God and Caesar

If you have ever been to Washington, DC, you might have noticed that the cars of that city have interesting license plates. Underneath the city flag of three stars and two bars, the words “Taxation Without Representation” are printed. It’s a reminder – and a protest – from the residents of the District of Columbia that, although they are taxed like every other American citizen, they have no Congressional representative. As a result, they feel as if they no voice in the larger happenings of our country.

Of course, our American idea of representative government is a relatively recent one. For most of human history, people have lived in societies with rulers not accountable to them and governments in which they had no voice. The Jews of first-century Palestine were no exception to this. Their nation was a province of a larger empire, their homeland an occupied territory of the foreign Roman power. The Pax Romana of Jesus’s day allowed for relative peace throughout the Mediterranean, but with simmering resentments and uneasy alliances. The Jewish people, more than others, found themselves caught in a conundrum: to cooperate was to become an active participant in their own subjugation, while to openly oppose Roman rule meant certain alienation, imprisonment, or death.

 James Tissot, The Tribute Money (c. 1890)

In the Gospel today, Jesus is confronted with this dilemma. Jews from both sides of the question – who normally detested each other – have joined forces to try to trap Jesus. The Herodians fear Jesus will upset the balance of things they have worked to establish with the Romans; the Pharisees believe Jesus is a threat to their authority and a false Messiah. The question they ask seems innocent enough: is it lawful to pay the tax to Caesar? The tax in question was a certain coin, a denarius, that called Caesar divine. We can see, therefore, that Jesus is caught in a real dilemma: if he says it’s okay to pay the tax to Caesar, the Pharisees can claim he is blaspheming God and can stone him to death; but if he says it’s not okay, the Herodians can arrest him for sedition.

As we heard, Jesus sees through their false flattery to the malice that is underneath. His response to their question – “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but to God what belongs to God” – is charged with meaning. Often, you will hear this Gospel and this phrase in particular explained as the Christian approach to political questions: that the church and state are separate realities with separate spheres of influence and obligation. But I think that narrows Jesus’s meaning considerably; his underlying point is something deeper.

“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar but to God what belongs to God.” The implicit question Jesus leaves us with is: what belongs to God? The answer of course is everything – everything we have belongs to God, since everything we have has been received from God. Jesus is telling the Pharisees and Herodians that, being so focused on the external challenges of living among the Romans, they have forgotten that God is greater than Caesar. They have been so caught up in the one whose image is on a coin, they have forgotten that they bear God’s image – his image and likeness, in the words of the Book of Genesis – within them.

The denarius of Tiberius Caesar: "Tiberius Caesar, divine son of Augustus and High Priest" 

We too face situations of adversity, confronting things or people or situations in our life that tempt us to lose sight of what God calls us to be. Maybe it’s a family member or a coworker that drives us crazy but whom we have to put up with; maybe it’s an obligation that has been placed upon us or a situation that of our own making that is less than enjoyable. Maybe it’s a spiritual battle we are waging of some kind, a moral weakness that we can’t seem to overcome or a spiritual dryness where we’re searching for God. We can let these challenges consume us, distorting the interior image of ourselves that we draw from God – permitting ourselves to be misshapen by anger, resentment, self-interest, lust, bitterness, greed, or whatever particular reaction we may have to the challenge that our Caesars present. Or, we can recall that God has fashioned us after himself, in his own image and likeness, and that it is in him that we find our true identity and draw our strength. Every day, we have the chance to glorify and honor God, or something else; if we seek to give God what he is due first, then we will have the proper disposition to deal with the Caesars of this world as we must.

Friends, like those license plates of the District of Columbia, life presents us with constant reminders that we are not in control of every situation and that we live in a world that often is not looking out for our own best interests. But we shouldn’t let our problems take the place of God. Instead, we let God be God, and so be reminded in everything that who we are depends upon who he is, and upon what he gives us in each moment. Caesar may have a grasp on the happenings of this world, and at times we may have to pay the tax of living in the way things are now, less than ideal as they may be. But our true citizenship is in heaven, and we have there One who constantly is our representative, interceding on our behalf at the right hand of his Father, ministering to our every need and reminding us that we are his. With that knowledge, in that identity, we can face the challenges this world brings. At the Eucharistic table to which we will come in a few minutes, may the presence of Christ reassure us again of God’s presence and strength and help us to give back to him all that he has given to us.