22 nd October: 20 th Sunday after Pentecost: Exodus 33.12–23;Psalm 99;1 Thessalonians 1.1–10;Matthew 22.15–22

Exodus 33:22: and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of a rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.

Our readings today take us into uncomfortably exposed places. Moses faces up to his fear about his ability to lead; Paul and his companions write to encourage the Church in Thessalonica dealing with persecution, and Jesus deals with questions designed to catch him out. The God who faithfully sustains, preserves and guides is the same God whose call will sometimes lay us bare to the elements.

In the early 1980s Victoria Barnett conducted dozens of interviews with German Protestants who had lived through the 1930s and 40s. The resulting book, For the Soul of the People ¹ , is one of the best-informed—and most poignant—records of what it is like for Christians exposed to the elements of moral and political challenges. The women and men she interviewed were decent people, but many, looking back, were confronted by the fact that they had failed morally and politically.

Inevitably and properly the Holocaust weighed most heavily on their consciences. One clergyman, a member of the Confessing Church and by no means pro-Nazi, explained in a voice that became quieter and quieter why, at the time, the events of Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass in November 1938, when state-sponsored violence broke out against Jewish businesses and people on a nation-wide scale, ‘didn’t move me colossally … why it somehow didn’t upset me inwardly I can explain only in retrospect; that the range of vision was too narrow. We stood under observation … I frankly admit to you that sometimes you had to ouch yourself not to be a coward’.

Many Pastors persuaded themselves that their duties did not extend to Jews. But, when the Nazi State from 1939 initiated a Euthanazia programme targeting those with mental impairment and illness and against the terminally ill, it was harder to look the other way because so many of those targeted were living and being treated in institutions run by the churches. They were warned: a Nazi poster in the early 30s warned ‘Everyday, a cripple or blind person costs 5–6 RM [Reichmarks], a mentally ill person 4 RM, a criminal 5 RM’. Directors and medical staff of the many church-run Sanitoria faced SS officers armed with warrants to remove their patients, knowing their likely fate. Some did deals—‘take the Jewish patients and leave the others’ or ‘take these mortally sick but leave these whom we can treat’. A few fought against the programme. One such, Paul Braune, recalled the reaction by fellow Christians when he expressed his moral opposition to killing the sick: ‘Again and again, I was met with the thoughtless words: Is it really so terrible when such invalids are freed, gently and painlessly, from their suffering?’ By the end of 1930 35,224 patients had been murdered. One Pastor, Ernst Wilm, was sent to Dachau for speaking out publicly when sent urns for burial: ‘We couldn’t stand at the grave and say ‘After it has pleased Almighty God to call our sister from this life’ when we knew that she had been murdered’. Faced with such indifference, faced also by the threat of arrest not only to oneself but to one’s family, how many of us would do the right thing?

In our reading from the book of Exodus God gives Moses a direct command but he does not have the courage to carry it out. God has commanded him to lead his people from the Sinai desert and travel to a new land with which he was unfamiliar. Moses’ dilemma seems to be this: in the wilderness he knows the Lord to be with his people. It is as is the Lord belongs in the desert. But when Moses does as God commands and leaves the place where he knows God to be, how can he be sure God will continue to journey with him. Moses knows full well that he does not have the resources to lead his people without God’s guidance and care. ‘My presence will go with you’ God tells him, but Moses cannot let it go at that and presses the matter still: how shall it be known that I have found favour in your sight … unless you go with us?’ And so the utterly compelling and strangely anthropomorphic encounter unfolds, as Moses is kept safe from God’s blinding glory by the shelter of God’s hand and is afforded a glimpse of God’s retreating back in token of God’s promise to remain with Moses and his people. Moses wanted certainty—the certainty that he wouldn’t be called upon to lead his people alone. He wanted the certainty that he would do right by his people.

In the Gospel, an unlikely alliance of Pharisees (sympathetic to the anti-Roman opposition) and Herodians (those who advocated loyalty to Rome) seeks to expose Jesus. They put to him a lose/lose question about paying taxes to Rome, anticipating that either he will estrange Zealots by affirming Rome’s rule or estrange Rome’s supporters by advocating non-payment. Matthew presents Jesus’ answer as a divinely clever answer that avoids the trap. But it is an answer that has frustrated exegetes ever since—not least those who wish for a crystal clear teaching either way on the relationship of Christianity and politics. Is Jesus acknowledging the emperor’s authority or not? Is the suggestion that Caesar and God rule different realms? If so, the answer is surely unsatisfactory. It seems more likely that Jesus is acknowledging political authority, but also setting its limits. The emperor can have the denarius but the people belong to God—an answer that would be in keeping with an earlier exchange on paying tax (Matthew 17:24). There are rulers who like to think themselves gods, but they are only ever human beings, not so much, as Bonhoeffer remarked the day after Hitler became Reich Chancellor, Führers (Leaders) as Verführers (deceivers). Resisting such people may mean taking up the cross in service of the one ‘living and true God’ (1 Thess 1:9).