PENTECOST 22

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: PENTECOST 22
PROPER: 24A
PLACE: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Kingsville
DATE: October 20, 2002


TEXT: Matthew 22:15-22 – “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

ISSUE: Jesus is being challenged. The world challenges Christ’s call to be faithful to God. He responds with the clever answer of “Give to God what belongs to God.” The world is challenged in return to a careful examination of what is it that we owe to God, who has already given us everything by God’s grace. It is to return to God the appreciation and understanding of our being God’s sons and daughters.
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Today we are dealing with one of the most famous of the well known challenges that were ever put to Jesus: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Let me set this exchange between Jesus and his opponents in context. This passage in Matthew’s Gospel account follows the fact that Jesus has already upset the tables of the money changers in the Temple, and he has been offering some of his famous parables to the crowds in the Temple complex. He is gaining significant stature and honor, and this is of course threatening to other honorable leaders. So you have a kind of ganging up on Jesus.
You have two groups confront Jesus, Pharisees and Herodians. You can tell there is some desperation here, because Pharisees and Herodians were themselves enemies. Pharisees were very committed to the Torah and meticulously involved and keeping its 613 laws for the sake of their purity. The Herodians were loyal to King Herod, and thereby were something of puppets of Roman authority. It was safer that way in keeping the peace. Factions that were normally opposed to one another confront Jesus to dishonor him, and minimize his status.
First, they flatter him in hopes of knocking him off guard: We know you are sincere teacher; you teach the way of God; you show no partiality. Then comes the challenge that is designed to entrap him: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? If he says, ”Yes,” the large peasant following will be lost. And, he will be accused of not keeping the law. If he says, “No,” the Herodians will report him as against the Roman Empire for treason, and all the hopes and fears aroused by the triumphal entry into Jerusalem may cause an insurrection. It appears to be a no win situation. So Jesus asks them to show him a coin. And they produce one, which is their first mistake. “Whose head is this, and whose title?” he asks. Obviously it is the emperors. It bears the image of Tiberius Caesar, and the inscription, “Tiberious Caesar, Augustus, son of the divine Augustus, high priest.” Caesar is God. To produce such a coin and image in the Temple was a breaking of the first commandment, their second mistake. It was idolatry, and the characters producing it, are humiliated in the eyes of the people, and lose honorable status. They are seen as hypocrites.
Let me insert here what the tax is that they are discussing. It was a head tax, or poll tax, required of every man, woman, and slave from the age of 12 to 65, (few people ever lived to 65) for the privilege of living in the Roman Empire.
So then, Jesus makes the clever response: “Give therefore (or repay) to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The people were amazed! Notice that in the Hebrew Scripture reading from Isaiah, the prophet acknowledges that God can even use a heathen to restoration to his people. When the Jews had been crushed and exiled by the Babylonians, Cyrus, a pagan Persian, set the Jews free to return and rebuild their homeland. They saw this action, as the action of God working through Cyrus. (Isaiah 45:1-7)
But the real point that Jesus is making is whether or not the Herodians, the Pharisees, and all gathered there that day were paying to God what they really owed God. That is the question for all the centuries and for us today. It’s the question to all who pay allegiance and taxes to the state, and to those who call themselves the people of God: Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Do we pay God appropriately for the privilege of being in the Kingdom, or Realm of God? That’s tricky; be careful. We believe in the complete and full grace of God. You don’t have to pay anything to be in the Kingdom of God. It is free. God’s grace is for free. It is unmerited and unearned. You don’t buy your way into God’s Kingdom. It is tax-free! No charge, free admission. It is the free gift of God’s love to his people.
All this is tricky, because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have Jesus saying that the workers in the vineyard who came early in the day, and those who came late in the day and all get the same wage: the bountiful love, mercy, forgiveness, and compassion of God. And then say, well you have to pay God to be in his Kingdom. None of us have got that kind of money or merit. You can’t have the prodigal son received home with such love, and the angry brother begged to come in to the party by the loving father with great forgiveness, and then say you have to be good to have the Father’s benefits. The grace and love just pour out to all the same. The Episcopal Church says that the appropriate offering to God is tithe of our income. A tithe? A tithe of our incomes is but a pittance, an insult in the very face of God for all we have been given: life, reason, insightfulness, skill, talents, abilities, our children, our families, our world, love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, beauty, freedom! All that for only a tithe? Come on.
Show me coin of what we pay to God. Show it to me! Show it to me! Show it to me!
It is us! We are the coins in the hands of God! Show me the image of who is on the coin? It is you. We are made in the image of God. It was stamped upon us at our creation and acknowledged by the sign of the cross imprinted on our heads at Holy Baptism. We are the valuable and precious coinage of God. God is stamped upon us and within us. “You are sealed by the Spirit in Baptism, and marked as God’s own forever.” We are God’s. We express God’s worth in the world. We are his loyal legal tender currency in the present and coming Kingdom of God. We are given to the world as an alternative form and kind of currency, and economics. We are the worth of God’s love, of God’s forgiveness, of God’s longing for justice, of God compassion, of God’s mercy. We reveal by our loyalty, our faith and our devotion to the Great God Almighty how valuable and worthwhile God is, and how God’s grace is continually and lavishly extended through us, his coinage. We are the channels, the agents, the economy of God that is but treasure for the world that funnels the free love and grace to the world. We extend the treasure; we are the treasure by the grace of God. And God forbid that we should deliberately allow our selves to be counterfeit through disloyalty, indifference, or apathy.
Today we face some difficult times. The American economy is slow, in retreat or recession. But the retreat of the Christian churches in the world in their longing for safety, and lack of concern for human needs, and especially health care for all, and for involvement in justice needs for communities is a far cry worse, and in greater recession. We face a world where people are brutal and violent. The economy and coinage of God’s love must be taught and spread around more to give the world a greater treasure of love and hope than it presently experiences. We live in a country that uses the death penalty as a source of ultimate punishment, as if human lives really don’t count. When the coinage of God is the coinage of compassion and loving grace in opposition to the harshness of the world. We live in a world that solves its problems by violence and war, at the expense of human lives and great suffering, especially that of children. If we face situations where we must and feel forced into war for the greater good of God’s people, it must not be done with joy and a sense of triumph and delight, but with resistance, sorrow, penitence, and without gloating. If we gloat, we diminish the value of the God of peace and justice.
The long and the short of all this, the coinage of God is us. We are given full value, being in the image of God, and valuable to God, Sons and daughters of the high God, We are a part of the royal priesthood of God. Remember what you say at a Baptismal Service of a new person made a part of the Kingdom of God: “We receive you into the household of God, confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his royal priesthood.” How we give, share, sacrifice, love, become involved in God’s world is so very important. We have other commitments too, and we pay the powers that be, what is appropriate, but even the powers that be belong to God. God is gracious, bountiful, and all giving in his love, and we are the continuing expenditure, The coins of his Grace, in a world deeply need of the mercy and grace of God.