first, then do good. He says that, if you truly believe, then that will change your life. You will do good things: good deeds will come naturally.

But the story in Isaiah has a bit of it which St Paul didn’t refer to, which raises another question which is also relevant today. Isaiah says that Immanuel, the virgin’s son, will eat ‘butter and honey …., that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.’ (Is. 7:15)

Does this mean that butter and honey have special properties which enhance one’s ethical sensibilities? Before considering that, we should note that this passage gets translated differently in different Bibles. If we had been using the New Revised Standard Bible (Anglicised edition), which we use at other services here, the passage says, ‘He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.’ The New English Bible says, ‘By the time that he has learned to reject evil and choose good, he will be eating curds and honey.’

So God-with-us, Immanuel, will get to know the difference between good and evil, but probably not as a result of eating butter and honey, or curds and honey, if you like. I prefer to think that it’s butter. I’ve always thought that Little Miss Muffet, sitting on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey, was, at least so far as her diet was concerned, a particularly disgusting vision – but I know that many people do like those sort of puddings. For my taste, butter and honey is just a step away from the land of ‘milk and honey’; and when I was little, ‘milk and honey’ was the name of a very nice biscuit.

Is it the idea that the boy will get to an age when he can recognise certain luxury food as being particularly good? Or is it just a rite of passage, that he will graduate to eating these luxury foods, at the same time as he learns to distinguish between good and evil?

But just a minute – Immanuel is God-with-us. God. It seems a bit odd that God should grow into knowing how to distinguish good and evil. Surely God would know good and evil right from the start, wouldn’t he?

This is an important question for us even today. This is, I would suggest, one of the things that St Paul would be writing to us about, if he was writing to the saints at Stoke D’Abernon. Think of the very sad – and very shocking – story of the US Senate report which has just come out, detailing the way in which numbers of people were tortured by the CIA; or, as they described it, were subject to ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques.

Is it justifiable to torture somebody if, by so doing, you will elicit information from them which will save lives? Or is torture always wrong, by its very nature? Or are there circumstances where torture is, in fact, permissible? Are there circumstances where doing something wrong is preferable to not doing anything at all: because by doing something wrong you may avert some other, possibly greater, harm?

You would think that Immanuel, God-with-us, would always have known what was the right thing to do, because He is God. But there are philosophers and theologians, called deontologists, who argue that good and evil are, by their very nature, good and evil, and they don’t depend on being declared to be good and evil by God or by a prophet: that God, who knows everything, will recognise that good and evil are absolute concepts, not dependent on somebody’s interpretation.

What do you think Jesus would have done? The grown-up Jesus, able to distinguish between right and wrong, that is. It doesn’t look as though Jesus did in fact get involved in calculations of the relative merits of different courses of action. Think of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ radical interpretation of the 10 Commandments. In Matthew 5:[43-44]:

‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’

Jesus never says that it is OK to do harm, if to do so would prevent a greater mischief.

So I think that, if St Paul were writing to the Saints at Stoke D’Abernon, he would be reminding them of what Jesus said about right and wrong. As we go into the happy times of Christmas week, think about all the terrible things that are going on in the world today – children killed in Pakistan and in Australia; the siege of the café in Sydney, with more people killed; people not having enough money to buy food and having to turn to food banks; all these things are subject to moral judgements.

The heart of the gospel message is God-With-Us, God in the form of a man, a baby in a manger. What difference that makes to us, how it affects our behaviour, our judgment of right and wrong, is the important question. That’s what St Paul would be writing about, to us, the saints at Stoke D’Abernon.

I do wish you a very happy Christmas – but I do urge you to reflect a little bit on what Jesus would say and do, if indeed he came and saw how we are today.

Discussion Note given to Revd Sir John Alleyne’s Modern Church Group at Guildford Cathedral on 10th November 2014

My topic is homosexuality and the Church of England. It is whether it is sinful to be gay: whether gay marriage is sinful: whether the church can join gay people together in marriage: whether gay clergy ought to be bishops.

