"Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar - and to God what belongs to God." (Mt 22:21.)
This Gospel line is often bandied about when people are discussing the rights and wrongs of paying state tax. But just a few lines above the text, Matthew writes: "The Pharisees went away to work out between them how to trap Jesus in what he said." (Mt 22:15.) In all the erudite discussions about paying Caesar, the entrapment idea is forgotten, and maybe even intentionally. There is a terrible cruelty about traps and snares. And cruel as it may be to catch animals in snares, it is far more odious to entrap human beings.
In guerrilla warfare, where one side is much stronger than the other, ambushes and traps are part of the war game. But in our normal daily living there is something very nasty about trapping and snaring people. Back in the early 1990s, there was a billboard in Dublin's north inner city showing a goldfish in a bowl . It was a Department of Social Welfare advertisement warning social welfare fraudsters that they would be caught. It was cruel, intimidating and in hindsight highly ironic.
The Pharisees were forever trying to trick Jesus, catch him wrong-footed, make a fool of him. Times don't change all that much.
There is something in the human psyche - maybe it is an Irish characteristic - that makes us admire the person who is cute, says nothing and is forever making a fool of his or her opponent.
It is bad enough when equals play such games among themselves, but it is intolerable when powerful institutions apply such tactics against the little people. One of the current buzz-words is "transparency". Yet we all know that the powerful and the strong make sure to keep everything as secret as possible. It is part of the ammunition used in defeating the enemy. It's part of the "cute hoor" syndrome that still rules OK in Ireland.
It seems to be an attribute often used by those who have a ruthless ambition to get on. And it can be couched in all sorts of guises which makes it look attractive and clever. There is nothing attractive about trapping people. And those who so often sense they are trapped become marginalised and on the edges of society.
Maybe it is that very reality which makes the poor and the lonely so attractive to Jesus. They are not into the trapping game. They don't have the power to behave in such a manner. All the time in the Gospels it is the Pharisees, the established class who do the trapping.
The keeping-quiet syndrome - saying as little as possible, and then when something has to be said, using a language crafted and written by PR people or spin-doctors - is really another version of what the Pharisees did.
Real openness will involve making mistakes, getting into trouble. At times it will make us very unpopular, but it is a far more prophetic and honest way of behaving.
We are going through times in Ireland now where we are seeing quite clearly the disasters that have been perpetrated through a labyrinth of traps and snares. Yet in all our discoveries, new traps and snares will be worked out and created. A new elite will move in and they in turn will develop all the tricks of the ruling classes.
It requires great courage to be prophetic. But prophets are few and far between. In all our current demythologising, we need to take great care. The lure of trapping and snaring is seductive. It is so easy to find scapegoats and then forget about all the new forms of traps. It's easy to criticise the Pharisees and their successors down the generations. It is much more difficult to spot the traps and tricks in our own environment.
M.C.