Come and see

They said to him, "Rabbi...where are you staying?"

He said,"Come and see."

With these simple words Andrew and an unnamed person (traditionally and most probably John the Evangelist, author of the fourth Gospel) became Jesus' first disciples.

St. Thomas Aquinas once said that we should pay attention to the little things that Jesus said, and he gave as an example Jesus' instructions to the man with the withered hand in Matthew 12:13: "Stretch out your hand." He doesn't say, "You're healed." Instead, he asks the man to do something, to make an effort, to reach out to him. To try. Little Scriptural gems like this are wonderful to behold, and when you find one you should cherish it.

This little exchange between Jesus and Andrew and John is one of my favorite of these. "Rabbi, where are you staying?" was an idiom used by the ancients to mean, "Teacher, we would like to learn from you. Where is your school, that we may become your students?" Jesus' response is revealing: "Come and see." He was not like other Rabbis. He didn't sit in a school with his select group of students. He moved from place to place, preaching amongst the people. If Andrew and John wanted to learn from Jesus, they would have to keep up.

As Christians we can't help but make Andrew and John's question our own. "Master, where are you staying? We want to learn. We want to understand." Jesus' response is direct and engaging. The words leap off the page; we can see him looking us in the eye as he says it: "Come and see." Jesus is a man of action, and like Andrew and John, if we want to learn from him, we will need to keep up. And unlike other teachers, he isn't here just to tell us something. He has something to show us, and we can only learn what it is by walking with him along the path that he walks.

Why can't he just tell us? What does he have to teach us that can only be learned by seeing him in action? I think there are two things. First, Jesus wants to teach us the way of perfection (and it's useful to remember that the early Christians described their religion as "The Way.") He wants us know what the perfect looks like, so that we'll know what we're supposed to be aiming for. He wants our aim to be true, though we may doubt our ability to hit the target. As Jesus says in Matthew 5:

"You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.' But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, 'Raqa,' will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, 'You fool,' will be liable to fiery Gehenna.

"....You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna.

"It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife must give her a bill of divorce.' But I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

"Again you have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'Do not take a false oath, but make good to the Lord all that you vow.' But I say to you, do not swear at all; not by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Anything more is from the evil one.

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?

So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

It's easy to understand what Jesus is saying here: that the exterior proscriptions of the Old Testament point the way to interior perfection. "Thou shalt not be angry with your brother" is the interior perfection of "Thou shalt not kill;" "Thou shalt not lust" is the perfection of "Thou shalt not commit adultery." "Turn the other cheek" is the perfection of "an eye for an eye" (which was originally intended to limit retribution, not to encourage it).

But these would seem to us unattainable ideals were it not for the example Jesus gave us by living them. In fact, Jesus' divinity brings to these ideals a fathomless depth, gives them an entirely new dimension, and heightens the urgency with which we ourselves pursue them. Jesus is God, and yet he submitted to these principles in relation to us. How important is "turn the other cheek?" So important that God himself, who was perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing, perfectly blameless, submitted to this principle in his own life, when he was attacked by evil men, even to the point of torture and death.

God created the universe, and is farther above us than we are above worms. For him to carry out these ideals in his life among us demonstrates a depth of love that is almost impossible for us to imagine. In fact, I would be willing to bet that an inability to conceive of a God as loving as this is the second most popular reason that people reject Christianity's concept of God. (The most popular reason being, ironically, that a God that allows evil in the world is not loving enough.)

And if God himself was willing to put these principles into practice, how serious must he be about them? What excuse can we have not to make them our own? Jesus makes no bones about it: these aren't lofty ideals that we can raise a glass to, and then ignore. He tells us, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me," Mark 8: 34.

The second thing Jesus wants us to know, which can only be learned if we "come and see," is him. And this lesson is deeply intertwined with the other, as we see in John 14:

"Where (I) am going you know the way."

Thomas said to him, "Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"

Jesus said to him, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.

....Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him."

Jesus wants us to come to know him, and through him, to come to know God the Father. He wants us to follow his example not just because it is the way of perfection, not just because it is supremely important to God, but out of love for him. If Jesus' example demonstrates God's unfathomable love for us, then the proper response is not just obedience, it is to love God in return. To love God we need to know God, and that is Jesus' mission in the world.

This is a great mystery. For us to understand God well enough to truly love him, for us to be capable of offering a love for him that approximates in even the smallest way the love he has for us, is a seemingly impossible task. Atheists like to challenge God with, "If you exist, why don't you show yourself? Why this game of hide and seek?" I'm not sure what they're asking for. Universal parlor tricks? The sun dancing in the sky? (And yet even when God provides such miracles they don't believe in them.) But God wants to reveal so much more about himself than that. He doesn't just want us to believe that he exists; that much he considers obvious. He wants us to know him, to understand him, well enough to be capable of loving him. Through all of God's 2000 year journey with the Jews, through all of history itself, God has been straining to reveal himself, yearning to be known, struggling to help us to overcome the sin that resulted from his gift of free will, which was necessary for us to be able to make the choice to love him, but which continually prevents us from doing so.

And now God has taken the ultimate step to bridge the infinite divide that separates us from him. He has come to live among us, to show us by his example what love is, to love us even when we don't love him, to lift us out of the mire of sin from which we have failed time again to free ourselves. To be present for us in the most immediate way imaginable, in flesh and blood, that we may come to know him and believe in him. He stands before us with his hand outstretched, ready to lift us into a new life, if only we will come, and see.

There is no State

Then the Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap him in speech.

They sent their disciples to him, with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not regard a person's status.

Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?"

