Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 19, 2008

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.

Today I want to give you a different take on the famous “Render unto Caesar” story that we just heard than I gave you the last time it came up in the lectionary, a take that I think is particularly relevant in this high political season that we are currently experiencing in our nation, or perhaps suffering would be a better word given how prolonged and how nasty our political campaigns have become. It’s OK that it’s a different take. Great Bible stories like this can have more than one meaning.

In this story, some of Jesus’ opponents set out to trap him. They ask him what seems like a rather straightforward, yes or no question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not?” Clearly “Lawful here refers to the Torah law of the Jews, since obviously it was lawful to pay the taxes under Roman law. It would be unlawful not to. In response to this apparently simply question that Matthew nonetheless tells us was intended to trap him, Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, doesn’t answer it. Rather, he says something that doesn’t make much sense to us. He asks for one of the coins used to pay the tax, that is of course, a Roman coin. When they give him one he asks them a question the answer to which would have been obvious to anyone looking at one of those coins. He asks: “Whose head is this, and whose title?” It’s really important that he asked not only about the identity of person on the coin but also about that person’s title, so hold on to that detail for a moment. His questioners give the obvious answer. They are the emperor’s. Then comes the famous line: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” They had asked him a simple yes or no question. He gave them an obscure, non-responsive answer. His questioners, however, don’t object. Matthew tells us only that they amazed and left him alone.

What’s going on here? What actually is Jesus’ answer to the question whether it was lawful under Torah law to pay taxes to the Roman Emperor? Why is it even a question? Remember that the Jews had been paying tribute and taxes to foreign occupiers more or less continuously since at least the eighth century BCE, so it seems odd that there should even be any question about the matter. Yet there was a serious question about the matter, and the answer to just what that question is lies in the reason why Jesus asked for one of the Roman coins used to pay the tax. The key is in Jesus’ question about the emperor’s title that appeared on the coin. The image was that of Caesar Augustus, but his title wasn’t just Caesar, Emperor. The coin also had on it the Latin characters “divii f.” The “f” stands for the Latin word filius, which means son. “Divii´ means “of the divine one.” The coin then called the emperor “Son of the Divine One.” The “Divine One” was Julius Caesar, whom the Romans had made into a god, or at least the son of a god. So the coin used to pay the Roman tax had on it a claim that to any Jew was pure blasphemy and idolatry, namely, that the emperor, a mere human being, was divine, was in some sense himself a god.

That’s why paying the Roman tax might be a violation of Torah law. Using the Roman coin, with its idolatrous claim about the Emperor, was an act of acquiescence in idolatry. Once we understand that dynamic, we understand that the most obvious answer to the question posed to Jesus was not the yes that it at first appeared to be but no, it is not lawful to pay the tax. Yet Jesus seems to say sure, go ahead and pay it. It’s the emperor’s coin, go ahead and give it back to him. But how could he say such a thing to his devout Jewish followers, who would have heard in his words a direction to participate in idolatry? The only answer to that question that I’ve been able to come up with is this: Jesus is saying that it is OK to pay the Roman tax with the idolatrous Roman coin because he knows that the coin’s claim that the Roman emperor is a god is false. As long as we know in our hearts that the coin’s claim is false, we can go ahead and use it. After all, Jesus’ followers had no choice but to live with the Romans, to try to survive under the boot of the Roman Empire. So the important thing isn’t whether or not you pay the tax. It is whether or not you know that the emperor’s claim to be a god is just that, the emperor’s claim, and is in no way true. So go ahead and give that idolatrous claim back to the one who makes it. Just make sure that you don’t make it yourself. Going along with the demand of the Empire that you pay its taxes using its coin is permissible as long as you always remember that the claims are false, that Caesar is not a god, and that your true allegiance is not to the false gods of empire but to the one true God.

And you may be thinking: That’s nice, but its ancient history. What does it have to do with us? Well, I think that it has a great deal to do with us. It raises for us a very important question, namely, how do we live with our modern equivalents of Caesar? In this election season it is particularly important for us to ask: What is our proper relationship as Christians to the powers of the world, our own nation included? What is our proper relationship to government and government’s claims on our allegiance? Most American Christians never ask that question. Perhaps you haven’t either, but please consider this. As you may get tired of hearing me say, the ways of the world are not God’s ways. The ways of the world are greed, power, oppression, exclusion, and violence. The ways of God are mercy, meekness, liberation, inclusion, and nonviolence. Our government may or may not be as given to greed, power, oppression, exclusion, and violence as other governments in the world are or historically have been. I leave that discernment up to you. It is however undeniable that our government is to some extent at least about greed, power, oppression, exclusion, and violence. Under our government, whichever party is in control, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, as the old Depression era song “Ain’t We Got Fun” famously sang. Under our government, whichever party is in control, laws are enforced that exclude gay and lesbian people from full inclusion in American society and violence is used to project American power around the world. The examples could go on and on. Our government demands our allegiance and demands that we obey its laws every bit as much as the Roman Empire ever did. So even if our government is not as bad as some are and others have been, the question of what a Christian’s proper relationship to the government is remains, and it remains a crucial one.

And I think that the famous Gospel story we are considering this morning gives, or at least suggests, the answer. The import of Jesus’ answer, of his famous “render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” is, I think, that, when we must, we may accommodate ourselves to empire, we may accommodate ourselves to secular power, right up to the point that that accommodation compromises us spiritually and no further. Paying the Roman tax was permissible in Jesus’ time because people had no choice but to obey the law. Using the idolatrous Roman coin to pay the Roman tax did not compromise the Jews of Jesus’ time spiritually because they knew that the coin’s idolatrous claim was false. We too must obey the law. Beyond that, we, unlike the Jews of Jesus’ time, are free citizens with a civic duty—and I believe a Christian duty—to participate in our political system for the purpose of bringing it more in line with the ways of God, however we think that can best be accomplished.

But the question before us is the same as the one I believe Jesus implicitly put before his followers: Can you pay taxes to worldly power without being compromised spiritually? Can we participate in our secular system of government without being compromised by it spiritually? It seems to me that simply because we live in the world we do things out of necessity that can compromise us spiritually. We value the good that government does, but we cannot separate ourselves from the evil that it does. Like Jesus’ compatriots we pay taxes to a secular government. We pay taxes to a federal government that conducts foreign wars that many of us think are illegal under international law and immoral under Christian teaching. We pay taxes to a state government that imposes capital punishment and excludes gay and lesbian people from the benefits of marriage, things that many of us find clearly wrong. How can we do those things without being compromised?

We do it the same way Jesus was telling his followers to do it. We pay the tax. We participate in our political system, but we always remember that the claims of secular power are idolatrous. We always remember that while we must go along with government in order to live, our allegiance is not ultimately to government. It is ultimately to God. When we must participate in systems that are at least in part unjust and immoral, by paying taxes to them for example, we pray for forgiveness to the extent that we are supporting what we know to be wrong. We remember that government also does good things, and we give thanks for the good that it does. Grounded in our faith we strive to make our governments truer to the actual mission that God has for them of providing for the common welfare and the safety of all of their citizens. Most of all, in all of these things, we cling to our faith in God. We live with Caesar, but we live in God. We are in the world but not of it. As we make our decisions as citizens in this political season, let us remember to look first to God and know that our true allegiance is to God and not to Caesar. If we will do that, we can participate in our worldly systems of power with spiritual integrity. Amen.