“We know that you are sincere,” they said to Jesus. “We know that you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.” How nice of them to say that. That’s quite an endorsement. Had Matthew not warned us at the beginning that we were about to witness a plot designed to entrap Jesus, we would have read those sweet words and innocently assumed that the speakers meant what they said.
Pharisees and Herodians make strange bedfellows, but stranger things have happened in politics. Judea was a province of the Roman Empire, and the population was heavily taxed to finance the army and administration of the occupying power. The name Herodians is shorthand for supporters of the political status quo, people who saw nothing wrong with Roman rule and very likely benefited handsomely from it.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, were not openly opposed to Roman rule, but certainly not in favor of it. They were pious men from Main Street Galilee and Judea who aspired to holiness — they sought to follow God’s law in all aspects of daily life. The Roman occupation of Jewish land may not have been their primary concern, but it definitely was not part of their vision for Israel.
What brings the two groups together in this scene is Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God which, for different reasons, makes both of them nervous. For a moment, they put aside their significant differences and set up a clever trap. They use a little flattery to butter him up and then drop a question that seemingly leaves no way out: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”
If Jesus says yes, he exposes himself as a collaborator with the occupation, and his poll numbers take a dive. And that takes care of the Pharisees’ nervousness about his public support. If he says no, he will immediately be arrested by the authorities for inciting sedition. And that takes care of the Herodians’ nervousness about his teachings.
It’s a brilliant set-up, only Jesus doesn’t play their game. “Show me the coin used for the tax,” he says, and his opponents have no trouble finding a denarius. Clearly they are much better connected to the imperial economy than Jesus whose pockets are empty. Can you imagine the tweets?
“Guess who brought blasphemous coins into the holy temple?” #shamelessherodians #whathappenedtothepharisees #freeIsrael
“Caesar’s currency isn’t kingdom currency!” #jesusmessiah #blessedarethepoor
Jesus doesn’t tweet. He doesn’t laugh or gloat or self-promote. With a nod of the head toward the coin he asks, “Whose image is this, and whose title?”
“The emperor’s,” they say.
Most likely the coin bore the image of the emperor Tiberius who ruled Rome during those years. And the title inscribed on it was more than a title. It was a declaration of Roman supremacy embodied in the person of the emperor. To most Jewish eyes and ears the inscription alone was blatant blasphemy: Emperor Tiberius, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest.[1] This brief debate between Jesus and his questioners isn’t about paying taxes, it’s about idolatry.
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” says Jesus. It’s not much of an answer to their question, if a simple yes or no is what you’re looking for. It’s a response that only raises more questions: Is Jesus implying that the faithful thing to do is not pay the tax since all things belong to God? Or is he implying that God has a legitimate claim on some things and Caesar on others? One way to read his statement is, “Since the coin bears Caesar’s image, let him have it; give it back to him, it’s his anyway. But remember that to be human is to be made in the image of God. Remember that all of you bear the image of God. So give to God what is God’s — your life, your breath, yourself.” Marcus Borg wrote,
This text offers little or no guidance for tax season. It neither claims taxation is legitimate nor gives aid to anti-tax activists. It neither counsels universal acceptance of political authority nor its reverse. But it does raise the provocative … question: What belongs to God, and what belongs to Caesar? And what if Caesar is Hitler, or apartheid, or communism, or global capitalism?[2]
How do we live as God’s people when the economic and political systems we have created become invasive and oppressive? How do we live faithfully when the systems we inhabit make us complicit in the abuse of others who, like us and with us, bear the image of God?
We cannot serve two masters. We cannot neatly divide our loyalties between God’s realm and the realms of other lords. And we must not confuse our loyalties to other lords with our loyalty to God.
Much more than a coin is at stake here. We bear the image of God, but when we look at each other, or in the mirror, we also see the inscriptions that our interactions with the world have left on us. You are what you wear, is a common script. You are what you do, what you earn. Or: You are nobody. Your life doesn’t matter. You don’t count. We are made in the image of God, but other scripts and images continually overwrite our identity as God’s own with layers of falsehood.
James Kelly wrote,
We are trying to be several selves at once, without all our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us. Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves. There is the civic self, the parental self, the financial self, the religious self, the society self, the professional self ... And each of our selves is in turn a rank individualist, not co-operative but shouting out his vote loudly for himself when the voting time comes. … We are not integrated. We are distraught. We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all. And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow. … Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.[3]
Give to God the things that are God’s is not an invitation to draw a line through the world and our lives where things on one side belong to God and things on the other to other lords and other claims. Give to God the things that are God’s is not a call to fragmentation. Jesus doesn’t suggest a split between a political self that answers to Caesar and a religious self that answers to God. Jesus didn’t come to carve out separate realms with separate loyalties: he proclaimed and inaugurated the kingdom of God.
Give to God the things that are God’s puts all other demands made on us in proper perspective. “We are trying to be several selves at once, without all our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us,” wrote James Kelly. The Life that integrates our conflicting selves and frees us to be who we are as creatures made in the image of God, is the life of Christ. “We have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence,” wrote James Kelly. That way of life is what Christ embodied, “a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power,” a life fully at home in the love of God.
As part of every baptism, just after the person has emerged from below the surface of the water, we make the sign of the cross on their forehead and say, calling them by name, “Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” In baptism, the life of Christ becomes ours, and through him we give to God the things that are God’s — our life, our breath, our days and nights, our whole and broken selves. With him we live, and learn to live, continually learn to live, as citizens of the kingdom, as people who know that we are not our own, nor anyone else’s, but God’s.
Markus Borg asked, “what if Caesar is Hitler, or apartheid, or communism, or global capitalism?” When Caesar was Hitler, the small Confessing Church in Germany declared,
As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures. We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords — areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.[4]
The Confessing Church was persecuted and driven underground, its pastors were arrested and sent to concentration camps, but, though small in numbers, the church that counts Bonhoeffer among its martyrs refused to give the things that are God’s to anyone but God. They were ordinary men and women, no superheroes with special powers. Their gift to us, though, is extraordinary in its simplicity and power. They show us that a life fully at home in the love of God is a life of fearless clarity. Even amid the waves of terror and anxiety which the empires of the world so skillfully create and manipulate, love lights a better path.
[1] TIBERIUS CAESAR DIVI AUGUSTI FILIUS AUGUSTUS PONTIFEX MAXIMUS
[2] “What Belongs to God?” http://www.beliefnet.com/story/20/story_2000_1.html
[3] James Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, 1941, chapter 5.
[4] http://www.ekd.de/english/barmen_theological_declaration.html