Then the Pharisees met together to find a way to trap Jesus in his words. 16 They sent their disciples, along with the supporters of Herod, to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are genuine and that you teach God’s way as it really is. We know that you are not swayed by people’s opinions, because you don’t show favoritism. 17 So tell us what you think: Does the Law allow people to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
18 Knowing their evil motives, Jesus replied,“Why do you test me, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used to pay the tax.” And they brought him a denarion.
20“Whose image and inscription is this?” he asked.
21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said,“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”
22 When they heard this they were astonished, and they departed. (Common English Bible)
“The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers: Jesus Teaches at the Temple,” Week Two
Rising out of the Welsh village of Hawarden, Gladstone’s Library is a multistory library, museum, and hotel clad in brick on the outside and framed by carved wood on the inside. It was named for the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone who, in the final years of his life in the 1890s, dedicated himself to the mission of, as his daughter put it, “bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books.”
And so, at age eighty-five, with the help of only his daughter and his valet, Gladstone personally carted back and forth the 32,000-some books of his personal library to the Gladstone Library’s site with his own wheelbarrow—on top of a 41,000-pound donation as seed money for the library, which today would be worth roughly five million pounds, or roughly six-and-a-half million dollars.
But it’s not the money that impresses me most about this particular legacy of his, it really isn’t. Glorifying donations by multimillionaires only reinforces the notion that we need a multimillionaire class to begin with. No, it’s the thought of an eighty-five-year-old man personally carrying his life’s opus out to a place for all of us to be enriched by. It’s real. It’s sacrificial. And, in his diary that day of December 23, 1895, Gladstone simply wrote, “May God in His mercy prosper it.”
My misgivings about the use of the term “prosper” in connection to God aside (as “prosperity theology in its current incarnation is largely a twentieth-century, rather than nineteenth-century, invention, and so predates Gladstone), that hope for God’s presence is what I imagine faith at its best to look like—a former Caesar (as Prime Minister of Great Britain) rendering not to himself or to another Caesar, but to God and to the children of God…and not by simply writing a check, but by doing the hard work himself.
To me, that is real authority. That is moral authority. That is what rendering to God looks like.
But from whence does such moral authority issue? How is it later revoked? And how are we to respect it, if authority in turn does not respect the humanity of those who’re under it?
All of these questions, and more, form the basis of the sermon series that I will be spending these several weeks unpacking with you, which I have entitled “The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers.” Jesus teaching at the temple is a scene that happens twice in the chronology of His life—once when He is an adolescent, in the Gospel of Luke, and again during Holy Week when He is an adult.
The back-and-forth debate between the adult Jesus and the temple authorities as depicted in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is, at a glance, the sort of stuff that evangelical dreams are made of: a chance to publicly debate your theological opponents in the grandest square ever, and for all the marbles! It’s the entire basis of the God’s Not Dead franchise, and the premise behind so many other Christian stories, books, even radio adventures.
Naturally, there is quite a bit more to the picture than that, and we spent last week trying to unpack that, to set the table for the rest of this series. Now, from this week onward, we will be going verse-by-verse through Matthew 22, beginning with one of the most famous of these Passion stories of Jesus teaching at the temple, the “Render unto Caesar” periscope in the middle of the chapter.
It is a story that I have seen used, misused, and abused for years throughout my career in parish ministry. I have seen it used to justify taxation and to oppose all taxation. I have seen it used to say that everything belongs to “Caesar,” a la Jeff Sessions and Romans 13, and I have seen it used to say that absolutely nothing belongs to Caesar.
Such absolutist stands for or against an earthly government certainly makes the interpretation of Scripture easier, if also incredibly inaccurate. But ease is what we so often crave from our religion, rather than dis-ease, comfort rather than discomfort, and the cushioned padding of what we think we know rather than what truth may in fact be out there, waiting to be grasped and embraced.
Perhaps the most egregious example of the misuse and abuse of this story that I have ever seen came from Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University and one of Donald Trump’s most prominent Christian enablers. In December 2015, as Trump was formulating his Muslim travel ban proposal, Falwell Jr. responded to the San Bernadino shooting by first saying that more people needed to have conceal-carry permits so that “we could end those Muslims before they walked in.”
The outcry against Falwell Jr. was positively thunderous, and to defend his inexplicable comment, Falwell doubled down by citing the “render unto Caesar” teaching of Jesus, saying, “Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” and part of that was to go to war, protecting whatever nation was under control of the king.”
