What Do We Owe to Caesar?

A Sermon on Matthew 22:15-22

Note: I preached this sermon today at Towne View Baptist Church, Kennesaw, Georgia.

Text (NRSVue)

¹⁵ Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. ¹⁶ So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality. ¹⁷ Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” ¹⁸ But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? ¹⁹ Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. ²⁰ Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” ²¹ They answered, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” ²² When they heard this, they were amazed, and they left him and went away.

Introduction

We are looking at a passage of tremendous historical significance for the formation of Christian thinking about how to relate to the state.

But perhaps because it is elliptical – for good reasons – Jesus’ answer has been subject to various interpretations that both reflect and have fed into our different theologies of relating to the state.

This is a Christian ethicist’s dream passage. So here we go.

Noticing Exegetical Details

Textual context:

Mt 21:1-11 Palm Sunday. Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph with huge crowds in tow.

Mt 21:12-16 He “cleanses” the temple. An amazing demonstration of open rebellion. Somehow, he is not arrested --probably because of the crowds.

Mt 21:23-ch. 25. He is in the temple teaching all kinds of things.

Look at Mt 21:45-46. This is a rebel takeover. The authorities are not happy: “They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, for they regarded him as a prophet.” 21:46.

We also know that it was Passover Week. Hundreds of thousands of Jews came from all over the empire. A time of worship and sacrifice but also political fervor and passion. The Romans dominated Israel, over their intense objection, of course. The Temple was a flashpoint space, mixing religious and political passion, then and now (Temple Mount). The Romans brought in more troops and they patrolled the temple itself. The procurator Pontius Pilate came to town. We know that the Galilean ruler Herod came to town that year. Annually, this was a very, very tense environment.

So in this space during this Passover Week is Jesus, upsetting everyone’s apple carts. Rome is increasingly worried but so are the Jewish authorities.

v. 15 -- That is visible as our story opens when Pharisees and Herodians combine on a question to trap Jesus. These guys hated each other. ChatGPT gave me this one: “They were about as natural an alliance as a vegan and a Texas BBQ chef.”

But they gang up on Jesus here because he is a threat to both, as well as to other Jewish leaders. A threat to their hold on the people, as Jesus was a powerfully effective populist leader. But also a threat to public order, for Jesus could potentially be a possible inciter of political violence and insurrection, even without a direct effort on his part to do so. Hailed as Son of David by the crowds?! Immediately comes in and disrupts the sacrifice and moneychanging system?! Their question about taxes is intended to trap him into an answer that will get him removed from the scene.

V. 16 – Notice the flattery. What they say about him is true, but this is flattery. I always get my guard up when a student flatters me.

v. 17 -- Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor? A trick question.

Certainly it was ‘lawful’ according to Rome. Indeed, it was required. Even to ask whether it is lawful is to come near the border of insurrection.

But whether it is lawful according to God’s law – that is the question, being asked in the temple, in front of huge crowds, with Roman authorities and Jewish authorities both present.

If Jesus answers that it’s NOT lawful, he’s setting Jewish law over Roman law and endorsing tax revolt. But if he answers that IS lawful, he looks like a Roman collaborator, disloyal to God and the people.

Tax revolt, by the way, happened in 6 AD when Quirinius conducted a census for taxation. (Sound familiar? It’s in the infancy narratives.) Judas the Galilean led an uprising, arguing that paying taxes to Rome was tantamount to funding their own enslavement and was a betrayal of God. The repression of this movement was fierce. Hundreds were slaughtered.

After Jesus’ ministry, 30 years later, the Jewish-Roman war was partly triggered by Roman authorities seizing funds from the temple treasure for taxes. After the war, which destroyed the temple forever, Rome imposed a head tax on Jews to support Jupiter’s temple in Rome. This was to humiliate them and rub their noses in their defeat. The readers of Matthew would have well known about all of this history. The characters in this story would have remembered the 6 AD rebellion and would have known that the Zealots continued to argue for tax rebellion.

Got all that?

vv. 18-20 -- Jesus sniffs out the trick question and asks them to show him the coin for the tax. This was the Roman denarius. The head on the coin would have been a depiction of Tiberius Caesar. The inscription read Tiberius Caesar Son of the Divine Augustus. The coin was itself a huge problem for Jews both because it depicted a human (graven image) and that human was being described as a son of a god.

The fact that his questioners have the coin in hand means that they are already implicated in the system, they are participating in it. This would have been embarrassing for them to be caught out in this way.

v. 21 -- And then he gives us famous teaching:

Render/give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.

v. 22 -- This great non-answer is sufficiently amazing that they bail and head out.

Interpretive Options

So we are left with this question: what “things” are Caesar’s? What belongs to Caesar? What do we owe?

