Matthew 22:15-22 NRSV
15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap
him in what he said. 16 So they sent their disciples to him, along
with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and
teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one;
for you do not regard people with partiality. 17 Tell us, then, what
you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" 18
But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the
test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax." And
they brought him a denarius. 20 Then he said to them, "Whose head
is this, and whose title?" 21 They answered, "The
emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the
things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." 22
When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
Matthew 22:15-22
is a pronouncement story on tribute to Caesar. The source is Mark. The context
in Matthew is that this incident becomes the first of four test questions
Matthew presents us in 22:15-46. For Matthew, the crucial factor is not the
substance of the controversies, but the fact that the Pharisees and other
leaders are seeking to discredit Jesus because they perceive him as a threat to
their authority.
In this case, Pharisees,
who strictly obeyed Torah and sought to get along with the political realities
contained in being part of imperial Rome, approached Jesus with a deceitful and
deceptive question. They approach Jesus with people who wanted the continued
reign of Herod in Palestine. These groups do not come to Jesus with an innocent
inquiry concerning the opinion of Jesus. Rather, they want him to choose a side
in a controversial political and religious controversy. They even prepare the
way with flattery. They address him as “teacher” or rabbi, a title he did not
earn through proper educational channels, but earned through his public
teaching. However, his questioners want to challenge the validity of the title.
They describe him as sincere, one who truly teaches the ways of God, and one
who says nothing simply to please certain people. They use such truthful
statements for perverted purpose, that of setting up Jesus, baiting him to
engage in divisive controversy. Does Torah teach us to pay taxes to Rome or
not? To pay the tax was submission to the political reality. To refuse was to
engage in treason from a political point of view. Refusal subverted Roman
authority. Leviticus 25:23 forbids the sale of land to outsiders, for it
belongs to God. Caesar usurped by force the Holy Land. Discontent with Roman
rule led to the refusal of people to pay the tax. The deception behind the question
becomes clearer when we realize that religious leaders helped to collect the
tax (Josephus, Jewish War, 2.403-5).
One element of
this episode to which I direct your attention is the skill with which Jesus
does not take the bait to involve himself in a fruitless controversy.
Many people have honest
questions about life and God. Jesus welcomes such
questions. Sometimes, however, our questions are not so honest. Beneath the
question are
often selfishness and a desire to protect our interests. Yet, even if badly
motivated, such questions reveal a deeper need than we know. We have a need for
someone to reveal to us our attempts to deceive and accuse others, as well as
remove the defenses we have against the truth challenging us. Today,
many of us could learn from Jesus the importance of not taking the bait. Baiting
people one suspects to be an opponent seems to have become a popular technique.
Baiting is a way to draw the other into an angry disagreement and avoid civil
discourse. Baiting draws you into a power struggle rather than genuine
conversation from which mutual learning can occur. The power struggle can be as
simple as showing yourself to be in possession of knowledge or logic the other
does not have. Baiting has the goal of escalating a matter into a crisis. Getting
people into a power struggle is a way to manipulate people and situations to
get what you want. People doing the baiting want to engage the power struggle
debate in order to avoid doing something. If they succumb to the one doing the
baiting, they discover that no explanation will satisfy questions. Such baiting
is often a way of inviting us into a hurtful and painful dialogue, rather than
a potentially therapeutic one. The reason is that the other is trying to do something
with their words. Philosophers of language would call this a performative use
of words. What they want to do will vary, but it often involves some variation
of showing their superiority over you. If you do not take the bait, you can
ignore the question while not ignoring the person. People baiting you may not
even be aware of how much they have revealed themselves in their attempts. They
have revealed a hurt, pain, and anger that does not need the deepening and
expansion that taking the bait would mean. Rather, they have revealed their
need for healing. They have revealed a deeper level of need that the one at the
receiving end of the baiting needs to have enough perception to notice and to
re-direct the conversation for the good of both.
