Harry T. Cook

10/19/08

Matthew 22: 15-22

Has each of us at one time or another not wandered into the middle of an argument between feuding parties and wondered what under the sun was at issue?

That’s exactly our situation today as Matthew drops us into the middle of a colloquy in which he depicts Jesus and representatives of established interests of the time dealing with a question about the coinage used to pay a tax to the Roman government of occupation. Is the argument about the tax itself? About the propriety of Jews paying taxes to a foreign government? Is it about the coin used for payment? Is it about Caesar? Is it about God? Or is it about Jesus outfoxing those trying to trip him up and make him say something that would run him afoul of one party or another?

By the way, the question, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” is the classic “When did you stop beating your wife?” However you answer it, you’re in trouble with some one, which is exactly what the inquirer intended. The passage at hand, of course, is the “Render unto Caesar” one; it is among the most misunderstood and misused of all biblical texts. It is unfortunate that it recurs in the liturgical cycle at just about the time parishes are raising money for the next fiscal year. Pastors are thus tempted to use the text as a bludgeon where tithing is concerned. That said: I go further to state that there are a number of ways to interpret the text. I will deal with one of them. You could say that the crux of the passage has to do with what belongs to whom.

The classic Hebraic philosophy is that life is unitary under the sponsorship of its creator. Hence this line from the 24th Psalm: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the compass of the world, and all they that dwell therein.” Would a person such as Jesus as he is variously depicted in the gospels have been likely to have forgotten or quarreled with the basic principle laid down in that text by saying that some things belonged to Caesar and others to God? The question always to ask about such a story as this is not did it occur as depicted, but what did the writer of the gospel document have in mind by including it? Mark was the first gospel to include a version of the story. The Gospel of Thomas has one, too. Also Luke, suggesting that it was thought important enough to have been repeated in one form or another by gospel compilers for more than 50 years in disparate communities moving from traditional Judaism to nascent Christianity. It is difficult for us at this great remove of time and place to get a sense of what must have been a huge fruit basket upset as old verities and ways were being challenged and in some cases abandoned while bold new thinking was coming into its own. And if the question of what belonged to whom was anywhere near the center of that ongoing ferment, then the story of the tax, the coin, its image and Jesus’ baffling answer to the question of the tax’s legality must be seen in light of that situation.

Of course, it was legal to pay the tax to the emperor. It was patently illegal not to do so. Moreover, the Romans ran a pretty efficient government, being by some 60 generations ancestors of Mussolini who legendarily got the trains to run on time.

Since the coin in question bore the likeness of Caesar, it was already “tref,” i.e., unclean in that it was a graven image. So, heck yes! Get rid of it by paying the hated tax and move on.

The tax may belong to the emperor, but that’s all right because – as Matthew and his gospel-editing colleagues may have thought – the emperor belongs to God inasmuch as “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the compass of the world, and all they that dwell therein.”

Rational persons in the 21st Century do not necessarily believe in the biblical god of creation, elementary science having clearly demonstrated a different reality. They can, however, with intellectual honesty believe in the unitary nature of life in which every action has an equal and opposite reaction in that all the manifold parts of life in the universe are connected chemically and physically, at the very least, and maybe in more ways than we can imagine. It is for some of us a near-overwhelming temptation to subdivide life by choosing up sides between a religious commitment and citizenship, between a Caesar and a god, between “us” and any “them.” In the final analysis, however, the fact remains that the people of the earth are one. We share the same genome.

The Caesars in our common life may be as loathsome as were Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Josif Stalin and Saddam Hussein, and each, of course, demanded what they thought belonged to them and spared no human sensibility to obtain it. Each of them had their Jesuses whom they persecuted and tried to silence, often succeeding. But none of them could change the basic fact that we all belong to the same species, all share the same earth, breathe the same air and, as such, all belong to each other, no matter whose likeness appears upon which currency or who is taxing whom for what.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.