There are to be ‘facilitated discussions’ within the Church of England following the Pilling Report, to try to achieve some agreement between those who reject gay marriage and the ministry of homosexuals, and those who would accept either or both.

In this paper I haven’t tried to reach very definite conclusions, but rather to mention what I think are relevant things which ought to be considered in this context. You are invited to use my thoughts as prompts for further discussion.

I have just had staying with me a Nigerian Anglican priest. A delightful man, but his views on homosexuality are challenging.

He says – and I think his views are pretty standard in much of Africa – that to be homosexual is a sin. The Church can forgive the sinner, but must condemn the sin.

The reason for this, he says, is what is said in the Bible, which is the Word of God. One must not contradict God’s word in the Bible.

For the record, I’ll list below some anti-gay Bible references, and then we can talk more about each one later. Suffice to say at this point that they are all said to support the proposition that gay sex is sinful.

Genesis 19:4-5 – a bad end befalls the young men of Sodom, the eponymous Sodomites, who called to Lot to bring out his companions ‘so that we can have intercourse with them’.

Lev. 18:22 – ‘You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomination.’ The context suggests that it is addressed to a male: and that it is addressed not in the context of his permanent sexual orientation, but on the contrary, that he is basically heterosexual – he must be, in order for some of the other prohibitions in this passage to bite on him – e.g. ‘You shall not approach a woman to have intercourse with her during her period of menstruation’ – and that the homosexual acts prohibited are deviant acts rather than expressions of a basic sexual orientation.

Mark 10:7-9 – Jesus’ saying (quoting Genesis), ‘God made them male and female ‘.

Romans 1:26f – It is a sign of godless depravity that ‘… their men, … giving up natural relations with women, burn with lust for each other.’

1 Cor. 6:9 People who won’t get into the kingdom of heaven include μαλακοι, malakoi, soft, effeminate people, and αρσενοκοιται, arsenokoitai (there is no transliteration, despite appearances) men who ‘go to bed with men’.

Against this are other readings:

2 Sam. 1:26 – David and Jonathan: homosexual love is rated more highly than hetero.

Genesis 2:18-25 – the creation of woman from Adam’s rib. She was to be a ‘partner’ for the man. No mention of procreation: no shame in nakedness – this came before the Fall.

Ephesians 5:23-33 – wives, be subject to your husbands. Man is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the church.

Cf. The Song of Songs, often said to symbolise Christ’s love for his church! [See, esp., 1:13 and passim in the KJV, which is less bowdlerised than more modern versions!]

See also Matt. 19:11-12. Whether it is better not to marry at all. ‘… there are others who have themselves renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let those accept it who can’.

Martin Bucer, the great Reformer of Strassburg, argued from Genesis 2 and Ephesians that God’s intended purpose in marriage was not procreation, but companionship; and that the simile between Christ’s love for his church and the husband’s relationship with his wife ‘gave a glimpse of the divine’ (MacCulloch p649).

In analysing, applying reason to, these Bible readings, I suggest that one can distinguish the questions

what we are, what is our nature, how we were created; and
what we do, how we behave.

Questions of nature, how we are created, are questions of fact. Science ought to be referred to. Our Nigerian friend, however, when I suggested this – for example suggesting that a number of people are born with sexual orientation which is not, or not exclusively, heterosexual, immediately raised the question ‘what is truth’? Science’s conclusions change, he said, but God’s word is immutable.

So one question is the relationship between God and truth. It’s relevant in that context to mention Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, and the dilemma in it. If God says that something is good, is it good because God says so, or because there is some independent standard of goodness which God recognises?

Even if the former is right, that something is good because God says so, how can we be sure that God is saying so?

Further questions of nature, how we are made, include questions of sexual orientation: maleness and femaleness. Is this simply to be decided by reference to the possession of genital organs of a particular type?

If so, what about people who have sex change operations, or who otherwise adopt apparently contrary sexual identity?

Even within physically homosexual relationships, one partner is ‘male’ and the other is ‘female’. In making love, one is giving and the other receiving.