For first century Jews, that was precisely the question, a terribly painful one, and by answering this way Jesus did not offer explicit direction.

He did avoid either instigating a tax revolt or being speared by the Zealots as a traitor, so that’s something, but his survival was only about 4 more days.

He didn’t answer this way because he was scared.

Perhaps he answered this way because he wanted them to determine the answer for themselves. We have to do the same thing now in a different context.

But to do so we must ask some interesting questions.

1. Are we living under Caesar?

Well, Caesar was a foreign emperor whose troops had conquered Israel and were ruling it by seduction and force. Lots of crucifixions solidified the terror. A perfect parallel for us would happen only if, say, an enemy did this to us – say Nazi Germany back in the day, or the USSR, or China. Ukrainians deal with it under Russia in Eastern Ukraine right now.

What is owed to our conqueror?? Usually the answer is: as little as we can get away with. And that was the broad answer in first century Israel. Some form of little or nothing.

But we don’t live under a Caesar. Right? We live in a democracy under people we have elected in free and fair elections whose behavior is governed by constitutional law.

Aha, now we go deeper.

Footnote 1: To the extent that a democracy is not fair for all its people, it raises questions as to whether it is really a democracy and whether it is owed what it demands. What, for example, did enslaved Black people owe the governments that permitted their enslavement? And what did they owe governments after Reconstruction was abandoned and the experiment in genuine multiracial democracy was crushed, initiating the Jim Crow era.

Footnote 2: A democracy can turn Caesarist if its leaders drift or rush away from the limits provided by the constitution and violate the laws they are supposed to uphold. If a democracy becomes a Caesar regime the presuppositions governing “normal Christian rendering to Caesar” change dramatically.

I will just say this about how this applies to our current moment: those who don’t want to face the question of what they owe to Caesar had better act to protect the democracy that they currently have.

But, back to the normal democratic context and the answer the Christian tradition has given:

The question has been, historically, what do we owe state officials whom we have elected and employ and can remove and whose behavior is governed by the standards of constitutional law?

The answer most Christians have given is that we owe everything they ask of us that fits within the rules that set and limit those demands. Historically this has included things like obedience to law, jury duty, military registration and service, civilian forms of service if required, and paying taxes.

The only one of these about which there has been much debate is military service, due to the peacemaking dimension of Jesus’ teaching which has produced a pacifist tradition. Just war theory also says we are only supposed to serve in just wars -- but no government that I know of recognizes a right of refusal based on that. Sometimes Christians have reduced to render military service in both these cases.

The Christian tradition would say that God gets everything else. This sets limits on the state’s hold on us, and our loyalty to it.

We don’t worship state leaders; we worship Jesus only.

We don’t give undue loyalty to government or its officials. Jesus alone is our Lord.

We don’t allow our love of country to curdle into nationalism; because all peoples matter to God.

Four Spatial Images

I’ve been using We language. The sermon title has WE language. Who is the we? This is a or the central question. WE are Christians. Christ-followers. We are NOT JUST Americans, or citizens, or people with some political status in some country. We are Christ’s people. That is the WE.

I am making a claim that should not be shocking but always needs to be reinforced. The primary identity of Christians should be as Christ-followers. It is not just one identity among many; it is who we are. We are not just individuals who believe in Jesus -- we are also members of the local and the universal church.

The stronger we identify (rightly) in this way, the more clearly the force of this issue is felt. What do we as Christians, as people who confess Jesus as Lord, who worship Jesus only, who are part of a global body of Christ followers, what do we do in relation to the state?

Answer: We do only what fits with our primary loyalty to Jesus Christ and membership in his body and confession that he is Lord.

So let me try a few spatial images to end this message.

It is not a dualism, where Jesus gets this part of us over HERE and the state gets that part of us over THERE. NO – because Jesus is Lord over ALL parts of our lives.

It is not a melding, where loyalty to Jesus and state/Caesar are understood as coterminous, the same thing.

It’s definitely not a hierarchy where the state gets the top spot and we follow Jesus just where it does not conflict with what the state wants from us. That’s state ABOVE and Jesus below, and this will not do.

No, the right answer is that it’s a hierarchy where our loyalty to Jesus is UP HERE and loyalty and service to the state is UNDER THAT. ALWAYS. No matter what form of government or who is in charge. This is default setting Christianity. Sadly, many of us missed the memo.

Conclusion

The coin shown to Jesus that day by his adversaries by its inscription proclaimed the lordship of Tiberius Caesar. But Christians proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Here is one such statement from the Apostle Paul. I will end with it:

“Therefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” –Philippians 2:9-11