Thirtieth Sunday of the Year

In Matthew’s Gospel, at the intersection of two approaches to law, Jesus boldly faces the lawyers out to trip him up by reducing all 613 commandments in Israelite law to one word: love. It must have been a shock to have studies, argued, made applications and even nit-picked to have these 613 commandments reduced to one word and move God's law from a courtroom setting to the street of practical living.

It would seem that most people would prefer a society based on care rather than profit and yearn for work that serves their higher needs. We need to acknowledge that a hunger for respect, love, generosity and a sense of higher purpose to their lives is something many theories overlook.

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29^th Sunday of the Year

In the 1960’s anthropologist Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane deals with our tendency to divide the universe into God's world and our world. God tends to the sacred and we tend to the rest. I remember in 2016 when I along with four other people were before a magistrate for having participated in a nonviolent protest at the Prime Minister’s office. The magistrate told us that ‘this is a court of law, not a court of conscience’ he quoted the line from today’s gospel: ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’ to back up his assertion. This quote is often used to defend the status quo. It implies that Jesus had no interest in economic or political questions, or identity questions which impact on our actions.