22 October 2023 Pentecost 21

Have you ever been asked one of those questions where, you know that no matter how you answer, it will be wrong.  You know the ones, “Hey Fred, have you stopped overindulging in those websites of questionable note yet?”  No matter how you answer that, it will not show you in a good light.  Well today, in our Gospel, Jesus is asked one of those questions.  But the question being asked is not about, ‘just any’ tax, it is about a specific and controversial tax.  You see, first century Jews were required to pay a lot of different taxes, temple tax, land taxes, custom taxes, but this one is an Imperial tax which was paid as tribute to Rome to support the Roman occupation of Israel.  That’s right, they were required to pay their oppressors an annual tax of one day’s wage, a denarius, to support their own oppression. 

Now the Herodians did not see any problem with the tax, mainly because the Herodians advocated supporting Roman governance of Israel.  Much of the crowd would probably fit into the ‘Nationalists’ label, and they were opposed to Rome and found the tax very onerous and humiliating.  The Pharisees, the religious elite in Israel, found themselves caught between a rock and hard place.  Because this tax had to be paid using a specific coin – one bearing the image of Caesar Tiberius which was also engraved with a proclamation of his divinity – this forced the Pharisees to break the first two Commandments.

Now neither the Herodians nor the Pharisees saw ‘eye to eye’ on many things, but today they appear to have come together with the express intention of causing Jesus to ‘lose face’ by either publicly supporting Roman rule which would have put the crowd against him, or refusing to support this rule and therefore encouraging sedition against the Emperor.   Both the Pharisees and the Herodians are fully aware of the implications of this question: ‘Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor’.  It is a definite lose-lose situation.  But Jesus does not buy into it.  He avoids this lose-lose scenario with a ‘non-plused’ dismissive shrug – if the coin belongs to caesar, let him have it.  It doesn’t matter, it is only money.  And he then reminds the crowd, the Herodians, and the Pharisees, that everything they have belongs to God.

Marcu Borg once made comment about this passage, when he wrote:

Thus 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 and still relevant question: What belongs to God, and what belongs to Caesar?  And what if Caesar is Hitler, or apartheid, or communism, or global capitalism?  What is to be the attitude of Christians toward domination systems, whether ancient or modern?

It is not just about our relationship to the government, but our existential relationship with God.  And to this point, it is important to note what Jesus does not say.  He does not say that the religious and the secular realms both deserve our equal attention.  His answer is more subtle yet also more complicated.  This coin is already the emperor’s – his face is on it, so give the emperor what is his, but then, consider what belongs to God.  What kind of tribute do we owe God?  In the first chapter of Genesis, we read “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”.  And when Jesus asks his interlocutors about the coin, he uses this same phrase, ‘whose likeness is this’.  We are made in God’s image, we bear God’s likeness, and we are, therefore, made to be more than we sometimes realise.

Think about that for a moment.  We are made in the image and likeness of God, and because we bear God’s likeness we are to act like God.  Not like gods, (small g), but to act like God, the one who creates and sustains and nurtures and redeems and saves, no matter what the cost.   There are parts of our lives that are part of the world order and therefore should be ‘rendered to Caesar’, but they are just elements of our lives.  Our deepest person and self is God’s, and when we remember that, all our life will take on a greater meaning and focus.  Now that is not meant as a threat – like ‘behave yourself, God is watching’, it is a reminder that no matter what we do, or say, or how we act, no matter what may happen to us, we are first and foremost and forever God’s own beloved child.  And that identity will, ultimately, shape our behaviour, urging and aiding us to be the persons we have been called to be.

This coin bore the image of Caesar; it was just money which is owed to him, but every human being bears the image of God, meaning that I ‘render to God’ wholly and without condition my entire self.

Paying taxes is the easy part, we may not like it, but it is the price of civilisation.  So go ahead, pay your taxes to those to whom they are owed, but give your whole self to God.  But absolute allegiance to an ultimate God, rendering our entire selves to God without preconditions or limits, without hedging our bets, is a higher and harder calling, and it also takes a lifetime.