Isaiah 2:1-5; Mark 12:13-17
Remembrance Sunday
St Barbara’s 10.11.2024
Rev Jeremy Bevan
Who’s in charge? What do they want? How should I respond? Unless you live alone on a desert island, you’ll have asked yourself those questions every time you had to get to grips with a new social situation. As a toddler, working out your parents’ rules; starting a new school or job; joining the armed forces, a gym, the WI. Working out who you answer to, what their expectations are, and what you’re going to do to meet them, really matters.
Both our Bible passages today try to answer those three questions. Firstly, the question: who’s in charge? In our passage from Isaiah, it was clearly God, with Mount Zion, the high hill on which Jerusalem stands, a visible symbol of God’s rule. Despite that symbol, the people had frequently ignored the second question: what does God want? That Isaiah passage dates from when God’s chosen people, the people of Israel, had not long returned from a shock seventy-year stay in Babylon, exiled there precisely for not paying attention to how God wanted them to live. Now, Isaiah says to them, we’re going to have to learn (or learn all over again) what it means to “walk in the light of the Lord.”
The third question: how should they respond? Well, in simple terms, follow the teaching God had given their ancestors. If we do that well, Isaiah says, we’ll look like a community worth joining, and “all the nations” will stream up to God’s holy hill. We’ll become the blessing for everyone God promised Abraham he and his descendants would be. And if we let God rule, there’s every chance peace will break out: swords will become useful agricultural tools, and spears equipment for tending our vines, which we’ll grow in peace. Some vision. And centuries on, it’s inspired some great art. So outside UN headquarters in New York stands an artwork by a Russian sculptor of a soldier beating a sword into a ploughshare. Unveiled in 1959 at the height of the Cold War, it still stands there, symbolising Isaiah’s vision for peace even, or perhaps especially, in a politically tense age.
In our gospel passage: who’s in charge? That question again, this time to Jesus from the Pharisees and supporters of Herod, Rome’s puppet king. Who runs this show? The Roman emperor, or God? How should we respond (that question again): with obedience to Rome, or faithfulness to God? It’s a carefully laid trap, of course. If Jesus answers “Rome”, he’ll look like a collaborator with the occupying power; if he says “God”, that occupying power will think he’s a subversive.
And at first sight, his answer appears to be a satisfying compromise. “Pay to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Easy. Everyone gets what they want; and Jesus offends no-one. Two non-overlapping spheres of influence: and perhaps in our day, when so many voices assert that there should be no place for faith in public life, that’s a view we might accept, too? But there’s a small problem. His questioners are “utterly amazed” at Jesus. That doesn’t quite seem a proportionate reaction to what he’s said: it doesn’t seem to fit.
And I think that’s because there more going on here, much more, than meets the eye. Behind Jesus’s measured words is a big challenge to his hearers, and a bigger vision. His words about giving God what is God’s would have immediately brought to mind the words of Psalm 24. Its opening words go like this: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him.” So what seems like a compromise is in fact Jesus’s rather veiled, rather cryptic, reminder of the radical demands of faithfulness to God. None of his hearers would have missed that allusion to Psalm 24. That’s why, I think, they’re utterly amazed.
So what does God expect of us if everything and everyone belongs to God? Three brief thoughts about Jesus’s challenge and Jesus’s bigger vision. Firstly, if everybody is God’s, that includes the authorities that govern us. Elsewhere in the New Testament, you can see the apostle Paul and others working out what that means. So the writer of the first letter to Timothy, for example, says: “Pray for those in authority.” I wonder how often we pray for our council leaders and managers, our magistrates, our MPs? How often we engage with authorities of any sort, believing that we might have something to say to them about governing better? That could challenge us all to see more clearly how God is best honoured in the public square.
Secondly, godly obedience sometimes demands tough choices. I don’t know how you reacted to Isaiah’s words from our reading about beating swords into ploughshares? Perhaps you thought: nice idea, but meanwhile in the real world, there’s Ukraine, there’s Gaza, there’s Sudan… And the reason the Royal British Legion has marched up from Palmerston Road for 90 years is because the world is still stumbling, rather than walking, towards the fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision. In an imperfect world, it remains crucially important that we who seek to be faithful to God engage with the tough issues of the day, including war. So that, little by little, we stumble together towards something better. A world, for example, where 70% of the casualties in war are not women and children, as is currently, and tragically, the case in Gaza. People have fought, have campaigned, have protested for the right to disagree with choices the powers-that-be make: let’s use that right, with all the wisdom God will give us if only we ask.
Finally, what about the situations where authority seems blind and deaf to God? And here, I think of a story from way back in the Old Testament, at the time just before the rise of Moses. The Israelites are slaves in Egypt, but they’re growing in number. So the Egyptian Pharaoh says to the Hebrew midwives, “If your women give birth to a boy, kill him at birth.” And the Hebrew midwives refuse to follow Pharaoh’s order to do that: an act of civil disobedience. They (as it were) take their time getting to women about to give birth, and they say, “Well, when we get there, the baby’s been born. And if it’s a boy, they’ve taken him away somewhere and we can’t find him.”
That refusal “redefines the moral imagination of the world”, what it is possible to do in protest at power being abused. That was how the former UK Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, put it. Such protest can of course come at a high price, as conscience-driven Christians around the world know to their cost. What might we do this week to grow our awareness and understanding of their situations?
In closing, I come back to our three questions: Who’s in charge? God is. What does God want? Us, and all that we are. How might we respond? With wisdom; with prayer; with perseverance and vision; believing that God’s kingdom is coming. Perhaps even through us here today, if we let it.
