The Emperor and God (10.18.20)
The Emperor and God
Matthew 22:15-22
October 18, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church
15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. 16 So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “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. 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” 21 They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” 22 When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
For weeks now, many of us have been reading and wrestling with Robert Jones’ book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. And Jones will be with us on Tuesday night at 6:00 p.m. via zoom, so we can hear him engage more of these themes in person.
Part of what has been so deeply disturbing to read is Jones’ well-crafted timeline of how white Christians in the United States purposefully and consciously aligned themselves with the power of the government, many of them hoping the Confederacy would be the sustaining government of this nation. To ally themselves with that kind of power and purpose, they twisted and massaged scripture and theology to match the power and influence they were so pursuing and enjoying.
All of this is obviously on my mind and heart even more as we near the conclusion of the 2020 Presidential campaign with the election now underway. I continue to find myself at odds with the loudest and largest Christian groups and their leaders—white evangelicals. I have even less patience now than I did four years ago with people who profess to be about the Way of Jesus and also the Way of the White House, particularly this one. I almost changed that to say “clergy” or “faith leaders” instead of all people of Christian tradition, but I knew that wasn’t what I was trying to say. I mean all people who profess to be actively and earnestly pursuing the path of Jesus the Christ yet are also somehow encouraged and bolstered by the most recent years of our dominant political regime in the United States. The two ways are diametrically opposed, and I really do believe that. In fact, I also believe that’s what Jesus is getting at in the gospel lesson today.
At this point in Matthew’s gospel, the case against Jesus is growing. Matthew’s gospel wants us to understand the urgency leading us toward his arrest and crucifixion in the Temple encounters of this section, and he wants us to understand WHY Jesus is a threat to power.
I think this thread of the Jesus narrative is one we desperately need to rediscover in Christian teaching in this country. We need to reclaim the story of WHY people would arrest and crucify Jesus. WHAT was he doing that had people so worked up. Was it simply a matter of his love and welcome being too broad? That seems more likely to annoy and offend than to threaten an empire. That can’t be all there is to it—he was just such a tremendously nice guy and so endlessly welcoming that everyone in power was ANNOYED to the point of state sanctioned murder?
No, it seems religious and political leaders alike sensed he was influential enough that a revolution might be brewing. He was challenging and questioning the methods of the Roman empire, teaching non-violent resistance. He was challenging and questioning the way rules of his faith tradition were being manipulated to control and limit people, and he challenged those manipulations by breaking laws and then teaching about why he did what he did. He embodied a way that he claimed was in line with the radical love of God. And so people with power to protect were threatened by the way he simply would not bow to it. In fact, the growing concern gave way to the old proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
That’s how we get to this scene in Matthew 22—the Herodians and the Pharisees are working together to trap Jesus, and Matthew reports as much; there is no secret here to motive. What should grab our attention as readers is the alliance being made between these two groups. On one side, we have religious fundamentalists who want to protect the ways of the faith they claim to know so perfectly and the power their guardianship affords them. On the other is a political body, born out of 1st century Judaism, protecting and preserving the ways of Rome amidst the practice of their faith. They share faith roots but have divergent priorities and agendas, yet they are willing to work together to advance their own agendas because they agree that Jesus is now a threat to their ways of life. This story is ancient but we know it so well!
Jesus quickly recognizes what is happening, sees the power struggle, hears yet again their questions about authority despite his efforts to explain himself through parables. He will not be trapped.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” The question is one of duality—the answer can only be either this or that but not both. Either you pay taxes to the emperor and show allegiance to Caesar or you don’t participate in the system and show your allegiance instead to God. But it can’t be both, the Herodians and Pharisees reason. And by getting Jesus to answer one way or the other, they show his disloyalty either as a faith leader or as a resident within the Roman Empire’s boundaries.
Jesus calls for a coin that would be rather controversial to have in the Temple, but someone produces one easily and readily. Then Jesus asks of it, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” or “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” The answer, of course, is the emperor, and the inscription on the currency of that nation declared him the Son of God. He answers them in a way that doesn’t sound baffling to us at all, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
With the passage of time and the way we as church in our time and place have told this story, we have easily separated our loyalties to state and loyalties to religion by effectively making separate compartments for them—give to government, give to church, have a public life and a private life, have a spiritual life and a regular life. Nothing about this sounds confusing to us because this is how we have told the story for years. You can be at least two people at the same time, even if those people are incompatible with one another.
Jesus is really talking about image here. Jesus is asking them about likeness. Whose image and likeness is on this coin? And the implied question that mirrors the spoken one is, “Whose image and likeness is on you? Which image do you bear?”
Columbia Seminary’s Raj Nadella writes, “[T]he ‘coinage’ of God’s kingdom is of a radically different nature than that of Caesar. God does not trade in Caesar’s currency. The whole nature and trajectory of God’s kingdom that Jesus has inaugurated, and is inviting people to participate in, is fundamentally at odds with Caesar’s. Which is why while people must pay to both Caesar and God, they must pay them not only for different reasons but in entirely different currencies. Paying to God and participating in the divine kingdom entails repenting of the ways they have been complicit in the Roman empire and its agenda. Paradoxically, then, people should pay taxes empire has imposed upon them while actively resisting it and working to promote the alternative kingdom.
