by Professor Emeritus Noel Q. King Presented at 1995 MiriPiri Conference
We are told that Guru Arjun Dev Ji at his martyrdom sent message to his son, Guru Hargobind)i, of the hostility of their enemies he should arm himself. The sixth Guru therefore at his inauguration girt himself ‘with two swords, signifying his spiritual as well as his temporal power, In keeping with the same symbolism, he built the Akal Takhat to stand beside Harmander Sahib. In Christianity there are traces of similar symbolism regarding two swords and the twines of church and state. Thus in the episode of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane there are the enigmatic verses in which Jesus asks whether any of them has a sword. “Here are two swords,” came the reply, Jesus says; “It is enough.” (Saint Luke, chapter 22, verses 36 and 38) The Roman Africa and then by thinkers from northwestern Europe, these swords were explained to refer to the Swappers of Church and State. Then we find the two swords in the insignia of the Roman papacy at a time when the Pope was a great temporal ruler and had his own armies, But this verse fades into ‘obscurity as compared with the great pronouncement: “Render to Cacsar what is Caesuras and to God, God’s.” (Saint Mark’s Gospel, chapter 12, verses 13 to 17, with parallels in Matthew 22 and Luke 20) This unfortunately 1s easily misunderstood. testis Nis ‘asked a trick question to embroil him with the imperial powers. “Shall we pay tax to Caesar?” He asks whether any has a denarius, a specific Roman coin with Caesar’s face and name on it. Apparently he does not himself carry such a coin. As a Jew of his day when he asks whose image is on it, he and his hearers would immediately be aware he was thinking of the words in the first book of Moses “God made the human, in his own image, (Genesis, }, verse 26) That is the whole human being belongs to God, those who dabble in things imperial, have to pay in ways imperial. God’s rights subsume all, until its fall to the Turks in 1453, the East Roman Empire witnessed to a situation where the Head of State persistently interfered in religion but was supposed to be subject to Bishops. In England, France, Spain, and Germany, despite the claims and actions of the Papacy over the centuries, there came the idea of a monarch of a nation being consecrated by coronation as the Lord’s anointed. Accordingly that person as the Head of a Christian nation possessed a special position in the church. But always there were some who took another view and again and again they challenged the royal religious power and refused to cooperate, By the time the Founding Falters of the Republic of The United States came along they had good reason to be suspicious of religious people. By separating Church and State and putting things ecclesiastic and civil a wall of partition they did not mean to imply that humans could be superior to God nor that religion and God did not exist. There is also reason to think they wanted to protect things religious from all kinds of state interference. Our discussion today does not refute earlier or refute other formulators of the power of the swords but hopefully will point to something more fruitful that former ways. Perhaps in the short lived Kingdom of Lahore the Sikhs had tried to say something Hindus and Muslims as well as the westerners who were coming up and that something was not heard.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 14, 1995
