Sermon Oct 18 2020

P20A 2020  Matthew 22:15-22

I am not a big TV person.  I’ll watch a whole series on Netflix if someone recommends something good, but I don’t sit down with the remote to flip through my six or eight channels, especially now, because I don’t want to watch all the political ads.  That is not to say that I don’t enjoy a good commercial.  Most years I only watch the Super Bowl to see who has come up with the best ad campaign, and of course, some of those really stick in your brain.  That’s probably why I read today’s gospel and hear the slogans from two competing credit card companies:  What’s in your wallet?  and It’s everywhere you want to be.

            This story introduces an unlikely alliance attempting to entrap Jesus.  The Pharisees were separatists who try to have as little as possible to do with political powers and instead focus on their personal piety and keepings God’s law. We don’t know as much about the Herodians; their name suggests that they are supporters and probably beneficiaries of Herod and his dynasty.  Herod was the client king of Rome, gifted with wealth and power in the hopes that he would keep some semblance of peace and appease the locals by making them feel as though they were self-governing.  But the Herodians weren’t from the lineage of King David, so most of Israel thought they were illegitimate rulers who had sold out to Rome.  So we have the anti-Rome religious elite and the pro-Rome political elite uniting against their common enemy: Jesus.

They begin with some empty flattery and then ask what I’m sure they thought would be a damning question:  Oh, Jesus, we know you are truthful and righteous because you treat everybody equally and you don’t take sides, so let us ask you this question that forces you to take sides…Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?  This is a fascinating question if you think about it. They don’t ask if it is lawful for Rome to levy the tax.  They don’t ask if it is lawful for them to refuse to pay the tax.  But let’s not focus too much on analyzing this question, because it was not their intent to start a robust debate about tax policy.  They were merely trying to find some way to trap Jesus, and had he answered yes or no to this question, they would have succeeded in catching him either in blasphemy or sedition.   But Jesus is not so easily tricked.

He asks them: What’s in your wallet?   He tells them to show him the coin used to pay the tax.  They reach into their pockets and take out a denarius, the Roman coin, which featured on the head side a picture of Caesar and the inscription: Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the divine Augustus and, on the tails side, a symbol for peace and the words high priest—positioning Caesar as the high priest of the empire.  So, the experts on Jewish law, who are standing, you’ll remember, inside the temple—the temple built to the Lord, Adonai, I am, the Lord your God, before whom you shall have no other gods, of who you shall not make a graven image, and whose name you shall not speak in vain…the temple to that God, the God who made those laws…and they have in their possession a coin, which is not only a form of currency but also a form of propaganda, that features a graven image and the name of an earthly ruler who claims he is divine and the high priest of everyone.  I’m not sure that when Matthew says they went away amazed that they were amazed at how clever Jesus was to avoid being trapped or amazed at realizing for the first time how complicit they had become in breaking the very first fundamental laws of the faith in which they claimed expertise.

Jesus tells them, Give to the emperor what is the emperor’s and to God what is God’s, which is the part that, to me, sounds like that second advertisement: God is everywhere you want to be.  Jesus reminds them that God is present in all aspects of life and that as long as they exist in this world, they are complicit in its systems, including its systems of oppression, whether they are, like the Herodians, obvious sell-outs conspiring with a tyrannical regime for their own personal benefit, or whether they are, like the Pharisees, under the mistaken impression that they can somehow avoid getting their hands dirty in the messier parts of the society in which they live.  Without even realizing it, they have—not in word but in action—pledged allegiance to the emperor whose image is on their coins. Jesus tells them to give to Caesar what is made in his image—that is, the coin for the tax, but he’s also implying that they are to give to God what is made in God’s image—and of course, Genesis tells us that we are what is made in the image of God—all of us, our whole lives, and that includes, in this case, the political part.

This passage has sometimes been used to justify looking at our lives as if a firewall exists between our spirituality and our other commitments, but here Jesus proves that cannot be true.  He’s not telling them that their involvement in civic life is not important or not connected to God.  And he isn’t remaining neutral just because he doesn’t answer this trick question.  There’s no question whose side he is on:  he has been advocating for the oppressed and the exploited during his entire ministry; he’s pointing out that these enemies have conspired with those doing the oppressing and exploiting.  And in just a couple chapters, it’s going to get much worse, as the Pharisees and chief priests get Rome to do the dirty work that their religion forbids, that is, executing Jesus.  Barbara Brown Taylor put it this way: It was not atheism and anarchy that killed Jesus.  He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix.  Jesus is absolutely saying that one thing has to do with the other.

It is easy to mis-envision how faith is supposed to fit into our lives.  It’s not a wheel where faith is just another spoke alongside other aspects of our identity—being a professional, being a family member, being an athlete or a musician, being a Steelers fan, being a party member.  When we talk about being Christ-centered, what we mean is that God isn’t one spoke—God is at the center calling us to bring all of our lives under the rule of God’s kingdom.  The things that are God’s, the things we are to give to God, are all the things, everything that makes us, us, all the business that we do in this life.  God does not call us to live outside of this world, God calls us to follow his way through it.  May we live and work and serve and protect and restore and vote our way through this life in such that we leave this world looking a little more like the kingdom that God intends for it to be.