I would suggest for consideration that therefore texts such as Genesis 2 or Mark 10 – God made them male and female – could in fact cover gay relationships. If maleness and femaleness can be understood independently of physical, genital characteristics, then same-sex couples can nevertheless be ‘male’ and ‘female’ within the ambit of the Scriptures.

Next, as opposed to how we are made, is how we behave. In this area questions to consider include questions of equality. The golden rule in Leviticus 19:18 – ‘you shall love your neighbour as a man like yourself’ as the NEB puts it, which Jesus adopted as his second commandment, implies equality. Therefore sexual relations which rely on inequality, such as rape and pederasty (‘child sex abuse’), are wrong.

Note that this is where the Judaeo-Christian tradition differs from the customs of classical antiquity, of Ancient Greece and Rome, where the love between men and beautiful (handsome) boys was often praised as being the highest form of love.

There are also questions of reciprocity: in any sexual context, do both parties agree? A positive answer implies equality, and also equality of bargaining power – which is why pederasty is wrong. In this relationship, we both want to do it; neither of us is being forced into it.

Behaviour, in this context, involves both nature, being disposed to feel sexual attraction, and action, actually feeling such attraction; and further action – making love. Greek terms are useful here – Έρως, ‘Eros’, Φιλία, ‘Philia’ and Αγάπη, ‘Agape’.

One suspects that Victorian Christians, if none others, thought that only ‘agape’ could be Christian. Eros was permissible, but only within the confines of marriage, for the purpose of procreation. In this they were clearly heavily influenced by St Paul, and the Jesus of Matt. 19.

But that is clearly unrealistic. Young people (if not older ones!) will find the words of the Song of Solomon highly evocative. It is not about trying to start a family! It is about desire, lust, even. That is the currency, the language, the toolbox, of sexual behaviour. One must fancy someone, in order to have sex with them. As Martin Bucer pointed out, in Genesis 2 Adam and Eve had no shame in being naked together. The Fall came later. He argued that therefore there is nothing wrong with sex, with sexual desire, Eros.

Homosexuality of circumstance, where people, who are usually oriented heterosexually, get into situations where they also feel homosexual attraction and act homosexually – examples are boarding schools and prisons – may fall more squarely under the apparent prohibitions in the Bible. Perhaps it could be argued that they are going against ‘nature’: but again, I believe that scientific research has indicated that many people are not exclusively oriented either hetero- or homosexually. At one extreme are bisexuals, and at the other, there is the supposedly ‘normal’ person who is all one or the other.

My Nigerian friend did not accept that homosexuals could ever represent ‘normality’, though. He did not accept the commonly-stated figure of 10% of the population being homosexuals. Only freakish abnormalities would account for homosexuality. Apparently he felt that Christians could, indeed should, love and care for such freaks of nature – but that they were by their nature sinful. This seems to me that, notwithstanding the stricture, he acknowledges that God made them that way. But do we believe that sin depends on how you are, rather than how you behave?

Is there anything intrinsic in marriage which would make it impossible for homosexuals to be ‘married’? It would seem that this question really depends, in a Christian context, on whether one can understand maleness and femaleness in a wider way than simply by reference to the possession of genitalia. As a matter of language, there is at least one gender-unspecific use of the word ‘marriage’, on a car factory assembly line, where the body and power train or chassis come together.

I haven’t talked about failures of sex such as rape or divorce. Equally, I haven’t mentioned the ways in which homosexuals have been persecuted. I am simply taking it for granted here that we are looking for ‘good’ sex: sex without prohibition or hurt to anyone. ‘They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.’ (Isaiah 11:9)

Can there be agreement about gay marriage and gay bishops? I suggest that the discussions should focus on whether a common understanding can be reached about what it means to be male and female (creation, our nature), and how Jesus’ teaching about how to behave, how to love our neighbours, should be applied to that understanding. As a preliminary, some agreement about the nature of truth would be useful.

I invite your thoughts and comments.

_____________________________________________________________

References – in preparing this note, I referred to the following.