Later in the campaign, Falwell Jr. would again go on to misappropriate this line, claiming it meant that people should support and vote for “the best candidate,” as though the Roman Empire were a twenty-first century western democracy.
But lets look at the setting of today’s passage: Jesus is in the temple complex, and once more He is engaged, this time by asking whether people should pay taxes to the Roman emperor or not. It is something of a trick question from the temple leaders to use the presence of the crowd to their advantage, just as Jesus used the presence of the crowd to His advantage in last week’s reading when He asked them from where John the Baptist’s authority came.
It is something of a trick question because if Jesus says yes, that taxes should be paid to Rome, it would expose Him not as the Messiah many Israelites had spent years, decades, hoping for—a Messiah who would lead them to glorious victory against the hated Roman occupation and to eventual independence as a nation. But if Jesus says no, that taxes should not be paid, it could be interpreted by Pontius Pilate—who, if you recall, is presently in Jerusalem to oversee the coming Passover and ensuring there is no rebellion on a holiday about a story of the Israelites throwing off the yoke of their imperial enslavers once already—as inciting insurrection against Rome.
Jesus’s rejoinder, though, springs Him loose from that conundrum. He first asks for a denarius, which by itself impeaches the credibility of His questioners on spec. Shekels were the legal tender of the temple complex, which was why the presence of the disliked moneychangers was necessitated—they were there to take the denarii of pilgrims and change them into shekels (and in so doing, taking the predatorily high commissions that made them so disliked among the faithful).
By being in possession of denarii, then, Jesus’s questioners are revealing themselves as not adhering to the shekels-only custom of the temple complex. Jesus makes that lack of adherence public (it should also be noted that Matthew includes in Jesus's questioners the Herodians, as a separate addition. Herodians as relatives or supporters of Herod were supporting a client king of the Roman Empire, and they did not wholly overlap with the temple leaders. These distinctions matter when discussing the temple authorities and how characterizations of them have historically fueled antisemitism. We must handle our texts with care and precision given how they have been historically used).
Secondly, the denarius acts as a helpful prop for that immortal line—“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.” Jesus is taking a dime-sized coin and juxtaposing it with the whole massive, expanded temple complex. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, indeed—for the things which belong to Caesar, like silver coins, are positively lilliputian in comparison to the things that belong to God, like the temple itself.
Jesus is trying to make a point—without falling into the trap of the original question—about the limited scope of Rome’s true power. What the emperor could lay claim to in Israel was but a speck compared to what God could lay claim to in Israel. The Israelites were, and remain, part of God’s people. Caesar, by contrast, was simply a man. An emperor falsely deified by his own people upon his death (and, by the time of Domitian, during his lifetime as well), but still only a man.
So, give to an idol their graven images. Give to Caesar the coin that bears his face. But give to God the very best of what we have to offer—and, as a part of that offering, give to the children of God the very best of what we have to offer as well—like a temple, sanctuary, or library of such dimensions that they eclipse what Caesar demands.
For there may well come a time under the presidency of our current Caesar in which the cult of personality that surrounds him demands a show or sacrifice of fealty that neither you, or I, or any person of faith, should be able to make in good conscience.
The service we can render in good conscience to our current Caesar is the service of prophecy, of saying to him like Jeremiah said to Jehoiakim, and like Isaiah said to Manasseh, that we see what you are doing to the oppressed and the vulnerable and the marginalized and dressing it up in the language of God from your Christian enablers. We see it, and so does God. We judge it, but God judges it rightly.
And it is that God who judges rightly to whom we ultimately render service. Everybody else—me, any other pastor, any other congregation or denomination, is ultimately middle management. We are the small denarius coin. God is the gigantic temple—and everything else beyond it.
There exists a whole realm of God that lies beyond what our Caesar, or most any Caesar, would have you believe, because such Caesars are not interested in rendering to that God, or to the people who claim to follow that God. They are not the Caesars who will personally carry 32,000 books to build a library at the age of eighty-five. They are content to remain on their thrones of selfishness.
And to those Caesars, including the one who sits on his throne at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we must be prepared to say loudly, and in one collective voice, “Blessed be the one true God, and long may that God reign!”
May that be the service you render as a follower of that same God of love, whose image you bear.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Olympia, Washington
July 8, 2018