[1] To
move a conversation forward with healing and growth will mean engaging people
who look at the world differently from us with dignity and love. It will mean
thinking the best of those with whom we disagree, even while acknowledging the
darkness in them that has led them to bait us. We need to learn from this
episode not to be the one doing the baiting of the other or to take the bait
offered by the other. The other is a person and a neighbor. Superficial divisions
like skin color, income bracket, political affiliation, sexual orientation,
gender, nationality, or religion ought not to become an occasion for throwing
stones at each other. Learning to build bridges will be a far more helpful
conversation than succumbing to the bait. Most of our social discourse already
has enough hurt. It might be time for some people to refuse to take the bait.
To return to the
episode, Jesus accuses them of testing him, something Satan did in Matthew 4:7
and his opponents did in 16:1 and 19:3. He accuses them of hypocrisy. He exposes
their hypocrisy by asking them for a coin, which had an image of the emperor. Since
they had the coin, they expose themselves as accepting the political reality of
Roman domination. They work with that reality by helping Rome to collect the
tax. Careful observance of Torah would have forbidden handling the coin, let
alone aiding in collection of the tax. The prohibition against the “graven
image” in Exodus 20:4 would have forbidden handling such coins. Along with the
image, the words on it might have been “Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine
Augustus.” Their question has behind it an attempt to undermine any prestige
and authority Jesus had built up among the people. Their reason for questioning
Jesus is concern for their continuing authority and prestige among the same
people.
The response of
Jesus, upon first reading, is unfulfilling to most of us. "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's,
and to God the things that are God's."
This leads me to
the second lesson I find in this episode. Jesus does not answer the question. We
want to know which side of the political and religious divide he stands. Does he
think they should pay the tax? We do not know. He does not tell his
contemporaries what to do. He refuses to side with a particular political
agenda. He does not satisfy our curiosity. What belongs to Caesar? What belongs
to God? His saying has a puzzling wit about it that invites us to ask further
questions as an internal conversation. It redirects our questioning to the
authority of God in our lives. Could it be that, as with many of the sayings of
Jesus, the point is to stimulate an internal conversation that makes us uneasy?
We need to determine for ourselves what
belongs to the emperor and what belongs to God. He at least hints that matters
are relatively insignificant when we are discussing political and economic
arrangements. They are not necessarily at odds with each other, but we do need
to keep them in perspective. We ought not to use obligation to God to avoid obligation
to the political and economic arrangements in which we live. Do not use
perceived obligation to God as a convenient escape from your obligations to the
political, economic, and cultural order in which you live and on which you
depend. We might tease out of the saying something more if we play with the
notion of an image. All the emperor asks is to return to him the coin he made. You,
as listener and reader, bear the image of God (Genesis 1:26). You belong to
God. The emperor does not own you. God owns you. That which belongs to the
emperor is relatively insignificant in comparison with that which belongs to
God, that is, your very self or soul.
The response of
his opponents is amazement. They leave him.
Of course, the
episode raises the matter of taxes. Paul struggled with the notion of taxes as
well, siding with the expedience of paying the tax (Romans 13:1-7).
Other matters
interest me today. A third lesson from this episode involves the history of
interpretation. This episode has provided opportunity to reflect upon the
relationship between church and state. For Martin Luther and Philipp
Melanchthon, this saying became part of the biblical support for the notion of
two kingdoms, one spiritual and one secular. One focuses on the gospel and the
other focuses on human institutional life, such as work, family, political and economic
arrangements, and cultural values. Both realms belonged to God and thus serve
divine purposes, one cared for life on earth and the other for life in
eternity.
A fourth lesson,
also from its history of interpretation, is that the episode has provided an
opportunity to reflect upon civil disobedience.
The church must be reminded that it is
not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the
state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If
the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant
social club without moral or spiritual authority. --Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (Fontana, 1972), 62.
Here are a couple
of citations from people who knew something about civil disobedience.
I offer a word
from Henry David Thoreau taken from his little book, Civil Disobedience:
Christ answered the
Herodians according to their condition. "Show me the tribute-money,"
said he; -- and one took a penny out of his pocket; -- "If you use money
which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and
valuable, that is, if you are men of the State, and gladly enjoy the advantages
of Caesar's government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it;
'Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God those things
which are God's' -- leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which;
for they did not wish to know."
