This Sunday, the lectionary invites us to ponder Matthew 22:15-22. The English Standard Version supplies the heading “Paying Taxes to Caesar.”
The gospels were written and circulated in places ruled by an Emperor, called Caesar, in Latin. The Caesar[1] claimed the same obedience a robot-owner demands from his robot. He claimed the absolute obedience claimed by God. He punished those who didn’t obey him.
Today’s report is set in the Temple in Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish faith; a place of pilgrimage for Jews from all over the world; the supreme symbol of Jewish claims to be the chosen people of God.
It’s the last week of Jesus’ life. It’s the day after he overturned the tables of the money changers. He has, very boldly, returned to the Temple to continue teaching about the Kingdom of God. But the Jewish leaders interrupt him. As I said last week, they try to draw him into a trap about the source of his authority.[2] But he defeats them; he humiliates them. Now, they change the subject to the authority of Caesar.
It’s a very dangerous subject. It’s about paying taxes imposed by Caesar. Taxes which pay for projects like non-Jewish, pagan temples; entertainment arenas; luxurious palaces. Taxes which severely burden people; make them always hungry and unhealthy.[3]
Matthew identifies the leaders in today’s passage as Pharisees and Herodians. They didn’t challenge Jesus personally. They sent their disciples, their pupils. So that, if Jesus again succeeded in humiliating the questioners, it’s the pupils who’ll be publicly shamed, not the leaders.
Matthew spells out the goal of the leaders: they want to “entangle Jesus in his words.” They carefully instruct their pupils on what they should do.
The pupils follow the instructions exactly. They begin by praising Jesus. They call him “teacher;” they say he’s “truthful;” they say he puts God’s opinion above the opinion of men. High praise!
Then, they put to him the carefully worded question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” It’s the type of question lawyers ask witnesses. A question for which the answer is either yes or no.[4] A question which often leads into a trap.
But this isn’t a court of law. There’s no judge to instruct Jesus to answer yes or no. Like all good leaders, like all good teachers, like all alert witnesses, Jesus quickly understands the purpose of the question: it’s goal is to entrap him, and to evoke a memory.
The memory of Judas of Gamala, a Galilean like himself. About 30 years earlier,[5] Judas had led a tax revolt against the “Census of Quirinius.” The census ordered people to return to their ancestral homes and register themselves by paying a tax. It was why Joseph took pregnant Mary to Bethlehem, and why Jesus was born there, as Luke tells us in his Gospel.[6]
Getting Jesus to oppose paying taxes would put Jesus in the same camp as Judas and his followers, who were executed for the crime of sedition. It would be a political master-strike against Jesus; it would provide witness testimony to say he opposed Caesar. It would also reduce his popularity, because agreeing with him would result in arrest, torture; even death.
Getting Jesus to agree to paying taxes would also make Jesus unpopular. Because the burden of taxation was great, and the government of Caesar did little to help people overcome their hunger and ill-health.
Whichever answer he gave, he would lose; his opponents would score a public victory. And that’s the point. Their question was not designed to get Jesus to teach about paying taxes. Their question was designed to make him lose face, lose credibility; designed to take the sting out of how he had earlier shown the public that these religious leaders were hypocrites.
Jesus didn’t answer yes or no. Instead, he asked them to produce the only coin the Caesar would accept for payment of the tax. A coin forbidden by Jewish law, because it had the image of Caesar, a man, on it; and because it included an inscription that Caesar was “son of a god.”[7]
Jesus’ asked them whose image was on the coin; asked them what the inscription said. After they answered him, he replied, “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Matthew tells us, “they marvelled” and “left him and went away.”
The “render unto Caesar” incident is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Did they record it in order to teach us about the authority of kings or governments, and about paying taxes? I don’t think so. Because over the centuries, Jesus’ response has been read in many ways. I’ll list four of them, in no particular order.
One, Jesus separated the secular from the religious and didn’t insist that Jews had to be ruled by Jews.
Two, he said we should pay taxes, because all authority, even Caesar’s authority, comes from God.[8]
Three, he said that since we are made in God’s image, we must obey God’s commands before we obey Caesar’s commands.[9]
Four, he showed that the coin is tiny in the massive Temple; we should trust and obey the God of the massive Universe, not men on tiny coins.
The passage is not about paying taxes. It’s about the need for authority. For legitimate authority. Authority which aligns with God’s will. Not to exploit, but to do justice; to create conditions which allow all things to thrive; and to worship God not just in temples or on set days, but in all of life, all the time.
Peace be with you.
[1] During the adult life of Jesus, the Caesar was Tiberius (AD 14 – AD 17).
[2] The leaders challenged Jesus over his authority to question their decision to license trading operations in the Temple. And he publicly humiliated them by the way in which he refused to answer their challenge: he turned their challenge against themselves. See Matthew 21:23-27.
[3] This is why Jesus so often fed and healed people.
[4] The technical term is “close-ended question.”
[5] In AD 6. From Luke 2:2, we know Quirinius was governor of Syria.
[7] Divi Filius. The first and second of the Ten Commandments. See Exodus 20:4,3.
[8] Jesus famously said to Pilate, who ordered his execution, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.” See John 19:11.
[9] This is a fair reading, because the Gospels are resistance literature – they often say things indirectly, so as to avoid making it easy for the authorities to prosecute them.
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