What is unclear, however, is how the tenants cannot see this inexorable disaster coming. They are blinded, in part, because their stupitity is mirrored step for step by the stupidity of the landlord. … Unless one interprets this parable allegorically—and thereby relieves its tension by making the landlord a figure for God—one is in trouble. Naked of allegory, the behavior of both parties appears to make no sense.

… Because he has become so accustomed to cloaking his greed under the guise of law, the landlord actually believes his tenants will abide by law. Because they so need to be unaware of their own weakness, the tenants actually believe their landlord is weak. … Because the tenants have been seduced by the landlord’s inappropriate trust to believe in their illusory power, everything in this tragic narrative becomes short-circuited; the tenants bite the unintended bait, the trap falls, the father is bereaved, and the tenants are dead.

… Who is responsible for all the murders? Put another way, what in fact undermined the tender chances for justice?

… a phrase that can be as absolutely superficial or as absolutely profound as one wishes to make it.

… there is a double dialectic at work in Mark’s version.  There is a dialectic of question and answer but also of entrapment and escape, within the story, and the narrative’s power concerns the skillful equation of question and entrapment from the questioners which is countered by an even better equation of answer and escape from Jesus.  …  (p. 397)

… Mark seldom says once what might be said twice, but here he outdoes himself: (1) Teacher/teach; (2) true/truly; (3) no/not; (4) pay or not/pay or not; and (5) … Pharisees and Herodians as questioners.  Everything here warns us to think twice about the opening question.  So also with Jesus’ first reply in 12:15bc:  “But knowing their hypocrisy … . (p. 398)

On the one hand, [“pronouncement story”] describes those texts where an independent saying has been given a narrative setting but where the saying can exist quite well by itself.  On the other, it describes those texts where setting and saying are in interactive relationship so that the saying loses either its force or even its meaning when it appears alone.  … dialectical stories.  …  The God and Caesar story  has moved from … the dialectical to the aphoristic tradition.  In effect, the narrative has become an isolated aphorism.  …  Those may be valid interpretations of the story, but one doubts them increasingly the more they are attained by the elimination of most of the text.  (p. 401)

The problem is not whether to pay Caesar’s taxes, but whether to carry Caesar’s coins. And Jesus has already decided on that point.

I’ve been thinking about that English ecclesiastic Wolsey.
Remember the words Shakespearre put on his dying lips?
“Had I but served my God
with half the zeal I serv’d my king… .

God and emperors just do not get along. They do not get along because they both want it all.  (p. 270)

Wealth just turns out to be another word for emperor.  …
Christian accommodation that results from playing the game called “Caesar’s coin” insures that the separation of church and state will make Christians faithful servants of states that allegedly give the church freedom.  (p. 272)

Blake’s reputation for eccentricity, if not madness, was much promoted by the casual matter-of-fact way he spoke about his encounters with spirits from the past. Thus, he would say, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he had been chatting with Socrates or Milton. When Crabb Robinson asked him what language he talked with Voltaire, he answered: “To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key; he touched it probably in French, but to my ear it became English.” It was a shrewd answer. It is an illusion to suppose that those who look into eternity are simpletons when the children of time seek to trip them up.

It is hard to see how the denarius question could have been thought by those who put it to be a serious trap, unless Jesus’ repudiation of the Roman occupation were taken for granted, so that he could be expected to give an answer which would enable them to denounce him. … In the context of his answer “the things that are God’s” most normally would not mean “spiritual things”; the attribution “to Caesar Caesar’s things and to God God’s things” points rather to demands or prerogatives which somehow overlap or compete, needing to be disentangled. What is Caesar’s and what is God’s are not on different levels, so as never to clash; they are in the same arena.

Blake’s reputation for eccentricity, if not madness, was much promoted by the casual matter-of-fact way he spoke about his encounters with spirits from the past. Thus, he would say, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he had been chatting with Socrates or Milton. When Crabb Robinson asked him what language he talked with Voltaire, he answered: “To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key; he touched it probably in French, but to my ear it became English.” It was a shrewd answer. It is an illusion to suppose that those who look into eternity are simpletons when the children of time seek to trip them up.

Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings if they understood the issue, would choose this world.

Jesus’ reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. … The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any “resurrection” must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by the resurrection. [Me: Resurrection has no need for babies—the resurrection itself is the birth and guarantees the continuation of life.]

… But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. … One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them. [Me: Could we imagine, when we all are dead, God no longer having anyone to commune with?]

… rendering the entire commandment “Love (the good) for your fellow as you (love the good for) yourself. …

Suppose you don’t love yourself asks Ben Azzai—how can you love someone else? A person may think his life is a failure … What then should this person do? Let him remind himself, says Ben Azzai, that because he bears the likeness of God, he is of ultimate worth, that regardless of his present condition he has the divinely endowed potential for joy and fulfillment, and only then having learned to love himself, he will recover his self esteem and be capable of loving others.

A careful look at the gospels shows that Jesus seldom accepted the questions posed to him. He exposed them as coming from the house of fear. [list of questions including this verse] To none of these questions did Jesus give a direct answer. He gently put them aside as questions emerging from false worries. They were raised out of concern for prestige, influence, power, and control. They did not belong to the house of God. Therefore Jesus always transformed the question by his answer. He made the question new—and only then worthy of his response.

… there is no marriage nor giving in marriage, because you cannot devote your life to two divinities: God and the person you are married to.

all of it prayer (again and again), answering and answering,
for the answer hears what the question wants to be,
and the wasp sates itself
in the breeze of the bloom’s lip, lip which is prayer,
praying its being,
being its prayer which is answering being.

