Caesar? Or, God & Neighbor?
After three parables challenging the authorities and leadership of Israel under Roman occupation, we now hear the first of three attempts to trick Jesus into making a fatal error in judgement. The first trap is a question about taxes, something to which we can all relate.
This attempt at entrapment in Matthew 22:15-22 is so familiar and domesticated such that it is hard to notice the nuances of what is really happening. Some Pharisees send a delegation of their disciples along with some folks identified as Herodians. This should raise a red-flag: Pharisees are those Israelites devoted to sincerely following of the commandments in Torah despite the Roman occupation, and also deny any idea that members of the Herod household are legitimate Jews at all; Herodians support the Herods who rule Israel on behalf of Rome and therefore are collaborators with the Empire, and had been accused by John the Baptist as being unfaithful to the way of Torah. Previous episodes in Matthew suggest that John still had a strong following, and that Jesus has taken up his mantle and his call for repentance. Even worse, the Herods serve as kings of Israel in at least several regions under Roman control. They are Kings of the Jews.
These strange bed-fellows ask Jesus if it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not. They flatter him as sincere and faithful to Torah, and suggest that he does not allow himself to be manipulated by others. If he says yes, his followers will abandon him. If he says no, he will be arrested. Clearly, they have no idea who this is. Jesus steadfastly avoids all flattery directing people to honor only his Father, the God of Moses and the escape from Pharaoh, the first Caesar. Jesus sees through this ruse, and calls them out as fakes – hypocrites, as moral and religious counterfeits, as play-actors devoid of any and all sincerity. Ouch! That had to hurt.
Getting right to the point, Jesus says, “Show me the coin with which to pay the tax.” This suggests he has no such coin himself. And that he suspects they have a Roman denarius in their pockets. Sure enough, they produce the coin. The Pharisees now have hoisted themselves on their own petard! Exposed! They are carrying an image, literally an icon, of the emperor who claims to be God in their pocket. This violates the third of the Ten Commandments that there ought to be no icons or idols of other Gods. It’s likely that they already pay the tax so as not to disturb the peace, while of course the Herodians do as well. After all, they are on the administrative payroll. Indeed, these are bad actors, role-players, and self-disclosed hypocrites. Who forget they are created in God’s image, God’s icon, not Caesar’s. Jesus could leave it right there. There’s nothing much more to say.
But now Jesus has established a tactical advantage in this clumsy attempt to trip him up. As he had done just after entering Jerusalem, once again he turns the tables on them, putting them in position to justify themselves. He puts a question to them in front of all onlookers: “Whose head is this, and whose title?” he asks. “The emperor’s,” they reply. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” says Jesus. Check and Mate! Off they go, tails between their legs, amazed at just how shrewd this Jesus character is. For all their pretensions to being faithful to the God of Moses and the Exodus, it’s now left to them to decide what belongs to Caesar and the Empire, and what belongs to God.
Next Sunday we will learn that the choice is not simply between Caesar and God. There is a third party for whom resources are to be pooled together – the neighbor. Our neighbors. Which the same Torah to which the Pharisees look for moral direction is uncomfortably specific: the community will arrange its resources to care for those with few or no resources themselves: this includes widows, orphans, and resident aliens. As an addendum to the Ten Commandments, Exodus 22:21-24 says: “21 You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. 23 If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; 24 my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans.” Double ouch!
It has been pointed out by many, such as Walter Brueggemann, that this definition of just who our neighbors are lies at the very heart of Israel’s, and therefore Jesus’s, core narrative and values. The Ten Commandments list the bare minimum requirements to sustain and become a people of the God who saved us from the land of Pharoah’s Egypt – a land of conspicuous and endless monopoly and hoarding of resources for the few at the expense of the many. Double the quota of bricks those Hebrew slaves must make so I can build more and more storehouses for food and other stuff for me and my cronies, says Pharaoh! And at the end of the day, tax their meager wages to add to my personal treasury!
Perhaps the most overlooked of all the Ten Commandments, despite its being the only one that is stated twice, is the Tenth: Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s herds, and you shall not covet anything else of your neighbor’s. This is the first time the neighbor is mentioned in the Bible. Covetousness is often misunderstood as mere envy, or wanting, but covetousness also results in the action of taking. Like the other nine commandments, covetousness is a behavior: “wanting and desiring quickly becomes seizing and acquiring and produces an acquisitive system of money and possessions that is self-propelled until it becomes an addiction that skews viable social relationships so that no one is safe from predatory eagerness.” [i]
And it has been noted that the commandment to observe Sabbath one day a week is in part to pause, take time out, from any and all systems of covetousness that threaten to destroy all viable social relationships with our addictions to money and possessions. Jesus recognizes there is no binary answer to begin with. God and Caesar are not the only choices here. There are the neighbors. The people of the land. Especially those without resources. His answer to those trying to trip him up assumes that whatever you give to God and/or Caesar better be used for those in need, the neighbors we have in Jesus, and not to fatten the already fat-cat storehouses and bank accounts of the empire and its elite rulers, nor the storehouses of whatever institutions claim to serve the Lord God of Israel. Which of course, includes the Church. Which at the time Matthew was writing was well into its infancy if not already in full-blown toddlerhood!
Jesus knows these traditions of the Bible. And calls one and
all who dare to listen to what he has to say to decide once and for all just
what we are to do with all that the good Lord has given to us. Which in
practical terms means some sort of return to Manna Season where everyone was
given enough, no one got too much, you could not hoard it, and where people took
a day off from all work and acquisitive and consuming behaviors. Nothing much
has really changed. What belongs to Caesar and the empire? What belongs to God
and our neighbors? How we answer these questions makes all the difference.
[i]
Brueggemann, Walter, Money and Possessions, (Westminster John Knox Press,
Louisville, KY: 2016) p.17
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