Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man…Tell us then, what is your opinion?
During Christ’s last week on earth, the Pharisees tried everything they could to entrap Christ with His own words, but they failed. Getting desperate, they decided to team up with the secular Herodians. They came up with (they thought) an ingenious “gotcha” question: “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?”
Why did that appear to be a fool-proof trap? Well, if Christ said to pay the tax to the Romans, He would lose the support of the crowds who were hoping He might be the Messiah. Messiahs did not pay taxes. If Christ said not to pay the tax, He would have been charged with instigating a tax revolt. People who started tax revolts in the Roman Empire did not live very long.
Before Christ answered their question, he posed one of His own: “Why are you testing me, you hypocrites?”
The crowd in Jerusalem for Passover had to be utterly shocked that a backwoods carpenter from Galilee would dare to speak like that to the Pharisees, but we must understand—calling the Pharisees hypocrites wasn’t Christ’s opinion. God doesn’t have opinions. The Pharisees were indeed hypocrites. That was the truth.
The question asked was a purely political one, but note Christ’s answer: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar. And give to God what is God’s.” Christ injected the spiritual into the political. Why did He do that? A priest wrote that it is God’s plan that we live in societies. And societies need governing. They need to be governed in order to care for the common good and protect the material welfare of the society.
If this is God’s plan, then we are to obey and cooperate with state authorities—provided they do not impede our spiritual welfare. And our spiritual welfare can only be protected in accordance with the truth. Opinions and feelings are multitudinous; they can change with the wind. Not so the truth. (Fr. Kevin O’Sullivan)
Truth never changes. It cannot be destroyed by any decision or legal act. Our slavery stems from our surrender to the rule of lie, our failure to unmask lie and to protest against it in everyday life. Instead of correcting lie we keep silent or pretend to believe it’s true. This means living in falsehood. Telling the truth with courage is a way leading directly to freedom. A man who tells the truth is a free man despite external slavery, imprisonment or custody.
A young Polish priest wrote the above—shortly before he was murdered. Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko was tortured, beaten, and thrown in the Vistula River in Warsaw on October 19, 1984, by three agents from the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The murder ended two years of harassment and intimidation that included thirteen interrogations, an arrest, a government-sponsored slander campaign, his apartment being robbed twice, a bomb thrown in it, his car destroyed, and Fr. Jerzy being followed and monitored 24/7.
The 37-year-old Fr. Jerzy was told to leave Poland and go study in Rome. But Fr. Jerzy refused. He remained with his flock. And so, his body was found in the river eleven days after his murder. Five-hundred thousand Poles went to Fr. Jerzy’s funeral.
Poland had been a Catholic country for a thousand years, but in 1945, at the end of World War II, Poland was doomed to live under the totalitarian nightmare of communism. Poles then were punished for injecting the spiritual into the political, for communism, as Karl Marx would attest, begins with atheism. What was it like living in Poland? A quote from George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 comes to mind:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
In 1953 Poland’s Marxist government implemented a law by which it, and not the Church, would appoint and remove pastors and bishops. The primate of Poland, Cardinal Stephan Wyszynski responded, “We teach that it is proper to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s. But when Caesar sits himself on the altar, we respond curtly: he may not.” Cardinal Wyszynski was charged with treason and went to prison. Two thousand Polish priests followed him there. (Wiegel, The End and the Beginning, 40)
Two thousand priests in prison for political crimes. Of course, that was seventy years ago, in Europe. Something like that could never happen here, right? Well, we of course hope not, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility. Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko, martyred 42 years ago, wrote:
The culture of a nation is also its morality. A Christian nation must be guided by our centuries old and proven Christian morality. A Christian nation has no need of so-called secular morality, which, in the words of the late Cardinal Wyszyński, has no face and offers no hope.
What is “so-called secular morality”? It is morality that derives not from divinely revealed truths but by the prevailing fashions of the day. It is a constantly evolving morality based on feelings and opinions and “lived experience.” In the Church this used to be called the heresy of modernism. Today, unfortunately, some bishops call it the new paradigm, accompaniment, and walking together.
What does a morality basing itself on “lived experience” and not divinely revealed laws look like? Well, ask yourself: Is the extermination of whole classes of people (the unborn and the elderly) truly “reproductive healthcare” and “death with dignity”? Or are those just clinical and sterile terms to justify murder? Is a law stating that two men can be “married” and then purchase children align with the natural law and the way things were designed to work? Of course not. Modern-day Pharisees, who claim to be for equal rights, are now actively punishing those who dare to refuse to live with these falsehoods. To them, some people are more equal than others. Hypocrites indeed.
What is your opinion? When Caesar injects the political into the spiritual and attempts to seat himself up on our altar, what should you tell him? If you wish to remain free, you must say, “You may not.” He will respond with something to the effect of: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” You can respond, “That’s just your opinion.”
“Telling the truth with courage is a way leading directly to freedom,” wrote Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko. It also leads to Calvary. Isn’t that interesting? That is what where Christ went. But not before He suffered a few years of harassment, slander, and stalking by His government, followed by arrest, interrogation, and death.
Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, died for our sins. He gave over every last drop of His blood to free us from bondage. He died, but then He rose from the dead. And the world, in the devil’s grip, scratches its head and asks, “Why aren’t you dead? Why can’t we kill you?” The answer is quite simple: The truth cannot be destroyed.
My friends, the world is passing away, and time is getting short. Where do you get the strength to endure in this valley of tears? You get it in here, in our sacred temple. At Mass, you can interrogate yourself, and then mystically walk the streets of Jerusalem behind a condemned man. Then when He is lifted up, you can be lifted up with Him—in real time. Yes, it is real time, but it is also outside of time, for at Mass history stops. There is nothing up here on our altar but an endless present.
Christ, the Lord of History, stops time for you. Look up then, and see Him hanging, bleeding out for you. Hear Him ask: Why are you still testing me? Why are you testing the Way, the Truth, and the Life? Take courage, and go tell everyone the truth. A man who tells the truth is a free man despite external slavery, imprisonment, or custody.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