The Holy Bible – KJV and NEB

Η Καινή Διαθήκη, the Greek New Testament, with the readings adopted by the revisers of the Authorised Version, 1882, Oxford, The Clarendon Press

MacCulloch, D., 2003, Reformation; London, Allen Lane – see chapters 15 and 16

Childress, J. F. and Macquarrie, J., eds, 1986, A New Dictionary of Christian Ethics, London, SCM Press – see articles on Marriage (Helen Oppenheimer), Homosexuality (James B. Nelson)

Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A., eds, 1996, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, OUP – see article on ‘Homosexuality’ by David M. Halperin

Vardy, P., 2010, Good and Bad Religion, London, SCM Press. See chapter 3, The Euthyphro Dilemma

Review of “More Perfect Union?: Understanding Same-Sex Marriage” by Bishop Alan Wilson

29th October 2014

Dominic Raab, Esq., MP
House of Commons
London SW1

Sent by email to dominic.raab.mp@parliament.uk

Dear Mr Raab

Search and Rescue of Refugees in Peril in the Mediterranean

As a former marine insurance underwriter and member of the British Maritime Law Association, and as a Christian, I am horrified that the Government has refused to support search and rescue missions to save refugees in danger of drowning in the Mediterranean.

This country has ships and helicopters which could be used in this vital work, and is sufficiently wealthy to commit military resources to bombing campaigns seemingly with little hesitation.

The reason given for our failure to support this vital humanitarian work, that it would ‘operate as a pull factor’ is grotesque, and intellectually insulting.

We have a clear humanitarian duty, as a leading maritime nation, to save life at sea. I hope that you will agree with me and make representations urgently that this immoral and inhuman policy be changed forthwith.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Hugh Bryant

Sermon for Mattins at St Martin’s, East Horsley on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 19th October 2014
Matt. 22:15-22

None of us really like the brown envelopes which periodically come through from the Inland Revenue. For some reason we never think of our tax bill as the price we pay for a fantastic bunch of goods and services. We are kept free and safe by our armed forces; we’re kept healthy by the National Health Service; our streets are safe because we have police, and so on. But we tend to forget all that when we see our tax bills. We just see it as a sneaky way the government cuts down our income.

I don’t think it’s really the case that we think that we would be able to spend that money better, better than the government has done, if we’d kept it. Perhaps we’d spend more on schools and hospitals, less on bombs and rockets for foreign wars. But others, of course, would have different priorities. As you go to the post box with your tax return, if you bump into a friend who sees the brown envelope going out again from you, you will shrug your shoulders, perhaps, and say, ‘Well, I’ve got to render unto Caesar’.

What Jesus was talking about when the Pharisees tackled him was perhaps not really about paying taxes. The question was, are we permitted to pay taxes to the Roman emperor – to Caesar? The Holy Land was occupied territory, which had been conquered by the Romans. The Jews had a certain amount of self-government, but they did have to pay tax to the Roman emperor. That tax was greatly resented.

You will remember all the references to ‘publicans and sinners’, meaning ‘tax-gatherers and sinners’, in the Bible. Jesus was accused of consorting with ‘publicans and sinners’ (for example at Matt. 9:11), instead of being always with virtuous people. Publicans, tax-gatherers, were hated. They operated under a sort of franchise system, whereby they acquired the right to collect taxes and pass them on to the emperor. They would charge a gross amount, to include their fee, and pass on the net amount which the Roman authorities had set for the tax. There was no limit to the mark-up which a tax-gatherer could charge. It was a good system from the point of view of the Romans, but it did make the tax-gatherers themselves very unpopular, hated.

Indeed the question was, Is it possible to pay taxes to Caesar? The catch was that Roman emperors counted themselves as gods, and there was a state religion, so paying tax – the word in Greek is κηνσος, census, so the sense may really be of registering for a census, rather in the way that Mary and Joseph went, before Jesus was born, to Bethlehem in Judaea to be ‘taxed’ (Luke 2:1f). The Authorised Version of the Bible says ‘taxed’, and other translations talk about ‘registration’, taking part in a census.

