Something came to mind a few Sundays ago as I was listening to a sermon on a passage from Matthew in which the Pharisees try to nail Jesus with the question of paying taxes. He says to them, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Render unto God what is God's.
Slow down if you think that's anything but the most difficult thing to do. When it comes down to it, who wants to render anything? It means letting go of those things I've held in my fist so tightly for, lo, these many years. "Give it up for God and the emperor? Do I have to?" Yes, you do.
The thing about rendering, though, is that it doesn't just mean "to give over to." It also means to clarify. Decades ago, when a farm animal died, the farmer would call the rendering man to come. He'd haul your dead horse off to a rendering plant to be turned into glue and dog food. Once, while tooling down the highway I passed a rendering truck that had horse legs and hooves sticking out of its box — not a pretty sight. The dead animals were headed to the plant where they'd be literally melted down to their essences.
To render unto Caesar and to God is melt it all down and understand exactly what's whose: what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God. Jesus' pushes the Pharisees into a clarity that angers them. What it becomes clear to you, you'll likely get angry too at first. But you might also breathe a sigh of relief and even rejoice.
Both you and they are sinners of whom the law demands everything. In this world, you belong to Caesar, top-to-bottom. You are of this world, and in this world Caesar rules. If you don't think it's so, wait a while and you'll finally come to see the world itself open its 6'x4' maw and swallow you whole. Even though we think this passage of God's word is about writing our tax checks, the demand is even greater. It won't be just a tax check you write. You'll be forced to render your entire self to the world and its ruler, whether you want to or not.
It's no easier when it comes to rendering unto God what belongs to him. From our first breath in the Garden, through to the at-last appearance of the New Jerusalem, God claims what is his. Adam and Eve refused to allow God what belongs solely to God and, instead, swallowed up the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Give up to God our control, our judgment, our future, our life and death, our salvation? Fuggedaboudit.
Our good and gracious Lord, however, has taken matters into his own hands. You don't want to give yourself to the world to serve your neighbor's needs and you'll never release your grip on matters that God would rather be in charge of. And if you never will, he'll do the rendering himself. He offers himself up, pours himself out as a libation for sin, jumps into the rendering truck with all the other dead creatures. You can see his nail-scarred feet sticking out.
This rendering is a clarifying business. It melts your illusions to truth. Whomever you're to render to, you can't and won't do it. (Stamp foot here.) To prove our seriousness, you and I and the rest of sinful humankind killed the one calling us. We decided to offer Jesus up both to Caesar and to God.
It's a role our Lord gladly plays. He doesn't stop the yammering demands of the law. He fulfills them for you. He doesn't just submit to your sacrificing him on the altar of righteousness, he makes his very cross the source of your salvation. And he renders you, too. For in your baptism are you not pocketed by God even as you're set apart to be spent on the world?
You are become the new coin of the realm, serving your neighbor. The economy of salvation is established for you to loosen up the credit crunch of grace. You do it, not by lending yourself out to get yourself back with interest, but by being given, being doled out, by being rendered. You are evidence that the divine wallet is open for the world's snatching. You are not saved in order to be deposited in First Christian Bank and draw interest because you're worth it. You're rendered yourself in order to make the economy of the kingdom of heaven run — and run well.
Ain't no credit crunch here.
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