It’s fair to say we’ve been thinking a lot about the nation state recently. The funeral of Prince Philip last weekend was a national occasion; the reaction to the recent Government report on Race and Ethnic Disparities has crystalised much of what is still painful about notions of Britishness; England’s patron St George, whose feast the Church kept this week, has been at times ignored, or appropriated by those with agendas of ethnic purity, or reinvented as an icon of multiculturalism; Monday’s BBC documentary Is The Church Racist? has laid down a challenge to change.
In Matthew 22, Jesus is asked if it is within the Law to pay the foreigner tax to the Emperor. He requests a Roman denarius, asks his questioners whose image is on the coin, and they answer “Caesar”. Jesus then famously tells his questioners to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s”.
This has often been taken as Jesus’s endorsement of a neat accommodation between the sacred and the secular. And for sure, we owe to modern nation states and to their Caesars obligations of good citizenship.
But it’s the question that Jesus doesn’t ask that’s more powerful: “and you, whose image is imprinted on you?” We know the answer of course: the same image that’s imprinted on every person, every race, every nation, since a time beyond history when God created us in this way.
So we might be nationalist or internationalist or somewhere in between. But the inescapable conclusion is this. Here we have no lasting city. We belong to him whose image we bear, and it is to him we must render not just our money or even our obedience, but our soul, our life, our all.
Chris Braganza
