What does Jesus mean when he says that we should ‘give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’?
Has he just answered a difficult question in a way that
gets him out of trouble, but doesn’t actually say anything.
It is a very clever answer to a difficult question that
is designed to stitch Jesus up.
They asked him, ‘Should we pay taxes to the emperor?’
The tax that they were speaking about was a poll tax, a
charge that was levied by the Roman authorities on every individual. When you paid your poll tax, it was usually when there
were Roman soldiers around, and you knew that you lived in an occupied land.
So, if Jesus says, ‘yes, we should pay taxes’, then he is
spiritually hopelessly compromised.
For a Jew there were so many reasons why they should not
pay the tax.
There was national pride. Quite a significant number of
people had chosen armed rebellion. They read in their history, from the book of
Maccabees, how Judas Maccabaeus had led a revolt against a foreign ruler, who
was bringing in ungodly laws, and how he had been blessed by God.
There was the law of Moses which assumes that the people
of Israel will be a theocracy ruled not by Gentiles, but by a Davidic king and
priests of the line of Aaron.
And there was the actual coin itself, the denarius. It
had the image of the emperor on it – and Jews were prohibited from depicting
the image of anything – and even worse, the coin claimed that Augustus, the
emperor, was the Son of God.
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| Tiberius' Denarius bearing: "Tiberius Caesar, Worshipful Son of the God, Augustus |
So if Jesus said ‘yes, we should pay taxes’, the
Pharisees would be able to say of him, ‘He has no authority. He rejects the law
of Moses and he is in league with the Roman occupying force’.
But if Jesus says, ‘no’. Well the Pharisees have been
clever. They have brought along the Herodians. The Herodians were the
supporters of Herod, the king who represented the emperor to the Jews. So if
Jesus says, ‘no’, he could stand accused of treason.
But Jesus’ answer is clever.
First, he asks them for a coin.
Then he asks them to look at the coin and he draws
attention to both the image and the head.
That is clever. In other words he is saying, ‘I don’t
carry on me a coin which has on it an image and a title that dishonours God.
But you do’.
And then he answers by saying, ‘Give to the emperor what
is the emperor’s and to God what is God’s’.
His answer would not satisfy the real
zealots who had chosen armed rebellion against the Romans. They would
have wanted him to say ‘No’ clearly and unequivocally. Many of his followers,
who believed that he was the Messiah – God’s ruler come to deliver his people –
would have expected him to say ‘No’
But Jesus had not come to deliver Israel from Roman
authority. He had not come to lead a revolution or an armed rebellion. He had
come to set people free from a far worse tyranny: from slavery to sin and
death.
And his answer
would not really satisfy those who wished to be unconditionally loyal to Rome,
because Jesus has left himself wriggle room.
What is it that we should give to the emperor?
What is it that we should give to God.
Obviously it seems we should pay his taxes.
But clearly, we are not to give to the emperor, the
ruler, everything.
What is it, then, that we should give to God?
1.
The
people who have called Jesus Christ Lord, Christians, have always recognised
the legitimacy and authority of the civic authorities.
Paul urges us, in 1 Timothy 2, to pray for rulers, that
under them we may be peacefully and godly governed.
·
In our 8.30 service, when we use the 1662 prayer
book, every week we pray for our President here and, because we are part of a
Diocese which comes under the jurisdiction of the Church of England, we pray
for the British head of state, the Queen.
·
In our prayers in this service, often we pray
for President Putin and for other world leaders.
·
The litany in the Orthodox church includes
prayers for the leaders of the land.
Of course, that is actually a double-edged sword.
It means that we pledge loyalty to them. But it also
means that we recognise that there is a higher authority over them. There is
one, as we saw from our reading from Isaiah 45, who directs them, and to whom
they will one day be accountable themselves.
There is a story told about Queen Victoria.
It is customary, when people attend a performance of
Handel’s Messiah, for people to stand when the choir sing the Alleluia chorus,
‘King of kings and Lord of lords’.
She was attending a performance and when it got to that
point, she made to stand. But an attendant said to her, ‘Your Majesty, you do
not need to stand’.
‘Young man’, she replied, ‘When men come into my
presence, I who am Queen of Great Britain and empress of half the world, they
stand. When I come into the presence of the King of kings and the Lord of
lords, I stand’.
And in Romans 13:1-7, Paul writes that we are to be
subject to the governing authorities, ‘for there is no authority except that
which God has established’. He says that we need civic authorities so that
there will be stability and law and order. And please remember that Paul was writing to a
people, many of whom were subject to an occupying authority, and the vast
majority of whom were never given the chance to vote for or against their
rulers.
And Paul continues, and he says what Jesus said, ‘This is
also why you are to pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give
their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe: if you owe taxes,
pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honour then
honour’.
