Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 16, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I’ve got a confession to make. I have misled you. Throughout my three and a half years as your pastor, I have told you again and again that the distinction that so many people, and so much of the church, make between religion and politics is false. I’ve told you that the earliest Christian confession, that Jesus Christ is Lord, is a political statement because in its original context it necessarily meant "and Caesar isn’t." I’ve told you that the faith must inform all aspects of our lives, the corporate and public as well as the personal and private. And it turns out that I’ve been wrong about all that. So this morning I come before you to make a correction, to retract what I’ve said before, to set the record straight. It turns out that the church is right. Religion is just about spiritual matters. It is just about our private, personal lives. So I apologize.

You may well be asking: What happened? How did pastor Tom come to this startling new (for him) insight? What changed something that we thought was so much of what he was about? Well, I’ll tell you. I read Matthew 22:21: "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s." Or in the more familiar King James Version: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things which are God’s." That’s perfectly clear, isn’t it? Worldly things like money belong to the world and other things, other-worldly things, belong to God. There’s the worldly, political, economic, social realm; and there’s the otherworldly, spiritual realm; and never the twain shall meet. There’s a Bible verse that says that right? Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. So it must be true. It must be God’s word and will, and I must have been wrong this whole time. Sorry about that.

-------------Of course----------------- "Render unto Caesar" isn’t the only thing this Gospel story says. That famous line doesn’t occur in a vacuum. I wonder if the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, changes what the story’s most famous line means? But no. It can’t. I mean, Bible verses are all simple and straightforward, aren’t they? The rest of the story has to set up and confirm the apparent meaning of the famous line, right? Well certainly, but let’s take a look and see how it does that.

The story begins: "Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him [Jesus of course] in what he said." Hmm. That makes it look like a trick is coming. How curious. But there can’t be a trick in Scripture, can there? No. Certainly not. Let’s keep going. The Pharisees send some of their followers along with some supporters of the Roman puppet kings of the day-that’s who the Herodians are-to Jesus. Now, these guys are not Jesus’ friends. He was a threat to them, and they knew it. Yet they begin by saying really nice things about him: "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth...." Hmm. That’s odd. These people didn’t really believe that about him, did they? Could they be disingenuous? Could they be flattering him to set him up to "entrap him," as their leaders had sent them to do? Kind of looks like it.

Then they ask him the question they apparently were sent to ask him: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?" That question sounds pretty straightforward to me. How is it a trap? Yet we know that the people asking it intended it as a trap, and Jesus saw it as a trap. Why else would he respond by calling his questioners hypocrites and accuse them of putting him to the test? Surely the Romans and their stooges the Herodians would think it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor. They’d think it unlawful not to. Under Roman law, the answer to the question is obvious. Of course, the Pharisees weren’t much concerned with Roman law. They were all about the Jewish law, Torah law. Still, paying the tax wasn’t unlawful under Torah law. So where’s the trap? Hmm. Maybe the trap isn’t that paying the tax to the Romans actually violated Torah law but that the people hated that tax and avoided paying it every chance they got. That’s certainly true. I guess the trap is that if Jesus answered the question "no" the Romans would charge him with treason, but if he answered it yes, the Jewish people who followed him and whom he was trying to reach would be angry, and he’d lose their support. In any event, both Jesus and the people asking the question saw the question as a trap. So, I wonder: Does the fact that Jesus thought the question was a trap shed any light on his answer? I mean, it wasn’t a straightforward question after all, so maybe Jesus didn’t give a straightforward answer. Just what does the story say he did in response to the question?

Well, he didn’t simply answer it. It’s a yes or no question. Is it lawful to pay the tax or not? A direct answer would be yes or no, but at first Jesus doesn’t answer the question at all. Instead he asks someone to give him one of the coins used to pay the tax. That of course is a Roman coin. Jesus then establishes that the coin has on it the Roman emperor’s image and title. The image is just that, a likeness of whoever the emperor was who issued the coin. And I know from reading a book by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed that those images usually depicted the emperor as divine, as a god. OK, but what was the title? Presumable Caesar, the Latin word for emperor. But that same book by Crossan and Reed says that these Roman coins often had on them another title that the emperors used. They often had the Latin inscription "divii f." The "f" is short for "filius," which means son. "Divii f" means "son of the divine one." OK, but who is the divine one? Crossan and Reed say it was Julius Caesar, the first Roman Emperor, who was worshipped as a god. So this coin that Jesus was looking at probably portrayed the emperor as a god, or at least as a son of a god.

