25th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 September 2025
For a long time, it has been the social rule in Australia that the topics of religion and politics are not to be raised in polite conversation. For a great deal of our history, we have also had the adage that politics and religion don’t mix, and that they, therefore, should be kept quite separate. And so, in Australia, particularly, when religious leaders have started talking about political or economic matters many of us start feeling uneasy, if not even embarrassed. In our own time, however, we have a strange reversal of this history for now it is not uncommon for political leaders to appeal to religious principles to stir the population to their cause and to appeal to the religious views of their people to ensure electoral success.
It all begs the question, what is the right relationship between religion and politics? Are they to be kept entirely separate or are they to be conflated together?
The text of today’s gospel speaks of money. Yet, money, in this context, might be regarded as that which is symbolic of our ordinary world of social, economic and political affairs. The text at heart expressing we cannot believe in God on the one hand, and act in the ordinary affairs of the world as if we had no belief. Christian discipleship doesn’t allow that type of splitting. One Master must determine how we engage our world.
As those who believe that Christ lives even now, we are those who also, by virtue of our discipleship, are committed to engaging our world in a way that might realise in our own time and place the Kingdom of God which was at the centre of Jesus’ entire ministry. To have faith in Christ is to have a commitment to this Kingdom and its values. This Kingdom is not only a spiritual reality. It is also a social one. It is not simply about another world. It is also about this one. The Kingdom of God, as termed by Jesus, is firstly a social project which imagines a new order of relationships between us. It seeks to create a social life which is characterised by community, reconciliation, and inclusion where each of us lives and operates for the other, by the other, with the other. Yes, this is a context which may only be fully realised in the next life, but it is also one which, by virtue of our baptism, we pledge to work towards now.
Because the Kingdom of God is about social transformation, it is about social change. This is what makes the Gospel according to one writer, “a dangerous memory.” As disciples of the Risen Christ, it is this new order that Jesus calls the Kingdom which presents as the basis from which we make our choices, including our political choices. We should not to be afraid to use those things of the world in order to maximise the potential of what we value. It is from this perspective that the late Pope Francis spoke of the need for Catholics to meddle in politics. He was not advocating by this that the Church, institutionally should busy itself with the affairs of government. What he was urging, however, is that disciples of Christ take an active interest in their society and use political agencies and processes to bring about a society that is genuinely reflective of God’s intention for us in a common life together.
Here, however, we come across the problem of Christian nationalism which is in no small way on the rise in certain parts of the Western world. Christian nationalism is the phenomenon when the Gospel becomes used at the service of national identity, when faith and patriotism become joined together. Then Christian faith becomes the requirement to belong to a society. The difficulty here is that the capacity to manipulate the Gospel to the interests of agendas of power becomes more and more possible. But the Gospel is not about who has power and who is to be excluded from that power, it is not a tool of national identity. It is not to be at the service of a certain political ideology or ethnicity and thus to be a means of exclusion. If it becomes used as a weapon in culture wars then it has become something other than catholic, no longer with its genuine prophetic character and grounded in humility, dialogue and openness. It risks becoming more about identity, culture or power than about discipleship to Christ. The universal, inclusive and transcendent Christian message then is changed into partisan ideology.
At first Christian nationalism can seem attractive. Do we not want political figures who are Christian? Do we not want a society based on Christian principles? Do we not want to resist a range of social and political forces and factors that seem to take us away from the Christian perspective? Why would we not want to encourage those who speak out using Christian rhetoric and symbols, and appeals to the Bible, as publicly and forcefully?
And yet, when the Christian voice becomes more and more aligned with a nationalist agenda, when Christianity and national patriotism become conflated, it becomes increasingly compromised. It tends towards promoting an exclusive club, defining a social tribe, a marker of cultural identity rather than a humble, saving presence which has not abandoned its character to continue to search for the markers of the Kingdom of God wherever, and however, they might present themselves. It becomes more shrill, more demanding, more driven – less inclusive, less loving, less open and less genuinely catholic.
How do we discern, then, which politics when pursued under a Christian banner is genuinely at the service of the Kingdom of God or a mere camouflage of the Kingdom of man? The Gospel gives us the clearest and the unequivocal answer when Jesus both announces his ministry in the synagogue at Capernaum at the beginning of his ministry and when he teaches the nature of ultimate judgement at the end of his ministry: when our politics leads us to those who are marginalised by the dominant culture; when it is committed to raising those who are subjugated by unjust social structures and processes; when it is ready to stand with the dispossessed and offer them new hope; when it is ready to reach out to those isolated by greed and the pursuit of power or by the processes of social punishment and to bring them back into the fold of community; when it welcomers the stranger and offers them the opportunity to belong and thus restores their dignity; when it works actively to bring about a society where no one need be hungry or thirsty or without the necessities of life. In other words, a society in which we recognise that we have a shared responsibility for one another, in which some are not winners and others losers, in which some are acceptable and others not but one in which all are brothers and sisters to one another in shared humanity
In Australia, there no political party called the Kingdom of God, and it would be very worrisome if there were. Subsequently, in a liberal democracy such as in Australia every political party will be ambiguous at best when placed across the template of the Kingdom – a mixture of expediency and principle, with a variety of policies some of which are reflective of the values of the Kingdom and some which aren’t. For this reason, our Christian discipleship impels us we to weigh up the whole situation, accepting the good and the bad, yet always keenly discerning which agenda has the greatest capacity to move us toward not just any values but specifically the values of the Kingdom as given us by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We do so in the privacy of our conscience, as it should be. But our consciences are not blank. They are deeply informed by what we know through the Church about God and his dream for our world.
It can’t be one way for our religious life and another for our political life. We are the servants of only one master.
