Jesus tells us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Mark 12), what bears his image, meaning coinage; he continues that we should render to God what is God’s, what bears God’s image, meaning us.
Our whole selves are supposed to be offered to God, such that the offering of my self to God becomes thereason that I do everything that I might do.
Augustine put it this way, in his Confessions:
“He loves you less who together with you loves something which he does not love for your sake”
Confessions 10.28
You may need to read that sentence a couple of times. The person addressed as ‘you’ is the Lord. To paraphrase, I love God less if I love something else which I do not love for God’s sake. Even if that thing is good and praiseworthy and something you should love, your loves are misordered if you love it for a reason other than love for God.
Why is that? At the most fundamental level, it’s because what is good and praiseworthy in the things you love is because of God and so should be rightly honoured and loved for his sake.
Ordinary things that we are supposed to love, like our families, our neighbours, our duties, our cities, or our nations, should be loved for the sake of the one who made them and ordered them. For the sake of absolute clarity: I am not suggesting everything in that list should be loved in the same way, to the same extent, or that each love is blind to the faults of what is loved. In fact, it’s loving them because God has gifted them to us that frees us to see their faults with clear eyes, these loves don’t need to be ultimate (for all there is still an appropriate order to them) when loved because of God the ultimate source of love.
This principle extends to all gifts that we receive, we love the gift because of the giver, and all good gifts come from the Father of lights (James 1). Chris Watkin even applies it to civic duties like rendering to Caesar what is his, we should pay our taxes because we give to God in love, to do otherwise is to not give to God as we ought to. To pay our taxes divorced from our love of God is to love God less.
Which means of course, that I love God at lot less than I should. I snatch the gift and scorn the giver like an ungrateful child. I use Watkin’s taxes example because I’ve never met someone who is grateful to pay their taxes, he argues that when we see that as giving to God it radically changes the nature of the gift: Caesar gets the same amount but my love for God increases. The nature of what I’m doing is shifted from obligation to gift.
There’s more we could say on that example—how should we think about it when governments misuse and mismanage tax revenues that we have gifted to God, for example? I don’t think there’s a government that hasn’t in my lifetime, of course, and I very much doubt that the Roman Empire was a picture of fiscal or moral health, either. We shouldn’t be sanguine about that; it rebounds more to the state’s cost and judgement if they misuse gifts given to them for the love of God and the Lord will have his vengeance (Romans 12). We are allowed to speak about it, to challenge it, to condemn it, and yet we continue to give for the love of God.
It’s easier to see this principle with anything that we like. Good gifts like the hot tang of freshly fried bacon on your tongue, or the deep green smell of a forest gloaming towards Autumn, or the shrieks and laughter of happy children, should be used as fuel for our joy in God. We love God more when we see them as gifts given by him, and that’s a rightly ordered love. We will also find that we love these things more too when seen as gifts from the creator.
In Watkin’s passage on taxes, he quotes Bonhoeffer’s prison letter:
“God wants us to love him eternally with our whole hearts—not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of cantus firmus [fixed melody] to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint.”
The world is closely ordered, the first page of the Bible starts to teach us this. Our lives and our loves should be ordered too. When the love of God is the grounding note our other loves are more fully alive and we live as full human beings.
To come at this from a slightly different angle, I think it also helps when we have concerns—or even deep pains—with our families, or our nations, or even our churches. When our love for them flows to God first it is easier to love them despite their faults. That doesn’t mean we don’t work to change them, or take steps to protect ourselves when required, but it does change how we feel about them. It might make the faults hurt more, but it should make them easier to love.
I say this to myself more than you, dear friends. It won’t have escaped your notice that I have the kind of mind that finds it easier to spot problems than celebrate joys. That can be a blessing when well used, and much of my writing flows from this, but it is vital for me and for you that the love of God is the great ground upon which we build.
He is, after all, worthy of your love. He was before he did anything for you; then he stepped into history, bore your sin in his body upon the tree, broke open the doors of death, pulled the dragon’s teeth, and gifted you life and love forevermore.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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