Text: Matthew 22:15-22
If I had to come up with my number one complaint about Jesus, it would be that he never seems to endorse my favorite causes.
How often are my prayers not prayers for God’s will to be done, per se, but rather prayers asking God to make the thing I was already planning to do go more smoothly?
How often do I equate my gut reactions with the will of God—or the way I want to vote with God’s plans for the nation and world—when I really should be giving my desires to God, and holding whatever happens with loose fingers?
It’s easy to assume my thoughts are biblical…as long as I’m careful to avoid any passages that might challenge what I’m thinking. And it’s easy to assume my take on things is the Christian take on things…as long as I don’t listen too carefully to those believers who see things differently than I do.
The deeper I get into middle age, the more deeply I tend to appreciate comfort and predictability. The worldview that’s taken shape over my 20s, 30s, and 40s has now begun the long process of fossilization. Soon everything will “of course” be the way I believe it to be, and contradictory views will “of course” be way off base.
But then there’s Jesus…
Believers in Jesus may be easy to categorize. But Jesus, on the other hand, not so much. He’s a living Lord, after all, and not a caricature or a mascot for my personal causes. My views may harden and fossilize as time goes on, but Jesus remains lively and nimble. And when allowed to be himself through the biblical text, he never fails to make me question my assumptions.
Jesus never fails to disturb me.
In our passage this morning, Jesus’ opponents continue trying to undermine him. His popularity with the crowds gathered for Passover is making him a threat to all the political and religious parties of Jerusalem. So they’ve begun teaming up in an effort to take him down.
The chief priests and temple leaders, whom we’ve met in previous episodes, belong to the party of the Sadducees. They are the most acclimated to Greek and Roman culture, and the most sold-out to the foreign occupiers among the religious leadership of the day.
The Pharisees, whom we’ve met many times in the Gospels and who appear in our story this morning, are the popular party. They are the most pious and biblical of the mainstream groups.
The most extreme groups would be the Essenes and the Zealots, but they tend to be outsiders—the Essenes being religious separatists who often live in their own communities outside of town, and the Zealots being religious and political revolutionaries.
Then we have the “Herodians” of our text. There wasn’t actually a political or religious party by that name. Rather, by this term Matthew means the political supporters of Herod Antipas, the puppet king set up by the Romans over the regions of Galilee and Perea.
These groups got along with each other about as well as culture-war Republicans get along with transgender communists. The radicality of Jesus’ ministry approach is, in fact, well illustrated by the fact that his inner circle of twelve disciples includes both Matthew the tax-collector—employee of the conquering Romans—and also one “Simon Zelotes”, a.k.a Simon the Zealot, a member from a revolutionary religious-political party who would have liked nothing more than to slit the throats of people like Matthew.
In our passage this morning, we see two of these volatile groups in Jerusalem joining forces in their struggle against Jesus. The Pharisees, popular party of the day and ancestors to today’s Orthodox Judaism, send some of their disciples alongside a group of “Herodians.” Those who trace their spiritual and political lineage back to Simon Maccabee—Simon the Hammer, defender of the temple and rebel against foreign idolatry—take their debate with supporters of King Herod, puppet of pagan Rome, to Jesus in the guise of seeking his perspective on their debate: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?”
As conquered people, Jews were required to pay an annual tax of one denarius to Rome—the equivalent of one day’s labor. The coin they were required to use for the tax bore the image of Emperor Tiberius, adopted son of Caesar Augustus, with the inscription “Emperor Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus” on the front and “High Priest” (Pontif Maximus) on the back, with an image of the goddess of peace. This made the coin quite literally an idol. And not only an idol, but an idol the Jews were required to obtain and then offer as tribute in an act of fealty to a foreign, idolatrous, divinized ruler. For the many polytheistic people across the empire, accustomed as they were to acknowledging the gods of other people, this might be humbling at worst. For the Jewish people—worshippers of the one true God, children of Abraham, and disciples of Moses—it was a slap in the face.
Enter the debate between the Pharisees and the supporters of King Herod.
Our passage, however, tells us that these two groups are working together in bringing this question to Jesus. Will Jesus agree with the Pharisees, and openly endorse sedition from Rome? Or will he agree with the Herodians, and openly endorse idolatry? The setup seems perfect. Jesus will be condemned either way. It’s like asking someone on live television if they’ve stopped beating their wife. Whether Jesus gets arrested by the Romans as a political agitator, or abandoned by the crowds as a religious sellout, either way Jesus’ enemies win.
Jesus, however, throws everyone off their guard. For starters, he easily sees through their deception and flattery. He then makes them produce one of the coins—revealing that someone among them is carrying an idol around in their pocket on temple grounds. Then he asks whose image and name appear on the coin. When he is told the coin has the emperor’s name and image on it, he flips the coin back to it’s owner in dismissal and says, “Well, then, give it to him.”
The answer, though, isn’t an endorsement of the tax. It’s a dismissal of the question. Even a dismissal of the coin itself. Jesus says, essentially, “Meh.”
Jesus then goes on and says to his questioners, “Give the thing with Caesar’s name and image on it back to him, yes. But, while you’re at it, give what has God’s name and image on it back to him.”
If there were microphones in Jesus’ day, this would be a mic-drop moment. The statement shuts everyone down. Why? Because they bear the image of God, as all human beings do, and as decedents of Israel they bear his name. “Give this dumb little coin back to Caesar,” Jesus tells them, “and give yourselves back to God.”
Jesus has neither endorsed nor forbidden the royal tax. He has damned it with faint praise. And he has gotten to the deeper question behind every issue of life: Have we really given ourselves to God in faith and obedience? Or are we holding ourselves back from him?
Many of the commentators I read in preparing this sermon discussed Jesus’ answer as though he were telling us how to balance our religious devotion with our political obligations. We honor God with our lives, they said, but in doing so we must also participate responsibly in the social and political needs of our day. And this, I’ll admit, is a reasonable application. We get this emphasis, especially, in Romans chapter 13. But more immediately to the context at hand, Jesus is taking our debates and our causes—even our apparently devout and biblical causes, like those of the Pharisees—and he’s cutting them off at the knees. He’s showing that we can have the greatest goals in the world—such as wanting to have the culture around us conform to the Scriptures—and yet not have our own hearts submitted to God.
“Bow your hearts first to God,” Jesus tells us. “Give yourselves personally and entirely to him. And whatever else you do will flow out of that.”
Let’s Pray
