A Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 45:1, 4-6 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b Matthew 22:15-21
Hannah Arendt was raised in a secular, socially progressive Jewish family. She studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and in 1929 she received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. Her dissertation, written under Karl Jaspers, another famous figure, was entitled Love and Saint Augustine.
In 1933, having already been arrested by the Gestapo for her studies in anti-Semitism, Hannah Arendt fled Germany for Paris. Two years later, Germany’s Nuremberg Laws declared that she and her fellow Jews were no longer German citizens.
Like so many others in the 20th century, Hannah Arendt became a stateless person. In our era of national states, that meant that no government stood to guarantee her any of those rights their citizens should enjoy: democratic self-determination, defense, free movement, the right to own property, and non-discrimination, to name a few.
Stateless when the Nazis occupied France, Arendt and her fellow German Jewish refugees were without passports. Even if they could legally leave France, what nation was willing to open its borders to the stateless?
Hannah Arendt posed a question our modern world has yet to answer: Where do human rights come from?
Only Arendt’s intellectual stature saved her. It brought her to the United States, whose ports were closed to other stateless Jews, and allowed her to teach in prestigious U.S. universities. She would later produce a masterpiece of the twentieth century, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
In it, Arendt posed a question our modern world has yet to answer: Where do human rights come from? In our current system of nation-states, those who are not citizens have no one who speaks for them, who guarantees their safety, who allows them to engage in their own forms of religious and cultural life, who provides for their health and education, or their right to labor. As Arendt so poignantly put it, the world finds “nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”
Jesus lived and died as a Jew in Roman-occupied Palestine. When his adversaries tried to trap him into showing disloyalty either to his faith or to the Roman regime, he responded with a single statement that would subsequently produce endless tomes of political theory: “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mt 22:21).
Everyone interprets sacred Scripture. It does not read itself. Americans like to think that Christ is, perhaps prophetically, referring to our modern separation of church and state, a concept that would not exist for another millennium and a half. It seems safer to say that our Lord recognized obligations that bind us together in virtue of our humanity, duties that exist in all spheres of human life, even before they are distilled into categories of sacred and secular.
Having studied St. Augustine and read his own masterpiece, The City of God, Hannah Arendt would have known one ancient solution to the modern quagmire that still affects so many of the world’s people. Augustine insisted that human rights are rooted in our common, divine origin. All human beings were created to know, love and serve God. All of us are called into divine life through the life, death and resurrection of the Christ. Therefore, each of us must recognize in the other a fellow creature, someone also called into existence by God, equally loved by God.
An anonymous early Christian commentator on the Gospel of Matthew made this very point, writing:
The image of God is not depicted on gold but is imaged in humanity. The coin of Caesar is gold; that of God, humanity. Caesar is seen in his currency; God, however, is known through human beings.
Hannah Arendt’s question has not gone away. At the conclusion of the Second World War, the newly chartered United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in our era of powerful nation-states, it only means what those states allow it to signify. People must still leave their homes, searching for a basic standard of living for themselves and their children. Migrants effectively become stateless. They stand as mere beggars on the borders of more powerful nations.
The Christians of powerful nation-states cannot co-opt Christ for their politics. He did not endorse what did not yet exist: the separation of church and state.
Totalitarian regimes still declare masses of people to be non-citizens and thus deprived of human rights because of their race, religion, gender or language. At the close of 2022, the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that more than thirty-five million people live without the guarantees of citizenship most of us take for granted.
Pity the massacred people of Israel, whose government must now respond in a way that will, at least hopefully, ensure the future lives of its citizens. And pity the Palestinians of Gaza, who must live under a gang of zealots, not a government whose first concern is for their safety and rights.
The Christians of powerful nation-states cannot co-opt Christ for their politics. He did not endorse what did not yet exist: the separation of church and state. This is only a comfortable deceit.
No, our Lord told us that we were children of the same Father and that as such, we are obliged to love and to care for one another. This is an uncomfortable reminder that come the end of our days when facile charters and uncaring constitutions are dust, we will be called before a throne of judgment, where all that matters is love and the mercy it shows.