I don’t know whether it’s a little bit irreverent to say that it occurred to me that this was rather the same procedure as asking the faithful – this congregation, for example, in this church – to join the electoral roll of the parish. Nothing wrong with that – it helps to keep the church family together, makes sure that everybody gets the news, gets invited to the parish picnic.

But of course it also allows the Planned Giving Secretary to send you a banker’s order form and ask you to consider regular giving.

So censuses do have a taxation aspect to them. And the catch, of course, was that in the eyes of the Pharisees, Jesus was going to be wrong whatever he said. If he said it was OK to go and sign up for the census, paying a token amount to signify that you were in the scheme, it would involve using a Roman coin, a denarius, a ‘penny’ sometimes so-called, but also reckoned to be a day’s wages.

This would be tantamount to acknowledging the authority of the emperor – as a god – which of course would be blasphemy. If on the other hand, Jesus could be caught out advising people not to pay, then he could be condemned as a revolutionary engaged in sedition against the emperor.

And the answer that Jesus gave was pretty mysterious. By asking to see the coin that you would use to pay the tax, it looks as though Jesus wasn’t familiar with foreign exchange. These days, I’m sure the Revenue are very happy to receive money’s worth in any currency which is exchangeable. But Jesus says here, ‘Show me the currency that you would have to pay the tax in’, and because that currency has a picture of the emperor on it, he says, in effect, this is a matter for the emperor: it’s nothing to do with us here in the Temple.

It was actually pretty shocking that the Pharisees had brought a Roman coin, with its purported image of a god, the Roman emperor as a god, into the sacred space of the Temple. So not surprisingly, Jesus didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But it does seem to be a slightly odd idea of Jesus’, that tax is payable only if you have the right currency.

What about the other side of what Jesus said? Render unto God the things that are God’s. The third-century scholar Tertullian said that this meant ‘us’, human beings. We are the things that belong to God. We are made in God’s image. So Tertullian argues that we are the things that are God’s. We belong to God. So Jesus is saying that, in a narrow sense, those things which bear the image of the emperor belong to the emperor: and those things, which bear the image of God, belong to God – and that is us. It still needs some careful consideration. Is there, according to Jesus, a hard distinction between the temporal authorities, the state, and the spiritual authority, the realm of God himself? You certainly can take what Jesus says to mean very simply, that we should be law-abiding citizens, obeying the laws that government has laid down for us, but also worshipping God and reserving our ultimate allegiance for him.

But St Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (13:1-7), pointed out that actually God is the supreme authority, over everything. Even governments are subject to the will of God. That is a reason for obeying the government; because the government actually derives its authority ultimately from God.

There is in fact no conflict between obeying the government and obeying God. That of course immediately begs the question what a Christian is to do, if the government is a bad government. Effectively it is the same dilemma which the Pharisees were challenging Jesus with. It’s the dilemma which Christians living in Nazi Germany faced, and it’s the dilemma which faces Christians in many parts of the Middle East today.

The government may ultimately be subject to the will of God, but that doesn’t by itself, necessarily, make it a good government, or worthy of our assent to it. As with all other aspects of the problem of evil, a bad government is nevertheless free to carry on making bad decisions and engaging in sinful acts.

We are so fortunate, that all we may find relevant in the story of Jesus and the denarius, ‘Render unto Caesar,’ and so on, is a fresh look at paying tax. No-one is trying to kill us because we aren’t swearing an oath of allegiance to a government which regards our Christian belief as blasphemy, as some of the radical Moslem opposition groups in Iraq and around would do. For those people, ‘Render unto Caesar’ has extra poignancy.

So let us, in our prayers, ask for God’s blessing on the people who are threatened today by militant Islamists all over the Middle East: let us call to mind the goods and services which our taxes pay for, and ask for God’s blessing on the people who physically deliver the benefits. And let’s pay our taxes with a good grace. Let’s also remember that our taxes buy a huge amount of benefit for all of us, and not begrudge paying our fair share.