Does that fact tell us anything about Jesus’ answer to the question, his famous "render unto Caesar" remark? Well, to any Jew like Jesus, the claim that any human, especially any gentile and especially a murderous, oppressive gentile like the Roman emperor was in any way a god was outrageous blasphemy and idolatry that could not be condoned. The coin in the story represents the Roman claim that the emperor was divine. It is part of the Roman emperor cult, and that was something the Jews never could and never did accept. So we have here Jesus setting up an answer to a trick question by reminding his questioners of the blasphemous, idolatrous claims of the Roman emperor cult. Hmm. It’s beginning to look more and more like we can’t really take "Render unto Caesar...." at face value, doesn’t it?

I mean, to any Jew, and certainly to Jesus, the things that were due to Caesar, to the Roman emperor with his claim to being divine were-nothing. A man who claimed to be a god, especially a pagan idol god, is due-nothing. Nothing that would help perpetuate his blasphemy and his idolatry and his oppressive hold on power over God’s people. Could it be that Jesus gave a trick answer to the trick question that the disciples of the Pharisees and the Herodians posed to him?

And you know. The more I think about it the less likely it seems that Jesus would really draw a sharp distinction between the things of the world and the things of God. The more I think about it the less likely it seems to me that Jesus would remove God from the things of the world. I mean, for starters, that distinction between the secular and the sacred that seems so natural to us didn’t even exist in Jesus’ time, as the Roman emperor cult itself shows. The Romans didn’t make that distinction, and neither did Jesus’ people, the Jews. They didn’t have a secular law, they had the Torah. Period. And Jesus is all about calling people to faithfulness to God in all aspects of their lives. For him there was nothing that wasn’t God’s. Caesar himself belonged to God, and his willful ignorance of that fact didn’t change the reality of it.

So the more I think about it, the more convinced I’m becoming that "Render unto Caesar" has to be a trick answer to a trick question. Yes! That’s it! Jesus gave a trick answer to a trick question. "Render unto Caesar" makes it sound like there are in fact things that belong to Caesar; but Jesus didn’t really believe that. He couldn’t have! A blaspheming, idolatrous Roman was due nothing from a devout Jew. Caesar himself didn’t belong to Caesar but to God. Jesus really was a genius, wasn’t he? He gave a brilliant trick answer to avoid being trapped by a trick question, an answer that looks like it’s saying one thing when in fact it is saying something else altogether! It lets people hear in it what they want. The Romans and their lackeys the Herodians can hear: Yes, the coin is Caesar’s so go ahead and give it back to him in payment of the tax. Devout Jews, however, can hear affirmation of the fact that nothing belongs to Caesar, and note that the story never actually has Jesus saying that anything does. Jesus’ Jewish listeners can be confirmed in their resistance to the Roman tax. Brilliant!, as they say in the Guinness TV commercials, only this one really is. Deflect an attack by letting the attackers hear one thing while meaning quite the opposite. Jesus was a master at it, and the Render unto Caesar story shows him at the top of his game.

So guess what? I haven’t been wrong all along after all. I retract my retraction. I stand by what I’ve been saying all along. Our life isn’t compartmentalized into the secular and the spiritual. There is nothing that is Caesar’s, that is, there is nothing that is worldly, that is not also and primarily God’s, that is separate from the spiritual and from God. Indeed, as Jesus would certainly say, God is before all that is and is the cause of all that is. God creates us to live in community, and politics properly understood is about the way we live together in community. Politics-the public aspect of our lives-is no more separate from God than our private, spiritual lives are. Properly understood, "Render unto Caesar" doesn’t contradict but confirms that fact.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing for a theocracy here. My denial of a distinction between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s doesn’t mean that any one faith or any one version of any one faith gets to impose its will on everyone or that there is some religious test for public office, President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court to the contrary not withstanding. It does mean that as Christians we are called to let our faith inform all aspects of our lives, the spiritual and the secular, the private and the public. I’m not the one who’s gotten it wrong. The church is. The church gets it wrong every time it acquiesces in the interest of secular power in muting the prophetic voice of Jesus Christ. We don’t have to make that mistake. Let’s not. Amen.