29th Sunday

29th Sunday

This free zone to which we are called

Is. 45.1, 4-6; 1 Thess. 1.1-5ab; Mt. 22. 15-21

In the course of my life I suspect that I have read tens of thousands of pages of scripture scholarship. Now it's astonishing, that this reform movement of Judaism, which came to be called Christianity, became the official religion of the Roman Empire within three hundred years. But what's more astonishing, in light of this mass of scholarship, is that you'd think the people who joined this movement were Oxford dons or the Harvard theological faculty of the University of Tubingen School of Theology because it seems to be a totally cerebral operation. Christianity seems to be an operation that takes place from the eyebrows up. It's really puzzling. Who in God's name would be drawn to this thing? With all these footnotes. In German!

And then we come across this passage from the beginning of Paul's first letter to the Church at Thessolonica. He says "because our message to you of the gospel came to you not only in words but also in power and the Holy spirit and with full conviction". Clearly he's not referring to footnotes. Or Germanic scholarship.

What is this power that he's talking about? The word that he uses over and over in all of his letters is, of course, the spirit. As a good Jew, he takes that usage from the Hebrew bible where the spirit is simply a way of talking about God's activity on the earth. The Jews used that as a mediatorial term. They did not talk about God acting here, they would say God's spirit acts. We see this all through the Hebrew Bible. What the spirit does, of course, is to enliven. God breathes, inspires, gives breath to, gives spirit to the clay dummy that becomes a human being. The spirit hovers over the chaos and form emerges. The prophets say ... the spirit of the Lord is upon me. And that's exactly what Paul's talking about. That out of his belief that God had raised this Jew, Jesus, from the dead, something happened to Paul. It was not just something above his eyebrows but some enormous vitality. some profound enlivening took place in this man, and in these people who joined this movement. Now if you read the Pauline letters, especially the Corinthian correspondence, you begin to think that this enlivening results in all kind of weirdness: people speaking in tongues. Doing miracles, and all this other kind of stuff. Paul is very, very uneasy with that kind of manifestation of spirit, that sort of enlivening. Rather his view of things, is that the spirit is the spirit of the God of Exodus. Who is a God who liberates. So the action of the spirit, the enlivening of the spirit, is experienced. That's the trick, word that the scholars quickly run away from. The experience of liberation. And so the gift of tongues, Paul will say in the Corinthian letter, is peripheral at best.

So we're talking about some sense of freedom. That is, "where the spirit is, there is freedom." This is Paul. "For freedom, Christ has made us free." And the agency of that liberation is the spirit of God.

Liberation takes place in all kinds of ways. For instance, if you were black and came to live in a society where you were not despised for being black, that would clearly be a liberating experience. If you were a woman and came to be treated as an equal by men, that would be a liberating experience. If you were a homosexual person and you were not mocked and made the butt of vicious and sick jokes, that would be an experience of liberation.

But let me take the other two readings and see if we can derive from them yet another sense of liberation. The first one from Isaiah is a very strange one. It helps to know the context. We're talking about the period of the Babylonian captivity. That is, Babylon was the major empire in the Ancient and Near East and in 587 they conquered virtually everything that was around. Including Israel. Seventy years later, they in turn were conquered by Cyrus, the Persian King. It's astonishing here because Cyrus is referred to as the messiah of the God. But Cyrus is pagan. Yet this pagan is called "The Lord's anointed." It's amazing. And what I'd like to suggest, especially to those people of my vintage, who grew up in a ghetto of Catholicism, that there's really a major form of liberation here. Let me put it in an aphoristic way. When I was a kid, they said, if something's Catholic, it's good. So of course, if it wasn't Catholic it couldn't be good at all. And what that does, of course, is blinker your life, narrow your world. One of the great liberative moments of my life came when I realized the reverse was true, that if it's good then it's Catholic. And that makes a huge difference and this is authentic Catholic doctrine. In other words, goodness qualifies it as part of God's intention for the world. And I propose, quite seriously, that this is an enormously liberating moment. To be able to reverse that optic, that perspective, and be able to embrace the world. To be able not to be driven by fear, as we certainly were.... Don't go there, don’t do that, God will send you to hell if you go in that Protestant Church.

And even this familiar passage from Matthew, has unfortunately been used often enough, to say the their Christian lives in two worlds. There is the world of Caesar, the world of the "world". And then there's the religious world, this kind of super second storey world. But that's not what's in play here at all. The question of taxes was an important question - then and now. But Jesus was not dividing the world into this safe zone which was God's world and this God-free but necessary world - the world of Caesar. Rather, Jesus was an ironist. And we get glimpses of this throughout the four gospels. In other words, when he said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" ... well, this whatever that might be, it is fairly small beer. However, everything belongs to God! Everything belongs to God!

So, if you have to do the Caesar things, know that that happens in a creation that is all God's. So you do not have this nice little separate section where you have politics and this other separate section where you have religion.

But what I propose is that this is an enormously liberating thing as well. We are being liberated from the belief that we are, ultimately, at the mercy of all institutions. The government - we're talking about taxes here. But the government and its power over me is radically relativized here. And not only the government because the government stands for every institution. King's College is not God. The Bank of Montreal is not God. Price Choppers is not God. My family is not God. God is God. That's liberating. It's not just some kind of cerebral exercise that we're talking about. We're talking about being given room for my life, the room in which I can live my life. All these institutions which seem to have so much determinative power over me, because I endow them with the kind of quasi-divine aura and significance, do not deserve it. God is God. Yes. Pay taxes, etc. But know that you're doing it as a free child of God. It's the world that's God's.

See, I can read that matter and, from the eyebrows up, I can understand it. But, I confess, I have a much harder time with this massive sort of liberation, this radical relativizing of everything else. But, that is clearly what was meant in the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus dead and raised by God. Thus these people, in their socio - cultural - economic moment, were able to relativize it and transmute it into this free zone to which we are called. Where the spirit is, there is freedom. Freedom. Christ has made us free.

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