So I’m afraid I’ve got bad news! Paying your taxes,
whether you are poor or whether you are rich and are able to work out legal or
non-legal ways of not paying them, is part of your commitment as a Christian.
And Peter in 1 Peter 2.13-17 echoes that teaching.
‘Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority’. And later he
says, ‘Show proper respect to everyone, love your fellow believers, fear God,
honour the emperor’.
2.
But
if Christians have always recognised the authority of the civic authorities,
Christians have also always recognised
that there is a higher authority.
That is why there were martyrs here when this country was
the Soviet Union. The authorities demanded everything of people, and priests
and pastors and people faithfully stood up and said, ‘No. We will be loyal
citizens. But we will always put worship of God and obedience to his laws first’.
And the communist state could not cope with that.
You may have heard the story of Daniel and the lions den.
Well, the book of Daniel is written to Jews who have been taken prisoners into
exile in Babylon. The king makes a decree that people must pray to him, and
only to him. It meant that people were to recognise that the king is the
highest power that there can possibly be – in both earth and heaven. And if
people refuse to pray to him, then they will be thrown into the lions den. It
was a very silly decree. Daniel, one of his chief ministers, is a Jew and knows
that he cannot obey. He is loyal to the king, but he has a higher loyalty: to
his God. He doesn’t begin a rebellion. He doesn’t rubbish the king. He simply
continues to pray to his God, openly, knowing that he will face the
consequences.
And as Christians who stand under the word of God, then
it does seem that Jesus is saying that there may be times when we need to be
like Daniel, we need to disobey. We are to pray that that is not the case, but
that in everything we do we need to be controlled by love. Love for God and
love for people. And if that is the case, we need to be prepared to face the
consequences. Again, we simply look at
the faithful martyrs of this land, and of many others more recently – we think
of Christians under Daesh - persecuted, because of their love for God and
people. They paid the price: persecution, isolation, being sacked from their
jobs, imprisonment and execution, because they felt that they had to be
faithful to God.
The thing about Jesus’ response to the Pharisees is that
it means that there are no easy answers to this.
And how are we to make those decisions?
There is nothing easy about this.
Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, right
to be involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler?
Or you believe, as a Christian, that the place for sexual
intimacy is in the context of the marriage relationship between a man and
woman? You believe that not just because it is in the bible, but because you
think it is right for society, and for the best welfare of individuals. How do
you respond to the increasing and at times vitriolic intolerance to that view
in the West?
Or what should you do if your boss asks you to do
something that you know is clearly wrong at work?
At the very beginning of our passage, the Pharisees try
to flatter and butter up Jesus. They say, ‘Teacher, we know that you are
sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference
to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.’
I’m not completely sure that it is true that Jesus showed
deference to no one, for in fact he showed deference to everyone. He treated
each person as someone who had been made in the image of God. This is the man
who knelt down and washed his disciples feet, and who stood before Pilate and
recognised that God had put Pilate in that position
But it struck me those three qualities: sincerity or integrity,
a commitment to the way of God in accordance with the truth and a willingness
to see the image of God not on coins, but in other people – and to kneel before
anyone, whoever they are, whether rich or poor, is actually the way that we are
going to navigate this whole issue. It is the way to wisdom.
One ancient anonymous commentator wrote this:
“So let us always reflect the image of God in these ways:
I do not swell up with the arrogance of pride;
nor do I droop with the blush of anger;
nor do I succumb to the passion of avarice;
nor do I surrender myself to the ravishes of gluttony;
nor do I infect myself with the duplicity of hypocrisy;
nor do I contaminate myself with the filth of rioting;
nor do I grow flippant with the pretension of conceit;
nor do I grow enamored of the burden of heavy drinking;
nor do I alienate by the dissension of mutual admiration;
nor do I infect others with the biting of detraction;
nor do I grow conceited with the vanity of gossip.
Rather, instead, I will reflect the image of God in that
I feed on love;
grow certain on faith and hope;
strengthen myself on the virtue of patience;
grow tranquil by humility;
grow beautiful by chastity;
am sober by abstention;
am made happy by tranquility;
and am ready for death by practicing hospitality.
It is with such inscriptions that God imprints his coins
with an impression made neither by hammer nor by chisel but has formed them
with his primary divine intention. For Caesar required his image on every coin,
but God has chosen man, whom he has created, to reflect his glory.”
And of course, we’re not going to get it right. We’ll
make many mistakes along the way. There will be times when we are controlled by
fear, other times when we are controlled by money, wealth and power, and yet
other times when we are controlled by ego. We will forget that as Christians we
do not struggle against earthly principalities and powers, but against
spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm. We’ll be complicit in things
that we should never be complicit in, and we’ll take stands on things that we
should never take stands on. And all I can say is that I am immensely grateful
that I worship a God of mercy who is daily changing me.
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