Do Human Rights Come from Caesar or God?

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.