Both St. Paul and St.
Francis remind us that we are created beings, for Paul we stand alongside, but
for Francis, we are part and parcel: we are sisters to the Sun, brothers to the
Moon – but does the moon use money? Do the stars? How about a jellyfish, adrift
in blue-green depths? If we are part of creation . . . if God created us just
like the rocks and the trees and those obnoxious little gnats that gnaw on our
arms, we’re also different, because I don’t know anything else that uses
money. I don’t know anything else that loves it, hoards it, covets it
like many do . . . now I don’t mean any
of us, mind you . . . we’re all the model of sober Presbyterian
upstanding-ness. But those Methodists, or Baptists . . . now they’re
a greedy bunch.
And it’s no wonder!
Everywhere we look, everywhere we turn, we’re reminded of it – money, money,
money, money. Our media is saturated by it . . . car ads blare it out . . .
If you own a Mercedes, it shows you’ve got money, it shows you’ve arrived,
but if you drive a Jag . . . well! You’re the Emperor of the World! On
TV, everybody’s young and has money, and if you’re not young, all it
takes is money and a knife, and voilá! You’re young, or at least
a reasonable facsimile thereof . . . And
politics . . . oy vey! does the candidate with the best answers win the day?
The one with the best grasp of the issues? Of course not! It's the one with the
most money, money, money, money . . .
And now, with the
economy still shaky, with politicians slinging mud and each saying the other’s
at fault, it’s hard to think of anything these days but money, it
saturates the news cycle like absinthe, bathing the talking heads in a green,
crinkly glow . . . what’s going to happen to our money, money, money, money
. . .
But for all our fascination with it, all our
yearning for it, all our worrying and fretting and fussing and fighting over
it, why are we so reluctant to talk about it in church? It makes us nervous, it
makes us angry, congregations hate to hear about it and preachers hate to
preach about it, and that's strange, because Jesus had no problem with it. His
teachings were mostly about money . . . the rich young ruler, who could
give up everything but his money to follow Jesus . . . the needle’s eye, the
rich folks, and the camel squeezing through . . . the widow’s last coin . . .
and then there's today's story – “Give unto Caesar’s that which is Caesar’s,
and unto God that which is God’s.” It’s gotten to be a catch-phrase, whenever
somebody wants to justify the inevitability of government – like death and
taxes! – it’s like “Oh well . . . Give unto Caesar . . .” And especially here
in the U.S., it’s come to support the separation of Church and State, like it’s
dividing assets up between players in a game . . . give unto Caesar that which
is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God’s . . . and little by little, step
by step, that which is God’s has been shrunk into a little pile over here in
the corner, into the privacy of our own homes or into a little altar in some
quiet room. Or maybe what’s God’s is just what’s here Sunday morning –
including an hour on Thursdays for choir and the occasional committee meeting –
and the rest is Caesar’s. Pretty good deal for Caesar, wouldn’t you say?
But that's not what
this passage is about, Jesus isn't talking about some abstract doctrine of
church and state, or even stewardship . . . what he’s doing is neatly
sidestepping a trap – and a very dangerous one at that. Because it’s not just
any old tax they’re talking about, it’s the “head tax” that Rome instituted in
6 A.D., when Judea became a Roman province, and it was the hottest topic of the
day. The tax had to be paid in Roman coins, which were inscribed with
Caesar’s head and an inscription which read “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the
divine Augustus, high priest,” and to devout Jews, this was incredibly sacrilegious
– only God was divine, and the only high priest was right there in Jerusalem in
the Temple. So to even pay the tax you had to handle these idolatrous
coins, and the issue was so hot that it eventually led to the disastrous Jewish
rebellion 35 years after Jesus’ death, and to Jerusalem's destruction five
years after that. And for Matthew, the story is clear-cut evidence that
Jesus was who he said he was – he’s so smart, so holy, so full of Godly wisdom,
that he handily outsmarted the best Hebrew intellectuals, like those young
hot-shot Pharisees sent out to ask the question. The authorities had already
decided to get him, you understand, and now they were looking around for an
excuse. And so they made what they thought was a no-win situation for Jesus.
They sent some Herodians, who were for the tax, and if he came out against
it, they would surely report him to the Romans, At the same time, the crowd was
just full of lurking Jewish nationalists, revolutionary types who hated
the tax, were itching for a fight, and if he came out for it, things
might get out of hand, and before the authorities could do anything, he might
have been lynched right there on the spot.
