Matthew 22.15-22

CHURCH AND STATE

Matthew 22.15-22

No one likes paying taxes and the Jews were no exception.

However, it was not so much the taxes themselves to which they objected. It was to whom they were paid that made them very angry.

Taxes were paid to the occupying Roman government, who had invaded their country and stolen their land.

In fact, when Jesus was a boy, a Jewish leader called Judas had actually led a national revolt against the payment of taxes. However, the Roman forces had quickly crushed it, leaving crosses around the countryside, with the human remains of dead and dying revolutionaries hanging from them as a warning to others.

By the time the first evangelist came to write his gospel, some 50 - 60 years after the death of Jesus, the payment of taxes was even more unpopular. By then the temple had been destroyed and the former Temple Tax that was paid towards its upkeep was being diverted towards the Temple of Jupiter in Rome.

Needless to say both the people at the time of Jesus and those later in the early church wanted to know the mind of Jesus on the subject of taxation.

In today's gospel reading, we find two groups of people taking advantage of the general unrest as regards taxation in order to curtail the influence of Jesus.

On the one hand, there are the Pharisees who objected to the Roman rule of Judea. On the other hand, there are the Herodians who supported the Roman occupation of Judea. Strange bed fellows indeed!

So they asked him, "ls it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?"

Now this was a trick question.

If Jesus said "Yes", he would disappoint the crowd who would accuse him of supporting Rome. If he said "No", he would be accused of being disloyal to the Roman government.

In short, Jesus found himself in a no win situation.

Aware of this dilemma, Jesus very carefully sidestepped the issue by asking for a coin.

In producing the coin, his tormentors show that they are actually involved in handling the hated currency.

And the reason why the coins were hated was because they bore the image, or head, of Tiberius, and around the edge they had the words, "Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of divine Augustus".

Fully aware of this, Jesus then asks, "Whose head is this and whose title?"

When his tormentors answer, “The emperor”, Jesus replies, "Give therefore the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's".

Thus, in this very clever move, Jesus turns their question back upon those who asked it and in so doing, disappoints neither the crowd nor his tormentors.

But what exactly did Jesus mean?

The answer is found in the question, "Whose image is this?".

Whereas the coin bore the image of the emperor, Christians by contrast, bear the image of God. Christians may well pay taxes to the government, but they themselves do not belong to the emperor. They belong to God.

Wherever Christians live and operate - whether in the economic, political or religious realm – they belong to God. The primary loyalty of Christians does not change when they move out of the church and into the voting booth. In other words, the reply of Jesus seeks to set allegiances into an ultimate and penultimate order.

As a consequence, there may well be times when a Christian has to decide whether or not that divine image is being denied by the state, and whether they should defend that image as being of greater priority than that of the emperor. That was the situation that many Christians found themselves in during the apartheid years of the South African government rule.

Unlike the Pharisees and Herodians in our gospel story, we cannot walk away when we do not get the answer we want to hear. On the contrary, we must stay and. bear witness to that ultimate allegiance to God in whose image we are made.