Talking to Caeasar

Text: Matthew 22:15-22

One of Martin Luther’s contributions to the discussion of the church and its role in our lives was the insistence that our faith be grounded in the Bible. Sola scriptura, as he put it in Latin. Scripture alone. Meaning that other guides to our faith were secondary, even if useful. When in doubt, turn to the book. He came to this rule of thumb through his own experiences, trying to figure out what he and what the church should do in a time of crisis for both.

It’s a good start. But as you know from your own experience, what scripture says is in detail not always clear. There are lots of reasons for this, good and bad. One of the not so good reasons is that people like to do the job backwards. That is, they know what they want to think and they find passages in scripture that support their own view. These passages are called “proof texts”—verses that prove our own personal points. This is not what Luther meant. But even if we are careful and open to listening to the Bible, we are hearing with modern ears words that were spoken at least 2000 years ago. They speak to us, but they were not spoken to us in particular. Therefore, we might mistake (or ignore) the context in which they were said or written. We do not live in the time of Jesus, for example, and we cannot assume that people who heard him heard as we do. They probably did not. The words do have meaning for us—the Bible has been a bestseller for a long time. But we need to think hard about how to apply what Jesus said to other people, and apply it instead to us and our time. And as Luther would advise us, we need to do that—as he did—in study, prayer, and hearts open to guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew has long been used a proof text. It has been used to call for or justify the idea—which by now is a modern dogma—of the separation of church and state. But this is not true to its original time, and it is not helpful to us in our current time.

When the Pharisees and the Herodians approached Jesus, Palestine was occupied by Rome. Rome, a foreign empire, had possession of the land and governance of Israel. Though leaving the culture pretty much intact, Rome had installed a vassal king, Herod, and extracted wealth from the land in the form of taxes paid in Roman currency. On the coins it read, Tiberius, divine son of Augustus. The Herodians supported Herod, and argued that the people should pay the taxes. They were the collaborators. The Pharisees argued that to do so violated Jewish law and that people should not pay. They were the resisters.

They came, it says, to entrap Jesus. People interpret this to mean that Jesus was put between a rock and a hard place—forced to commit either sedition or blasphemy, and therefore getting into big trouble. But that is not quite what the passage says. He is not being asked to choose between religion and politics but between two different camps who have adopted two different tactics in the face of foreign occupation. Jesus will not do this. He will not support one or the other.

But he also does not say that some things belong to Caesar and some things belong to God. He does not say we must balance the demands of church and state. The issue is not church or state—in the time of Jesus and for about 1500 years after that, there was no distinction between church and state—the issue was how to respond to the demands of a conquering power. In that sense, this passage does not apply to us at all. Our circumstances are not similar.

It would be a short sermon if that was all there was to it. But there is something in this story in Matthew that catches our thoughts. Jesus’ response—in the traditional version “render onto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s”—has mystified and motivated people for a long time. We turn to this story for some guidance about how to behave as faithful people who live in a culture that does not share our faith or our understanding of God’s teachings. Whether that culture is the institution of the church—as it was for Luther—or the state or the secular society.

Until recently, modern Protestant mainline churches in the west—including Lutherans—have considered churches to be separate from but parallel to the secular world. Either withdrawn from or resigned to the goings on in the world. They argued among themselves about whether the church was within, against, or part of the culture. They made the church a place where people could take refuge from culture, think about things of the spirit, and hang around with other Christians. Though that is part of the story, it is not the whole story. (Lutherans sometimes turned to Luther’s notion of two kingdoms. But Luther never argued that the two worlds could be separated this way.)

In this view, when our faithful consciences disagree with the acts of the culture, we have to ponder which way we should turn. People have said about this passage that it is about maintaining dual allegiance to two realms, or that is is about living a balanced life in face of the demands of faith and the demands of the culture, or it is about the hardship in trying to do so.

But Jesus is not saying here that we have a difficult and annoying balancing act between two calls for our allegiance. We only have one allegiance: it is to God. Jesus is not saying “sometimes obey God but sometimes obey Caesar instead.”

Our hope is that someday the world will be the way God intended it to be. Your kingdom come, we pray, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is a prayer and a call for this world to be healed from sins and sorrows and to be saved from fear, violence, and greed. To be for all a good world in which to live.

Jesus teaches us in this passage that our job is to make the world of Caesar be the world of God. To live in the world according to our faith. I do not mean that Christians should convert everyone or to teach dogma in schools or to make Sunday the official sabbath. I mean that for those of us who profess to follow Christ, that his teachings be our guide in the whole of our lives. We who are Christians need to ask ourselves when we think about political action and policies not what would Jesus do, but ask instead: What did Jesus teach me to do.

The passage today in Matthew uses taxes as a way to focus on this question about what to do. So let us do the same. And let us start that by talking about food, which was, along with money, a favorite interest of Jesus.

On Friday, the Greater Boston Food Bank held a luncheon for its supporters and agencies—people like Faith Kitchen. Partly the event was to thank everyone for all they have done to feed people. And partly it was a way to remind everyone that there are a lot of hungry people in greater Boston.

In the past year, the Food Bank has fed over 400,000 hungry people. That represents about one out of every nine people in our neighborhoods. Most of those people go to bed at night not knowing where their next meal will come from. The Food Bank in the last year distributed 31 million pounds of food. Agencies like Faith Kitchen know that that is not enough; in the past few months the meals served here at Faith have been packed with people, many of them new to Faith Kitchen.

Even in our area, which has felt the effects of the financial downturn less than other parts of the country, one in nine people do not have enough to eat.

The Food Bank is truly great, but it does not live on donations alone. It relies heavily on a program called the Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Program. And money for that comes from the Commonwealth. That is, it comes from taxes. People who are hungry are fed through people’s taxes.

Unlike in the time of Jesus (and unlike in colonial times in this country), taxes are not a way of drawing wealth from one nation to another. Instead taxes are one of the many ways we act together for the common good. (Being law abiding, serving in programs like the military or Americorps, being civic boosters, are some other ways.) We all live together in one nation, and taxes are one of the things that help that work.

The people ask Jesus: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? Jesus might have quoted the summary of the law: love God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. In our time, for many things, one way we enact our love for our neighbor is through paying taxes for the benefit of our neighbor. Contributing to the common good is a way we care for our neighbor.

How shall we as people of faith act also as people of a secular culture? Jesus tells us to render onto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Our call is not to flee from, or be resigned to, or give in to, Caesar. It is to call Caesar to account, to enlist the culture as a means to enact God’s will and hopes.

I’m not saying that you should love to pay taxes. Or hate them. But that you see them through the lens of your faith. I’m not telling you how to vote. Or what to think politically. What I am saying is this: for Christians, the decisions we make in the world must be considered in the light of our faith. That what we do in the world should reflect our faithful understanding. That when we think of the demands of Caesar, of the world, we think about them in terms of the commands of God.