For to love Jesus is to be so overwhelmed by his life that we no longer think we must choose between love of ourselves, love of others, and love of God.

Douglas Steere wisely says that true religion often appears to be the enemy of the moralist. For religion cuts across the fine distinctions between the several virtues and gathers all virtues into the one supreme quality of love. The wholly obedient life is mastered and unified and simplified and gathered up into the love of God and it lives and walks among men in the perpetual flame of that radiant love. For the simplified man loves God with all his heart and mind and soul and strength and abides trustingly in that love. Then indeed do we love our neighbors.

The measure of our love to God seems in justice to be the measure of our love of every virtue. We are to love and practice it with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength.

For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.

[Me: This is because goodness is hidden deep within ourselves. What our minds or the minds of others can imagine, define, or plan, is so much less than the goodness that is possible.]

… every contact with a lover of life brings us one step closer to loving our own.

I long only to serve God the Master with all my heart and soul and mind and strength and to love my fellow men and women even as I love myself. I we allow this principle to guide our lives, then selfishness will flee from our hearts and we shall be like children of God. We will find in every man and woman our own brother and sister.

The assignment is to love the God you did not make up with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and the second is like unto it: to love the neighbor you also did not make up as if that person were your own strange and particular self. Do this, and the doing will teach you everything you need to know. Do this, and you will live.

Within a universe which is structurally convergent the only possible way for one element to draw closer to other neighboring elements is by condensing the cone: that is, by driving towards the point of convergence the whole area of the world in which it is involved. In such a system it is impossible to love one’s neighbor without drawing close to God—and vise versa for that matter.

Of God Himself can no man think … He may well be loved but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden but by thought neither.

One could argue that the great breakthrough of industrial agriculture occurred when most farmers became convinced that it would be better to own a neighbor’s farm than to have a neighbor, and when they became willing, necessarily at the same time, to borrow extravagant amounts of money. Thus they violated the two fundamental laws of domestic or community economy: You must be thrifty and you must be generous; or, to put it in a more practical way, you must be (within reason) independent, and you must be neighborly.

To those who love one another
the thought of heaven is native
as the thought of food.

καρδιας (heart) — sinful desires: Jesus forgives (sets free from)
ψυχης (soul) — demons: Jesus casts out
διανοιας (mind) — hypocrisy: Jesus exposes
ισχυος (strength) — illness: Jesus heals

Why should a concern for oneself be the basis for virtue?  … in our inalienable need to maintain ourselves we must, of necessity, help preserve other selves.
… the cherished quote … contains the foundation for a system of ethical behaviors and that foundation is neurobiological. The foundation is the result of a discovery based on the observation of human nature rather than the revelation of a prophet.  (p. 171)

… harming others always haunts and eventually harms the individual who causes the harm. Consequently such actions are evil. “… our good is especially in the friendship that links to other humans and to advantages for society” (The Ethics, Part V, Proposition 10). … Neither the essence of the conatus, nor the notion that harm to the other is harm to the self are Spinoza’s inventions. But perhaps the Spinozian novelty resides with the powerful blend of the two.
The endeavor to live in a shared, peaceful agreement with others is an extension of the endeavor to preserve oneself.  (p. 172)

We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it’s a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that’s often when we see Spirit most brightly.

… self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.

The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self—to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

… the difference of mind and being of the man who finds comforts all around him unbroken unless by constraints which are none of his own seeking and the man who is pinched by his own charity is too great for forecasting. It must be felt … It changes the whole man, if anything can; not his mind only but the will and everything.

I think I caught the risen Christ,
just yesterday, on Broadway alongside Union Square.
We were returning from the Green Market
—fresh fish, green mesclun with a pinch
of bright and edible nasturtiums tossed on top,
some tiny new potatoes for our evening meal—
when I glimpsed ahead a shambling, awkward figure
lurching his twisted way along the sidewalk
and jerking fiercely now and then as if in seizure.
He wore a red baseball cap slightly off center,
sweat shirt, jeans, sneakers — all shabby
but well cared for, clean — and over his right arm
a cardboard carton with the lid cut off to shape
a sort of basket, I suppose, to display wares.
I glanced in as we passed and sure enough
there were ball-point pens, other plastic items
in there waiting to be purchased. Silent—
in my head—I wondered at the courage of one
so violently deformed, yet coping, contriving
to survive this predatory city.
Those contorted legs could not move him
that fast and we were swiftly past him to confront,
lying across a heap of trash bags up against the wall,
a homeless man, asleep, with the usual pathetic sign
informing all and sundry:
I’m in trouble, please help. Someday
I may be able to do the same for you.
I walked on, ignored both plea and promise,
passed right by as I’ve been taught to
by this casual, careless, care-less cruel city;
then glancing back over my shoulder saw our friend
in the red baseball cap struggle across,
laboriously read—how long it seemed to take
that grubby and ill-lettered sign, then lean
over and drop something in the cup.
Yes, I realize, it only encourages. I know
they’ll likely spend it all on booze. I’ve heard
and lived these arguments, knowing far too much,
believing far too little, and being so afraid,
for years now. But there was something in
that simple act, an eastered innocence
put me to shame, drove me to my knees
among the sidewalk lily vendors.
I think I caught the risen Christ,
a day early, but there just the same,
on Broadway yesterday alongside Union Square.