Jesus is complicating his listeners’ paradigm for engaging to the empire. For communities that are dealing with oppressive and violent regimes, the choices are never as clear cut as paying taxes or flatly refusing to pay—literally or metaphorically. Challenging the empire and undermining its oppressive powers requires lot of negotiation, tact and imagination. Not paying taxes will not necessarily bring the empire down. The questions is—what will? Within the context of Matthew’s Gospel, the Beatitudes suggests that whatever brings wholeness, transformation and healing to communities is a form of resistance to imperial worldview and ethos, and thus perhaps the form of coinage required of disciples especially in divisive times.”
This turn of phrase invites not just questioning of the status quo but true imagination. That shouldn’t be a problem for people of faith who tell the story of a hovering, moving God with power to speak worlds into existence. The question of image and likeness immediately draws the mind back to THE guiding story—“from the opening chapter of Genesis: ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.’ Likeness – ikon – is the word used in the Septuagint (Greek translation) of Genesis,” notes David Lose, ”and is also the word Matthew chooses. So a better translation of v. 20 is likely, ‘Whose likeness is this, and what title?’…I suspect those listening closely to Jesus’ word choice would have harkened back to God’s initial pronouncement and promise: We bear God’s likeness and are therefore made to be more than we sometimes realize.”
Andrew Prior challenges our contemporary telling of this story as he observes, “[I]n the [1st century cultural] mindset, Jesus has given Caesar no authority at all. He has said the precise opposite of our modern idea that we can pay our taxes and keep our religion private.”
The real question here is: To whom do we belong? What way is forming us and shaping us and guiding us through our life? What is the emperor’s and what is God’s? This is not a text about giving to the government what belongs to the government and to the church what belongs to the church. The question here is about your story. The story of this moment, the story that gets told of your entire life, the story that guides you and becomes the one for which you are known. When your allegiance is begged from all directions, what does it mean to give to God what is God’s?
Clayton Schmit adds, “Take a look at any person. Whose inscription is on him or her? Each is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). There can be no doubt, then, what Jesus means here. Give yourselves to God because it is to [God] that you belong.” It’s not a question we will answer easily today, and the crowds that day were astounded. Sometimes we just sit with the questions for a while. What does it mean to bear the likeness of Caesar? What does it mean to bear the likeness of God? And if we are interested in giving our likenesses to God, what in the world does that look like?
I will not ever stand before you and say, “YOU MUST VOTE for A, B, and C.” But I will absolutely say that if the guiding story of God’s love is the one that is forming your life, then the stories of all being made in the image of God, all beings bearing God’s divine likeness, all beings carrying that first blessing of “very goodness” should be in your heart and on your mind and with your spirit as you vote, as you live, as you engage in your community. If it isn’t, then you don’t really believe it.
David Lose draws us to notice Jesus’ particularly brilliant response as he “accuses [those who have confronted him] of neither blasphemy nor disloyalty. Rather, he calls them hypocrites, those who have quite literally taken to wearing another, and false, likeness. So perhaps the charge against those trying to entrap or discount Jesus then or now is best understood as amnesia, for they have forgotten who they are, in whose likeness they were made.”
Amnesia, in this sense, can genuinely be a forgetting of true self and guiding story. Have we forgotten? Have we forgotten who we are? Have we forgotten in whose likeness each and every one of our neighbors was made?
Australian pastor Andrew Prior goes further, saying, “To deny the flourishing of all who are human, is to cease to worship God, and to cease loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is to side with government, and with the nation, when it has become Caesar-like.” To find our likeness in the ways of Caesar is a way of chasing after the illusion of comfort and security and the hope of power. To find our likeness in the ways of God is to believe in the wholeness and flourishing of all things and all people and to participate with great hope in bringing that story to life. When we give our likeness to God’s likeness, we are giving to God what is God’s.
“[W]e give to God that which belongs to God: that is, we give ourselves,” Clayton Schmit writes. “We take the sacred trust and invest it in lives of worship. Sometimes, that worship occurs privately, in devotion. Sometimes, in church with our brothers and sisters in Christ. And the rest of the time, it occurs in the sphere of daily work and service. All of this is worship.” Please hear that again: "All of this is worship. Ultimately, giving ourselves to God means that we give ourselves to the world.”
And if we’re still wanting for an example of how this likeness might take shape, all we must do is turn our attention the one who was approached by the Pharisees and Herodians that day. It seems the honoring the likeness of God in each one of us will make us less comfortable in the power structures of our society. Honoring the likeness will draw us into community with people who don’t fit in the neat categories all cultures like to create. Honoring the likeness of God in us will compel us to live out a radical love that might well threaten those who are making themselves in the likeness of Caesar.
You bear the likeness of God in you. Everyone you meet, even if you are squinting really hard and cannot see it, bears the likeness of God in them. Every neighbor, every stranger, every person we pass by and do not notice or do not want to engage bears the lioness of God within them.
This is the story we claim is guiding us. May you remember this is your story. May you come to understand that your life itself is a gift. May you give to God what is God’s.