Scripture text: Matthew 22:15-22
I will confess much fear and trepidation as I was preparing my sermon for this week. I wasn’t looking forward to this and with good reason. Our gospel text today makes it almost unavoidable. I guess I have no choice. I going to have to dive into that minefield known as politics.
I think most of you by now have figured my political allegiance out and if you hadn’t, I told you all outright last week that I’m a liberal. I also know that I’m not alone in that, that there are some of you here who share in that inclination. Others of you do not and lie more on the conservative side of things. This is, of course, the fundamental problem of politics. The reason it is considered so impolite a topic in conversation. It’s divisive. Ideally, it’s supposed to be a battle of ideas, but far too often it becomes a battle of personalities. One person against another.
And I think it is for that reason that Jesus generally doesn’t get involved in political discussions. Despite modern perceptions by certain individuals and groups that Christianity is the sole possession of (and banner bearer for) one particular political philosophy in this country, Jesus says very little about the matter of politics. He’s a uniter, not a divider, in general. He’s come to save the world, all of it.
But even back then, as now, people are often wanting to draw him into the debates of the age. The Pharisees approach Jesus with a question, a somewhat pragmatic question rather than a theological one. “Is it lawful to pay taxes or not?”
The question itself seems somewhat straight-forward, but there’s a lot of context here to unpack. First off, these are Jewish scholars asking a Jewish rabbi his opinion about taxes. Now let us remember that this conversation is taking place in Jerusalem, in ancient Palestine. In 50 or so BC, Julius Caesar’s on-again off-again rival Pompey marched the Roman legions into Jerusalem and declared Palestine a province of the Roman Empire. Conquered territory.
Now, some 80 or so years later, as a province of the Empire, the people are expected to pay their fair share to support the infrastructure of the Empire: the roads, the salaries of public employees, the aqueducts, the public housing, all these existed in that era in the Roman Empire and all were paid for by tax revenue. Oh, I missed one. The army, they were paid for by taxes as well. The same army who kept the Jews and all the other residents of Palestine on their best behavior. The same army who lined the roads of Palestine with the crucified bodies of those who weren’t all that well behaved.
The coins that Jews paid into those tax coffers were then used to support the occupation and oppression of their own people. “Is is lawful to pay taxes?” Suddenly, it’s not so simple a question anymore. To not pay is to invite retribution for what was obviously a seditious act. But to pay is to directly support the brutality and tyranny that people were being subjected to each and every day by the Romans. No easy answer to that question, is there?
That, of course, is the point. These Pharisees are not asking this in good faith. They’re trying to trap Jesus. If he answers the question “yes,” they can accuse him of being a traitor to his people. If he answers “no,” the Herodians (who are also hanging around in this conversation) will go running to the Romans and accuse Jesus of sedition and inciting rebellion.
As clever as they think they are, the Pharisees have not fooled Jesus one bit. He turns their question on its head. He asks for a coin and, when he holds it aloft, he asks them whose image is on the coin used in the tax. Imago is the word in Latin, Icon in Greek, and Tzelem in Hebrew. His word choice is deliberate, casting the minds of these good Jewish religious scholars back to a passage in Genesis: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Whose image is on the coin, whose imago? Caesar, the Emperor. Well then, whose imago is on Caesar? Imago Dei, the image of God.
Jesus’s answer to the question about taxes, taxes paid to a hated empire made up of hated people, is to remind his questioners that those people they hate are crafted in the image of the same God they were.
This is what Jesus does, time and time again. We love to draw lines. We love to divide ourselves from others. We love to stand over and against other people. We want to believe ourselves their betters, that we’re superior. We’re superior in morals or money or character or virtue or race or politics or whatever. We draw a line and declare ourselves good, and put those people that we do not like on the other side of it. And we may be justified in our dislike, the Jews of ancient Palestine had many good reasons to dislike and distrust the Romans. Sometimes our hate is not so easily justified. It may be based on prejudice and presumption, on misinformation and ignorance. But three things are always true.
The first is that we always declare ourselves good. We’re the righteous ones. We’re the virtuous ones. The second is that the other is always declared bad. They’re the sinners, whether those sins are real or imagined is largely irrelevant.
And then the third thing happens. We’ve drawn our line, declared each side good and evil respectively, and then Jesus comes along. We always expect that he’ll stand with us, but every time without exception he steps across the line and stands with those we despise.
It’s what he’s doing in this story. The Pharisees hate the Romans, they hate what the Romans do with their tax moneys. But Jesus reminds them the Romans are God’s children too and that he stands with them. When Jesus does that, he does two things. One, he pleads with us on our side of the line to cross over to him. Come, come and see these despised people as I do, as God does. Precious and loved as children of God, fashioned in his image.
The second thing he does is he shows us our hate for what it really is. We think ourselves righteous. We think ourselves superior, but, by standing on the opposite side from us, Jesus reveals that our hate and self-righteousness makes us just as lost as those we are so quick to damn for their sins. Whatever sins we believe them guilty are quickly overshadowed by our hate and disdain and we become as guilty as they.
Good and evil, virtue and sin, righteous and unclean, these distinctions are we often define them are irrelevant to God. There isn’t one of us that isn’t guilty of something. We’re all sinners. We’re all lost. Which is why Jesus came to begin with. He’s not here just to save us or people like us. He’s not here to save the good people, because there are none. He’s here to save the sinner, the lost, the wounded, the desperate, and the depraved. He’s here to save everybody.
The Pharisees don’t see that and far too often neither do we. Hate blinds us to truth. We draw our lines and grow contented in our own self-justification. But then there’s Jesus, calling to us, pleading with us: Cross over. See the world as it truly is. See it as I see it. Cross over and replace hate with love and death with life. Amen.
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