Well, it must be church stewardship time and election season! Without fail, every three years at this touchy time in our communal lives, our Lectionary hands us Matthew’s Jesus, dealing with controversy about money, taxes, and the government.
I imagine that many of you have heard lots of sermons about today’s Gospel. Many preachers make this text all about the importance of giving your money to the church. Other preachers line Jesus up behind a political agenda of unquestioning obedience to ruling authorities. Still others might portray Jesus as a rebel who urges us to withdraw entirely from worldly matters.
I’m not going to do any of those things today, though. I’m persuaded that Jesus’ response to the Jewish leaders goes beyond our neat boxes—whether they’re boxes around church finances or around the separation of church and state. Jesus’ response is meant to do more than just make the preacher squirm today. It’s meant to make us all squirm, think, and reconsider– just as he discombobulated those clever Pharisees and Herodians who put him to the test.
To understand what’s at stake here, let’s start with some historical context: In Jesus’ day, the Jewish people lived in an occupied land and paid a heavy tax burden to the Roman Empire, to a regime that they both feared and despised. Some Jews, like the Herodians who supported Roman rule, were OK with paying a head-tax to Rome to keep the peace. Many others, though, including the Pharisees, had reactions to the tax that ranged from distaste, like the Pharisees, to violent insurrection.
The denarius was the Roman coin equivalent to the daily wage for a laborer. These coins that Jews were forced to used daily to buy the necessities of life under Roman rule, constantly brought them face to face with the symbol of hated Roman power: On one side of the coin, you see, they saw the face of Tiberius Caesar, with the shocking inscription, “son of the divine Augustus.” On the other side, they saw his mother Livia, the divine “high priestess” of Rome.[1] These coins were therefore blasphemous objects for the Jews, examples of the kind idolatry that God specifically forbids in the commandments.
So here we have two opposing groups trying to trap Jesus into either showing himself as a radical who could foment political upheaval by refusing to pay the Roman tax—or as a smooth-talking, love-spouting fake who really advocates colluding with the hated Empire. Jesus’ response to this trap is amazingly clever. Before responding, in asking to see one of the coins, Jesus traps one of his questioners into pulling out one of these Roman coins from his own pocket. Right there in God’s Holy Temple, everyone can see that this good Jewish leader is the one carrying around an idolatrous Roman coin! The owner of the coin’s the one who’s enmeshed in the Roman system. Jesus’ questioners—not Jesus– are the ones carrying around Caesar’s money, after all!
And then, instead of answering the men in the direction that they intended, Jesus cleverly moves the question elsewhere. In his response, he refuses to take sides. “To whom do you and your lives belong?” he pushes the crowd to ask themselves, “to the emperor, or to God?” God doesn’t trade in Caesar’s currency. Jesus’ Kingdom of Love is not Caesar’s Empire of power. While people do owe both Caesar and God, they owe for different reasons, to different extents, and they pay with different currency.[2]
Imagine a Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate cornering Jesus today in front of the capital, surrounded by an intensely divided crowd of fellow citizens. I can imagine us waiting with baited breath to see which side Jesus is on, waiting to see whose platform Jesus will support, waiting to condemn both Jesus and the other side if he says something we deem incorrect. But Jesus’ response for us today remains the same one that he gave to the Pharisees and Herodians. He asks us: To whom do you and your lives belong? What does it mean to belong, heart and soul, to God? What is the coinage of God’s Kingdom, of God’s dream for this world?
To answer these questions, all we have is the example of Jesus himself, the only human who does belong heart and soul to God, the One in whom God’s Kingdom is being revealed. In the Gospels, Jesus shows us both total commitment to God and total commitment to justice and mercy and love in this world. Over and over again, Jesus shows us love in real, tangible acts—in touching lepers, in forgiving enemies, in making friends of the outcast and sinner, in healing those in pain, in reaching out to those rejected by society, in making blind eyes see again, in washing feet, in dying so that we might live. The coinage of Jesus’ Kingdom is Love, Love to be spent lavishly and without restraint. Jesus Christ reveals the paradoxical power of living a life of divine, self-giving love. What are a few coins for the emperor, compared with a lifetime of love for God and neighbor?
If living in Love seems impossible, or daunting, perhaps this illustration from famous preacher Fred Craddock might be helpful: When we think about giving our lives to God, says Craddock, we tend to imagine a grand gesture, like pulling out a thousand dollar bill and laying it on God’s table. “Here you go, God, here is my generous offering. Now I belong to you—See! Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee.” But Craddock points out that’s not really the way it works. Instead of a one-time dramatic gesture, giving our lives to God is like taking that thousand-dollar bill to the bank and cashing it in for loads of quarters. We then give those bits of change away faithfully throughout our lifetime, one small act at a time, every day, every hour, without ceasing.[3] We give them away when no one is watching. We give them away when no one else seems to care. We give them away when it would be easier not to do anything at all. There are so many ways to live and so many choices to make, every day, every hour. What I share, what I eat, what I wear, whom I welcome, where I sit, when I stand up, they are all opportunities to love, to spend God’s coinage of the Kingdom.
With all of the controversies and polemics, the violence and hatred, the disrespect and dehumanization going on around us right now, it’s more important than ever that we remember in whose image we are all made, to whom we belong, and what coinage we need to be using every day. Each of us is made in God’s image—friend and foe alike—and we belong to a God of Love, a God who acts in Love and who requires us to act in Love. We don’t belong to Empire, to greed, to hatred, to guns, to oppression. As those things rage around us, we extend a hand to someone in need, we lift others up when they fall, we share what we have, one small, mundane act of Love at a time.
[1] Doug Bratt, https://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/proper-24a-2/?type=lectionary_epistle.
[2] Raj Nadella, Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-29/commentary-on-matthew-2215-22-7
[3] Fred Craddock, excerpt found at Sermon Stories: 25 Cents at a Time
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