OUR GOD IS A GOD OF SURPRISES

XXIX SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME: Is 45:1,4-6; Mt 22:15-21

The Scriptures are full of surprises, with the unexpected taking the central stage and leaving us bewildered. Our God is indeed a God of surprises, or as they refer to him in Bemba, Shimwelenganya, that is the One full of imagination, always designing new things. 

God’s heart is open to all

Who could imagine that Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, was part of God’s plan, having been called  by God himself who entrusted to him a mission towards his people. Indeed, God’s ways are different from our human ways. For the people of Israel, Cyrus was a foreigner, who knew nothing about Yahweh, but God chose him, as he had chosen Moses long time before, to be the liberator of his people. 

The Jewish people ran the risk of extinction, going the same way that the Kingdom of the North had gone before, being lost in the melting pot of countries, tribes, languages and cultures. That had been the policy of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, who uprooted nations and moved them to distant provinces of their empire, so that they would not revolt, but disappear, losing their identity. The Persians had a completely different attitude towards the vanquished nations, allowing them to live in their ancestral lands and keep their cultural identity. And so the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, to rebuild the Temple and to keep their religion and their traditions.

With Isaiah, we must recognise that God is not a narrow minded chauvinist god. His heart is universal, and the lordship of his love embraces all. Nobody can have exclusive claims on God. He is the God of all, and all play a role in the fulfilment of his plans, even when they do not know him.

All political power is human and cannot claim divine rights

“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mt 22:21). This is one of the most famous sentences of Jesus, which we hear repeated whenever people speak about the Church and the State. Jesus makes it plainly clear that we cannot give to the political ruler - be he chief, king, president or prime minister - the respect and the obedience that belong to God alone. 

In most ancient cultures, the role of the king was associated with the divine, in such a way that the ruler was surrounded  by an aura of sacredness, because he was seen as being in touch with the gods and being their representative here on earth. This conferred on the king absolute power, demanding from people total obedience, and punishing the slightest disrespect as a crime and an offence to God himself. In the past, in Bemba, people referred to the Chief as “Mwine nkuni na menshi”, meaning that he is the owner of the firewood and of the water. Everything belongs to him, even the food that someone eats and the water that he drinks. He had power of life and death over his people.

Jesus makes it clear that political rulers are not divine, since they are not gods, but human beings. They are not sacred and they cannot demand a sacred reverence. Their word is not God’s word, and their laws are not God’s laws, but simply human laws. Although many of them claim absolute power and demand absolute obedience, they become oppressors, claiming rights that they do not have. They cannot be worshiped and praised as gods, because they are mortal human beings like everybody else.

Any leader, whoever he may be, is just a human being that should put his life at the service of the people and he should never give himself the power to take away the basic rights and freedoms that are the preserve of every human being.