And, to be sure, these are very challenging days.
If you are at all like me, you probably spent this past week listening to news of violence and war. You may have listened to first-person accounts of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel, or interviews with Palestinian civilians trying to escape Gaza, and you likely saw images and videos of violence and destruction that are hard to forget.
Just yesterday, for instance, as I was packing for this visit, I listened to an interview with an Israeli mother desperately searching for her 23 year old son / and I recalled that just a few days before there was another interview with a 23 year old Palestinian man, desperately trying to get his family out of Gaza to safety.
Many of us are carrying these conflicting voices, these stories, as well as our fears and concerns, and raw prayers into this sacred space. And my hope, then, is that all of this can be a part of the offering we make today, that we bring our heartache up along with the bread and wine and money. The psalms, especially, speak of the collected prayers of a community rising like incense before God, and so perhaps the most important thing we do today is to simply bring all of this unresolved heartache and allow it to rise like incense before God.
In addition to this, the reason I am here is to spend a few moments talking about faith and money. During the pandemic, while quarantined at home, I wrote a book entitled The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty and the Church Today, in which I reflect on the first five centuries of Christian writings about money. This book ended up being about Christianity’s complicated, conflicted, and contradictory relationship with money. And since it has been published, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with people of faith about their own complicated, conflicted, and contradictory relationship to money. And through this, I’ve learned that talking about money is always deeply personal, and that talking about faith and money is even more so.
And so truly, what better text could there be to introduce all these themes of wrestling with faith and money than today’s passage from Matthew 22? I want to assure you that this text wasn’t my selection; the Episcopal lectionary works in mysterious ways.
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In today’s Gospel, Matthew 22, we land right into a scene of fraught debate and religious conflict. In the chapter just before, Jesus told three pointed parables that put the religious authorities of his day in a negative light. And so, today’s passage begins with the Pharisees and the Herodians joining forces to get back at him.
The Gospel of Matthew tells us that they want to entrap Jesus; they want to catch him saying something that they can charge him with, either sedition against the state or religious idolatry. And so they ask Jesus what would have been a simple but ultimately dangerous question: “Teacher,” they say, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”
As simple as this question may seem, this question raises issues of one’s loyalty to God, of one’s responsibilities before the state, and asks who and what we place our faith in. To be sure, Jesus’ questioners hoped to catch him encouraging disloyalty to the Roman Emperor, which would have been an act of sedition. And so, instead, Jesus responds with ambiguity.
In response to the Pharisees and the Herodians, Jesus asks to be shown the coin that was used to pay the tax, and then he asks whose head was imprinted on that coin, and when his challengers point out that it was the Roman emperor’s face on that coin, he famously replies, “Therefore render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
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The first three words of Jesus’ famous reply - “Render unto Caesar” - they have become an idiom in their own right. Around tax time, for instance, one might hear an Episcopalian or two begrudgingly talking about “rendering unto Caesar” their portion of taxes.
“Render unto Caesar”, then, is frequently presented and preached as Jesus’ definitive statement about Christians’ need to obey civil authority, especially around tax season. And while I am certainly not here to dispute that, I also want to suggest that there is more going on beneath the surface of Jesus’ reply. And to get at that level of understanding of the text, we have to talk about artifacts and the weight of the Roman occupation of Israel.
For instance, when Jesus asked to see the coin, he didn’t ask for any coin. He specifically asks for the coin used to pay the Roman tax, a coin called the Roman denarius. Biblical scholars note that this coin had not only Caesar’s image printed upon it but also the inscription, "Tiberius Caesar, Augustus, the son of divine Augustus.” So, very importantly, on the Roman coin that Jesus asked to see, Caesar and God are presented as one and the same.
A quick side note, this year I am living in Barcelona, Spain, and live a short subway ride away from the ancient ruins of a temple built for the worship of Caesar Augustus. This temple was built in the year 10 AD – that is, during Jesus’ lifetime.
Living so close to those ruins, I’ve had the chance to visit, and stand, and look up at the columns of a massive space intended for the worship a Roman Emperor. And standing there, one can imagine just how painful it must have been for the Jewish people to not only have been conquered, colonized, and controlled by Rome, but to have also been surrounded at every turn by temples dedicated to the worship of Caesar as god.
Therefore when Jesus says that one must “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s”, he is likely playing with, or at least winking at, Romans’ patriotic obsession with Caesar as god. For as a Jewish man, and even more importantly, as a poor Jewish man, Jesus would have known - he would have been raised with the belief - that despite what the Romans said, no ruler is God. For only God is God. And to worship one’s colonizer was an act of self-hatred and idolatry.
This background helps us to understand why Jesus’ strange and ambiguous reply engendered the kind of response that it did, for Matthew’s Gospel tells us that all who heard Jesus were ‘amazed.’ Even his challengers left the heated exchange stunned by the wisdom and cleverness of Jesus’ reply.
For everyone who listened, heard what they needed to hear. A patriotic Roman soldier could hear Jesus generally affirming the obligation to render the divine Caesar his due. But a faithful Jewish listener could also hear Jesus making that ever-so-slight, but all-so-important, distinction between Caesar and God. It is as if he had said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but to God the things that are God’s.”
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Now, why is any of this important? How is any of this Good News in challenging times? I think there are a few things we can glean for our own lives from this text.
First, it’s important to note this exchange occurred in a time of religious conflict, one in which affirming the divinity of Caesar was frequently a matter of life or death. This was not just a philosophical inquiry / and in this high-stakes, heated exchange, Jesus intentionally creates an ambiguous space.
Jesus creates these ambiguous spaces throughout the Gospels. Very often, Jesus refrains from teaching clearly and directly. Instead, he teaches using strange images, little stories, and challenging parables, some of which we’re still trying to wrap our minds around today. While there are times he is very clear - such as when he drove the money changers out of the temple - more often than not we encounter Jesus teaching at a slant.
And you know, especially after this week, I don’t think this ambiguity is just about Jesus living to fight another day. Like us, Jesus lived in a world that wanted easy answers, a world that wanted people to be either righteous or condemned. All pure or all evil.
One of my favorite moments in all the Gospels is when an entire crowd wants Jesus to condemn a woman caught in adultery, but the Gospels tell us that the first thing he does is bend down and draw in the earth for a moment. Jesus creates a pause. He creates an ambiguous space before offering his clever reply which shames the condemners. Creating a pause is important because truth is so much more complex and painfully ambiguous than we want it to be, and Jesus invites us to more from certainty into this more considered and compassionate space.
The second thing to glean from this exchange is how Jesus raises the question of who we ultimately consider God, and who we owe our loyalty to. As I just mentioned at length, in the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus was considered divine, and the Jewish refusal to worship Caesar as divine was a recurring point of simmering conflict and danger.
But in the 21st century, in the United States, I don’t think we have to worry about people worshiping our politicians as divine. They are painfully and obviously all too human. No, our common idolatry has to do with our worship of money as a god.
Many people, including some Christians, believe that money is what will ultimately save us. Many people who may not consider themselves particularly religious express ardent faith in the power of the dollar, in the goodness of the marketplace, and describe our lives as guided by an invisible hand. The real religion, the core belief system of the United States, is faith in the power of money to solve and heal and save all things. And in response to this, Jesus holds up a coin and asks us to reflect on who and what we consider our God.
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