The scene must have been one of great anticipation; the Pharisees' "trick" not particularly clever. Jesus had been preaching and working miracles throughout Israel for three years. Many Israelites, longing to be free of Roman rule, had come to believe he might be the Messiah, the king from the line of David who, they believed, would overthrow their oppressors and restore the independent kingdom of Israel. Now Jesus had made his way to Jerusalem, on the eve of the Passover, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the celebration of God's deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. If ever Jesus would announce his kingship and begin the rebellion against Rome, this would be the time and the place.

Going to Jerusalem at this time was a nearly suicidal act on Jesus' part. Either he would begin the rebellion in a city that hosted a Roman garrison of overwhelming strength, or he would burst the hopes and expectations of the people, whose reaction to the disappointment might be severe. It would, in fact, be Jesus' final journey to Jerusalem; these were the last few days of his ministry before the Passion.

The Pharisees' "trick" was simply to force the issue. "Tell us now," they were saying, "which side you are on. Are we to pay homage to Rome or not?"

Jesus' answer to this question posed in Matthew 22:15ff is one of the most famous quotes of the Bible:

"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."

I remember when we covered this passage in Scripture class at Gonzaga. The Jesuit priest who taught the class (now I've forgotten his name) read the passage and said, "So you see how Jesus tricked them."

And I thought, "No." It seemed to me that he gave a straightforward, honest answer, though not the one the Jews wanted to hear. "My kingdom is not of this Earth," he seemed to be saying. "There's no conflict between Caesar's kingdom and mine. Pay your taxes, get along with the State so that your physical needs are met, so that you'll have peace sufficient to let you concentrate on what's really important, which is your relationship to God." Jesus seems to be arguing for a separation of Church and State.

This is in fact the message Jesus wanted his Roman listeners to hear, but this is the "trick" part of Jesus' answer. It's not the answer his Jewish listeners would have heard. It's ironic that many of us today who read this passage continue to hear, as I did when I was a college student, the "trick." We miss the real message Jesus intended for his Jewish listeners.

To understand the rest of Jesus' answer we have to pay attention to the seemingly innocuous verses that precede it:

Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?

Knowing their malice, Jesus said, "Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax." Then they handed him the Roman coin.

He said to them, "Whose image is this and whose inscription?"

They replied, "Caesar's." At that he said to them, "Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."

"Whose image is this?" To understand the affect these words would have had on Jesus' Jewish listeners we have to remember that the whole history of Israel was one long, life and death struggle with idolatry. The religion of the Jews was not, as we sometimes imagine, safely carried through the ages in the isolated little corner of the near east that they occupied. No, paganism was constantly infiltrating the land of Israel, brought in through intermarriage with the pagans who surrounded Israel, brought in through trade, through the cultural assimilation that was to be expected when a simple nomadic people settled down near far more advanced, cosmopolitan cultures. It was practiced by the people of Israel, it was practiced by the pagan wives of their kings, it was practiced by the kings themselves. We forget that on several occasions the religion of the Jews was in grave danger of being wiped from the face of the Earth, replaced entirely by paganism.

The struggle against paganism resulted in some of the bloodiest scenes of the Old Testament. Think of Jezebel, the pagan queen of Israel who promulgated the worship of her native god Ba'al Melkart throughout Israel. She was thrown out of a window, "and some of her blood spurted against the wall and against the horses," 2 Kings 9:33 prosaically reports. Then they ran over her with a horse, and left her to be eaten by dogs. In Israel, any lapse into idolatry was a serious thing, a matter of national survival. Nothing was more loathsome to a Jew than an idolatrous image.

"Whose image is this?" Jesus asked the Pharisees. The image of Caesar, the emperor of Rome. At the time Jesus asked the question it was only 70 years since Julius Caesar had become the first Roman emperor to declare his own divinity. It must have been particularly galling for the Jews, not only to be ruled by pagan kings, but to be ruled by someone who claimed to be a god himself. It was a wound that was still fresh.

What's most hilarious about this scene is that Jesus did not pull the coin out of his own pocket; he tricked the Pharisees into pulling it out of theirs. By pointing out the image on the coin Jesus is calling attention to the fact that in using Roman money the Pharisees are carrying little idolatrous images around with them every day.

"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar." Having pointed out the idolatrous image on the coin the natural response of any Jew would be to throw it away from them, and Jesus completely agrees. "Give it back to him, give it all back to him," he seems to be saying. Don't just pay the tax, throw all his idolatrous money back in his face.

Should we refuse to pay the tax? Should we rebel against Roman rule? This is the "extreme" position the Pharisees hope to corner Jesus into taking, but Jesus shocks them into seeing that these are insignificant little half-measures, which betray the interior compromise the Israelites have already made with paganism, a compromise brought to light by the little pagan idols each of them carries about with them every day. Jesus demands more than rebellion, he demands that his listeners recognize the creeping idolatry that has developed with in their own hearts, and that they renounce it utterly. He demands that God and Caesar each be given his true and proper due in the hearts and in the lives of his listeners.

And what then, does belong to Caesar, and what belongs to God? How would Jesus' Jewish listeners have answered that question? Based on their training in the Scriptures, this is what they would have thought: "Did Caesar form the Earth or the waters? Does he make the rains fall and the crops grow?" As God says to Job:

Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it?

....Who shut within doors the sea?....Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place?

....Have you entered into the sources of the sea, or walked about in the depths of the abyss? Have the gates of death been shown to you, or have you seen the gates of darkness?

....Do you give the horse his strength?....Does the eagle fly up at your command?

What Caesar is due, Jesus is saying, is precisely nothing. He has no place in our priorities. God is everything. Separation of Church and State? No. Jesus is saying, like the little boy in The Matrix, "There is no State."