And so here come the
young-Turk Pharisees with the Herodians hot on their heels—maybe trying to look
casual, like they just happen to have gotten there at the same time, “Uh, hi,
Dick, Harry … what are you doing here?”—and they try to disarm him with
flattery: “Teacher,” they say, “we know you are truthful, and you teach
God’s way in truth, and you don’t just say the things people want to hear,
you're a straight-shooter, and you love your mama, so we know you’ll give it to
us straight . . . is it lawful to pay tax” – and here the Greek is census,
that’s how we know it’s the head tax, not just any tax – “is it lawful to pay a
head-tax to Caesar or not?” And although he's supposed to be flattered, he knows
where they're coming from, he knows their malice – literally, their evil: – “Why do you test me,” he says, and he’s
comparing the religious authorities to Satan, who also tested him in the
wilderness, you'll recall. “Why do you test me? Show me the coin of the
census,” he says, and hmmm . . . here's this supposedly hyper-devout Jew,
pulling an idolatrous coin out of his pocket—what a picture that was—and
sure-enough, there’s the hated likeness of Caesar right there on the front,
stamped there just like honest Abe on a penny, and Jesus asks them: “Whose head
is this, and whose inscription?” And right here, where it’s crucial, our
translation fails us, because the Greek translated in the NRSV as “head” is eikon,
and a much better translation is likeness, or better yet, image as in
the King James Version – he asks them “whose image is this on the coin?”
And they have to say that it’s Caesar's, that it’s the emperor’s image right
there on the coin, and of course that’s when Jesus says it, the punch line of
the whole story – “Give to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
And Matthew says they
left amazed, no doubt at the thoroughness with which they'd been had. Jesus had neatly slipped the noose – nobody
could deny that Caesar’s likeness was on that coin, that his foundries
had minted it in Rome, way over across the Mediterranean – And the Herodians
could have had no problem with that answer, and so had no excuse to report him,
and he'd made them all look like idiots, and worse, idolaters to those lurking
revolutionaries – they’d been caught red-handed, with a idolatrous coin, participating
in the hated Roman economic system. They had the coins, those sacrilegious,
unclean coins right on their persons and I wonder – did they get them
from the Temple coffers?
I’ll bet they left in
fear as well as amazement. Because finally, he'd one-upped them
theologically as well, he'd taken the question to a higher plane, and that’s
where that word eikon comes in, because it’s the same word used for
image in the Septuagint, in the Greek version of Genesis, which all the
religious authorities of the time would’ve used. It says “God created
human beings in the eikon – in the image – of God,” we are
stamped with God’s image, just as surely as the census coin was with the
emperor's, and as surely as that coin belongs to him, we belong to God . . .
and this statement is breathtakingly theological, and at the same time deeply
subversive. Far from separating church and state, it does exactly the opposite,
it plants Christianity right at the heart of politics. Because if we are
God’s, we can’t be the emperor’s, if our lives are the Lord's, everything
we do belongs to him. And being subjects of God’s, we can’t be the subjects of any
state. And that applies just as surely today as it did in Jesus’ time.
I think it's clear
Jesus doesn't forbid the head tax, and that doubtless applies to taxes today. But
with its veiled revolutionary reference, and its reminder of just who we belong
to, he invites us to think about what we give to earthly powers – like
the Roman empire or the United States of America or Costco or Ford Motor
Company – and what we give to the Lord.
Of course, there is
an ultimate answer, and though it’s threaded throughout scripture, it’s summed
up in Psalm 24: “The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and
those who live in it . . .” and I like this solution, especially for those who
glibly repeat the “give unto Caesar’s” verse. Because if we do that, if
we give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s,
we’ll give nothing to the state ‘cause everything belongs to God.
And there are Christian groups who stick to this hard line as much as they can
. . . the Quakers, for example, are one of the few denominations our government
regularly excludes from the draft, and you can see their point – we have God’s
image stamped on us, not that of the U. S. of A.
But for the rest of us, perhaps the answer
lies somewhere in the middle after all, the state does do things we
think God desires. Things like . . . keeping the streets safe, providing basic
services to the poor, educating our children, etcetera, etcetera . . .
the problem is, what do we do when the state does things that clearly God would
not want? What about when the state oppresses, when it passes unjust laws? What
then? What then is the Christian responsibility to give unto Caesar what is
ultimately God’s? These are tough questions, for thinking Christians, as I know
everybody here is, and they get tougher every day, as this old world becomes
more and more dangerous, as our economy wobbles like a badly spun top . . . we
should all ask ourselves: just what does it mean to say “Jesus is Lord?” Amen.
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