In addition, from Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Jesus evaded the
direct question put to him because it was a trap. He was in no way bound to
answer it. He therefore asked to see the coin for taxes. And then said with
withering scorn, "How can you who traffic in Caesar's coins and thus
receive what to you are benefits of Caesar's rule, refuse to pay taxes?"
Jesus' whole preaching and practice point unmistakably to noncooperation, which
necessarily includes nonpayment of taxes.
A final lesson we
can tease out of this episode is the spiritual danger of our attachment to
money. We who participate in the economic, political, and cultural order have
some obligation to support it through paying our taxes. Yet, the obligation
invites us to consider the role of wealth and money. When Jesus said to his
opponents, “Show me the money,” he revealed their reliance upon the system. One
can find a lot of meaning in money. Maybe these reflections should lead us to
re-consider the role of money in our lives. Let us explore the passage in that
light.
Many persons
witness to the dangers of money. Bob Dylan once said, “Money doesn’t talk, it
swears.” Another witness is from Henrik Ibsen.
Money may be the husk of many things
but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not
health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy,
but not peace or happiness.
Yet another witness:
Who steals my purse steals trash—
‘tis something–nothing,
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been
slave to thousands—
But he that filches from me my good
name
Robs me of that which not enriches
him
And makes me poor indeed.
—William Shakespeare, Othello: Act
3, 3, 159–164; lines spoken by Iago
Jesus prods his
contemporaries to re-think their relation to God, to Rome, and to money. In his
book A Stewardship Scrapbook, William
R. Phillippe notes that the Reformer John Calvin taught that material goods are
instruments of God.
“Money becomes the
means God uses to help persons. So God put wealth at our disposal … so that we may
organize our life and the life of our community … to bring shalom, the fullest
possible, sustainable life for all persons everywhere … to organize the society
in which we live in a responsible way, in solidarity with all others. But
Calvin also warned that the devil brings sin among us, and we become selfish
and ingrown and try to insulate and isolate ourselves from the community.
Thereby, we negate the good values of our money. We then come to idolize our
money and give it a place it should not have, so that it becomes divine and has
power over us.”
We often become selfish and
protective when it comes to our questions about the relationship between our
money and our faith. We think of wealth as belonging to us. We might like a
separation between what we do with wealth and what we do with the claim of God
upon us. However, government prints money for its purposes. Money has various
images upon it that make it clear what country considers it valuable.
Recognizing such human claims is important for us to live in this world. God
has placed us in this social world. The social system of financial exchange,
laws, political life, economic life, military life, and civic life, do have a
claim upon us. We receive much benefit from these arrangements. Through
taxation, we experience in quite personal ways the claims of our social world
upon us. Yet, viewed in another way, such claims are insignificant. We possess
things, but only for a relatively brief time. The wealth we have used to belong
to someone else. After we die, it will belong to someone else. Such human
claims are temporary. We ought not to invest much worry over such claims.
Here
is the question we need to answer. God has made everything that exists, and
called it good. Everything God created declares the glory of God. In a special
way, God has marked human beings with the image of God. Ownership of this world
is in the hands of God. Each of us belongs to God. This reminds me of the
sentiment expressed in a hymn by William H. How in 1864:
We give Thee but Thine own,
Whate’er the gift may be;
All that we have is Thine alone,
A trust, O Lord, from Thee.
It also reminds me of the sentiment
in the chorus, “We are an Offering,” by Dwight Liles in 1984:
We lift our voices, we lift our hands
We lift our lives up to You
We are an offering
Lord use our voices, Lord use our hands
Lord use our lives, they are Yours
We are an offering
All that we have, all the we are
All that we
hope to be
We give to You, we give to You
The claim of God is upon
creation and upon each human being. The question each of us must answer with
our lives is whether we will live in a way that acknowledges the claim of God
upon us. If we give to God what already belongs to God, we acknowledge the true
owner of everything that exists.
[1] Bruce, Michael. "Don't take the bait! Philosophy
and / of power struggles." Psychology Today, February 1, 2011,
psychologytoday.com. Retrieved March 25, 2017.
