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Martedì 6 Giugno 2023

Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Word for Today
The Gospel of Mark 12:13-17

Caesar

Caesar, who represents government and political power, aims to maintain absolute control, total dominion on everybody and everything in the world. To dominate and utterly control peoples, Caesar has to somehow persuade people to do an absurd as well as stupid existential gesture, and he managed, he managed through and through. Caesar managed to persuade people to spontaneously give, in his greedy hands, the entire fruit of their work, every personal resource, every talent and creativity that God gave to His children for the common good and for the true evolution of mankind. How did he manage? How could an entire people hand the fruit of their work, every resource and idea, every talent and creativity, time, energy and strength over to Caesar’s power? Easy. Caesar put a price on everything and everybody, he invented money, on which he inscribed his image, turning everything into money. Every gift, wealth, talent. energy, creativity, use of time, work, effort became money, with a price that was, of course, decided by Caesar himself at his own pleasure. In this way it was possible to put a price upon everything, every gesture, journey, idea, work, energy, resource, thought, time, task. Food, water, health, illness, fun, culture, religion, relationship, affection, sex, sport, fear, science, safety, pleasure, pain, life, death, dignity, freedom and slavery were all priced. Once everything and every dimension of human life have a price, then it is done: utter power and absolute dominion on people belongs to Caesar and without Caesar nothing can be bought or sold. People, to get some money, which remains anyway Caesar property, turned their life in money, spontaneously offering, in this way, everything, really everything belonging to man, and every man, in Caesar’s hand and bag. Caesar, this way, held, managed and dominated, undisputed, everything and everybody. All that has a price belongs to Caesar and Caesar manages and controls it. What cannot be priced yet, and that does not represent a secure profit for him, Caesar hates viscerally and roughly. For this reason, researches regarding alternative and clean sources of energy are not accepted and almost illegal, as are the therapies that not encompass the use of drugs but use instead meditation and healing thoughts: those are considered illegal and almost like dark magic, even if they work.
What does not belong to Caesar is illegal. So what belongs to God, being free, is, for Caesar, wrong, misleading, illegal, hostile. Pricing everything then, guarantees the stability of the control system through money itself. From a psychological point of view, to keep absolute dominion on people it is necessary to keep people in a state of tension, separation and ignorance, and money is the perfect tool to create and keep tension, separation and ignorance. Tension is created by debt. Caesar created an irrational discrepancy between the objective value of things and their price, so that people, to buy things of little value have to spend a lot of money. Because, in comparison, the money they earn is very little, then Caesar promptly lends them money, so they can satisfy their desires, elicited by Caesar himself, and then give him money back under the pressure of deadlines and with the interests.  With this mechanism of legalized usury, Caesar obtains the first of his goals: keeping people in a constant state of tension under the weight and the oppression of debt and misery. Separation is also obtained through money. Nothing in the world can divide and turn people against each other better than money. Separation guarantees Caesar that people never have enough strength and power to get together and fight to overthrow him.
Money is also perfect to get and keep ignorance. People live for money, run around all day for money, are completely taken and busy with money, they do not work to live, they live to work, and this obsessive occupation, in time, will turn off every intelligence, every perceptive view of life, every spiritual development, creating instead ignorance, intellectual misery, spiritual sterility, existential starvation. People’s ignorance allows Caesar to diffuse his persuasion’s power on the most evident and mean lie’s and deception’s wings, continuing to get people approval and support. Caesar never had any true interest in people’s true wellbeing and distributive wealth: it wouldn’t have had any sense in view of his goals of absolute dominion and power, and it would have been of no commercial and economical benefit. To Caesar, God’s people is only and solely a flock of weak and shivering sheep to be mowed until their skin comes off, depleted of any physical, intellectual and spiritual resource, of any beauty, strength, wealth, dignity and freedom.   To Caesar law has never been and never will be at the service of justice, not even for a second, but at the service of his very plots and interests. So the culture he inculcated was never used and will never be used to enlighten people, but to make them blind and dumb, conforming even the more sharp and clever brains in miserable thoughts’ structures. Even religion, in Caesar hands, did not, and never will, lead men to God in joy and spiritual evolution, it will rather increase man’s psychological tension for a debt, a psycho-emotional debt built on morals, tradition, precepts, cultivated through guilt, fear of hell, fear of God, exasperation for sins, so that men will constantly feel in debt with God as well as with Caesar. But for Caesar that was not enough, he went further and put a price on price, he invented taxes. Taxes are people’s halter, some sort of theft, arbitrary as well as legalized: it is the way with which Cesar plunders people of the little they have, guaranteeing them protection while he’s guaranteed by the protection of constitution and law, beside the one of his armies. But here Caesar made an enormous mistake that he could not foresee and know: he priced price, and somehow he put a price on himself and his dominion. So Caesar as well got caught in the perverse and self-destructive price’s mechanism. That is how come that now Caesar power is inversely proportional to the taxes he imposes: the more the taxes, the more he demonstrated his powerlessness and weakness, revealing the closeness of his end. This is why Jesus says: Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God, because recognizing to Caesar what he defined as his own and to God what really belongs to God, a little bit at a time man will not be forced to give anything to Caesar anymore.