Photo by Caleb Fisher / Unsplash
Seventeen percent of us would like the country stamped with God's name. Jesus took a coin from his questioners and handed back something gentler, and far harder.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
Mark 12:17
On the fourteenth of May this year, a survey reported that some seventeen out of every hundred of us would now like the government to declare, in so many words, that this is a Christian country — a few more than felt that way two years ago, and the number climbing at the very moment most of us suspect that faith is slipping quietly out the back door of American life. Set the two facts side by side and you can almost hear what lies underneath them, which is not arrogance so much as fear.
When we are frightened that the thing we love is dying, we go looking for something with an army.
There was a morning when they brought Jesus a coin to trap him. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, he said, and to God what is God's — and the ones who heard it marveled, which is a lovely word, because it means he had slipped the trap in a way nobody saw coming. Caesar's face was on the coin, so let Caesar keep it.
The other thing he would not hand over. He would not let the Kingdom of God be melted down and struck into currency for an empire, would not be the holy sword the frightened and the furious were, then as now, so eager to swing.
And here is the strange grace of it. The people who wanted their country made officially God's were not monsters. They were homesick — homesick for a God who wins the way the world counts winning, with laws and thrones and the enemy routed. He loved them too much to give them what they asked for.
A faith that needs the state to prop it up has forgotten, for a little while, that it was never the coin. It was the thing no coin could buy. Look at the money in your hand, and then look at the hand. One of them has Caesar's face on it. The other has someone else's. Beautiful and terrible things will happen to this country, the way they happen to every country under heaven.
Do not be afraid. And do not give away the part of you that was never Caesar's to stamp.