Several
years ago I drove with my friend Bruce Bayne from upstate New York to
Indiana. It was pretty much toll roads
and turnpikes the whole way. This was in
the pre-Easy Pass days, so at each state line we would have to stop and pay the
toll in cash. Every time we did this, Bruce
would say, “Gosh, I don’t seem to have any cash on
me. Would you get the toll?”
I didn’t wise up to this practice until we got through Ohio,
and by then it was almost too late.
In
all other respects, Bruce is a generous and thoughtful guy. But to this day he never carries cash. I
couldn’t help thinking of him when I read today’s
Gospel [Matthew 22:15-22] in which Jesus is asked about paying one’s
taxes. He doesn’t seem to have any cash on him either
and says, according to Matthew, “’Show me the coin used for the
tax.’” And then Matthew tells us, “They
brought him a denarius,” the Roman coin bearing the image
of Caesar. Hence the famous saying, “Render
therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things
that are God's.” [Matthew
22.21]
October is the time when we
tend to talk about supporting the church through stewardship, so I can't help
being a little suspicious that this teaching about money finds its way into our
readings smack in the middle of the month.
Luckily for you, the money in this story is more symbolic than real. So relax: I will not be putting the bite on
you this morning. You can ease yourselves out of the spirit of pocketbook
protection. But something important is going on here.
When the Pharisees tried to
trap Jesus in a logical error, they did well to use tax money as their
example. Remember that Jewish Palestine
was a Roman occupied territory. Taxes
were odious not only because they were expensive but also because they
continually reminded the Jews that they were paying tribute to a foreign
power. So the question, "Is it
lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not" is not an innocent
question. It is loaded. If Jesus says yes, he's endorsing Roman
occupation. If he says no, he's inciting
sedition. What do do?
We all know what Jesus
does. He asks to see the coin used for
the tax. Pointing to Caesar's image on
the denarius, Jesus famously splits the difference: “Render
therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things
that are God's.” Countless
generations of Christian preachers have seen this saying as a warrant for
Christian obedience to civil authority. But before we go there, I do find it
interesting that Jesus has to ask somebody to bring him some money. Indeed, the great New Testament scholar John
Dominic Crossan says that’s the most important feature of
the story: Jesus has to ask for a
coin.
We are so used to projecting
our own values and habits onto Jesus that sometimes we need to step back and
see just how different from us he is. He was, as Crossan reminds us, a
Palestinian Jewish peasant. He did not
live in affluent Western culture. Life
in Roman occupied Jewish Palestine was hard.
Taxes were high, food was scarce, and the state was not your
friend. Survival in that world required
a measure of shrewdness that most of us don’t have to exercise on a daily
level. Keeping going from day to day was
in itself a kind of victory.
"Is it lawful to pay
taxes to the emperor or not?”
Should I cooperate with established authority or resist it? For first century Palestinian Jews, this was
a serious and vexing question. In
traditional Jewish thought, there was no separation of church and state. The religious and political establishments
were supposed to be one and the same, and so the question of paying taxes to
Caesar never raised itself when Israel was ruled by a Jewish king. But now the Jews found themselves in a new
world: the political and religious
establishments were under separate authority.
Should I give money to support a non-Jewish occupying power? The Torah teaches that everything belongs to
God. Is it right to give some of God’s
money to those who worship somebody other than Israel’s
God?
These questions are neither
innocent nor easy. And when we translate
them into our own moment they don’t lighten up much. As a
Christian, just how much allegiance do I owe the state? The easy answer is to read Jesus literally
and see him as providing an early version of the First Amendment. But Jesus’s teachings are never innocent or
easy either, and this one outlines the dilemmas for us fairly starkly.
Most of us unthinkingly say
that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes the principle of
the “separation of church and state”. Here is what it actually says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” When the U.S.
Constitution separates church and state it says that our nation will have no
one, official religion. It does not say
that religion has no role in public life. “Render therefore unto Caesar
the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” The radical thing in Jesus’s teaching
this morning is not that he endorses allegiance to civil authority. The radical thing in this statement is that
he gives us a way to be both citizens and people of faith.
Some people do not find the
citizen-faith tension a problem. They
say, “America was
founded as a Christian nation.” Well, not precisely. Half of those guys were Deists, a group who
denied both the divinity of Jesus and the reliability of scripture. Others solve this tension by going the other
direction, arguing that the founders wanted preachers to stay away from
politics. Why, then, do we have chaplains in the House and Senate? Why, indeed, do we have a national cathedral?
When Jesus tells us that we
must render to God and Caesar the things that are their own, he is offering us
the opportunity to be faithful citizens.
Given the great prophetic traditions of Christian witness, being a
citizen of faith means neither unthinking obedience nor hermetic
detachment. A faithful citizen is one
who holds both God and Caesar in critical tension with each other. The best way for me, as a Christian, to “render unto
Caesar” is not only
to pay my taxes but also to hold Caesar accountable to God.
The First Amendment does not
absolve us from caring about the nation. It is not a free pass out of the
obligations of citizenship. And if it
does nothing else, our baptism impels us toward engagement with the Gospel
dimension of public life. Separation of
church and state does not mean that people of faith have nothing to say about
public policy. It means that you and I,
as followers of Jesus, don’t have a special privilege
when we come to the table. But come to the table we must, if we are to “render
therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things
that are God's.”
Like my friend Bruce, Jesus
did not carry money. Bruce is not poor,
but Jesus was, and his poverty reminds us what we who follow him must first
demand of our governments. What are we doing collectively to serve and help the
poor? And, beyond the poor, what are we doing to serve and help all those Jesus
publicly and privately consorted with: the sorrowful, the sick, the oppressed,
those at the margins of society? How are we bringing Gospel values to bear on
the concerns of our common life? How can we work together, in the interests of
the common good, to make the blessings and opportunities of our shared heritage
available to all? These are the concerns of the faithful citizen. They were the concerns of Jesus. And even
though all of them were not Christian, I believe they were on the minds and
hearts of the Founders, too. They should be ours as we enter the voting booth
next month.
“Render
therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things
that are God's.” What would Jesus tell us about income
inequality? About the war against ISIS? About Ebola? What would Jesus think about urban policing,
public education policy, and yesterday’s the Supreme Court ruling on
the Texas Voter I.D. Law? The Gospel calls us neither to unquestioning
obedience nor cynical disregard. There
is no one Christian position on these issues, but they are all of concern to
those who follow Jesus. The Gospel calls
us to stand where he stood, in the hard tension between faith and freedom. It’s a tricky and difficult
place to be—both a
Christian and an American—but the Gospel allows us no
other.
So if you do carry cash, when
the collection plate comes your way take out that dollar bill and look at the
picture of George Washington (or Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S.
Grant) and ask yourself the question they put to Jesus. God or Caesar? Jesus or
the state? We are tied inexorably to both. There is no easy answer. That’s why
following Jesus is never dull. Amen.
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