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Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost – October 22, 2023
Matthew 22:15-22
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
In our gospel reading for today we hear the Pharisees try to trap Jesus with a hot button question. It was a question pertaining to one of the biggest, most divisive issues of the day: “Was it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” Many Jewish people despised paying taxes to Rome. They resented having to carry around coins with a picture of the emperor on it and words etched in proclaiming him to be a god, and they certainly didn’t like having to fund their own oppression by paying them taxes.
But not everyone hated paying these taxes. Some Jewish people were okay with it. A group called the Herodians saw some advantages to having Rome in Israel. They recognized that the Roman Empire brought with it some benefits. It’s like that scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” set in Israel in the time of Jesus, where one of the Jewish characters says, “What has Rome ever done for us?” And his Jewish friend says, “Well, there’s the aquaducts, and sanitation, and the roads, and irrigation, and medicine, and education.” The Herodians thought paying taxes to Rome was a good deal.
“So Jesus,” the Pharisees asked, “what do you say? Is it lawful (meaning under Jewish religious law) to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”
This was a hot button issue. There was a lot at stake in Jesus’ answer. If Jesus said it was lawful to pay the tax, he would be seen by many as advocating idolatry and being complicit with a foreign enemy. If he said it was unlawful, he would be labeled a revolutionary and handed over to Roman authorities. Remember, the Pharisees asked him this question to trap him. They wanted to throw him in the middle of this debate so they could watch him get torn apart. Either way he answered would get him in big trouble, and they would be rid of him at last.
The first thing Jesus does in response is to bluntly call them hypocrites. He knows they have those idolatrous coins jingling in their own pockets as they speak. He asks for one of them. Then he asks whose image is on it. When they answered, “The emperor’s,” he said, “Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperors and give to God the things that are God’s.”
What does this mean, exactly? It sounds like some kind of riddle. Technically, everything belongs to God! Every Jewish person knew that! So was it lawful to pay the tax, or not? Both sides seem to have been scratching their heads over Jesus’ answer. Neither side got upset. The Pharisees were amazed that he managed to step around their trap. They left him and went away.
But Jesus answer was so much more than an artful dodge. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and give to God the things that are God’s” is not really a riddle. Instead, Jesus is redirecting the focus of the conversation to something even more urgent. Jesus cuts through the heat of this hot button issue to focus on something bigger. The bigger question for Jesus isn’t whether they should give the emperor his coin; it was whether they were giving themselves to God.
You see, the coins they had might have carried the image of the emperor, but they themselves carried the image of God. The people themselves, with their talents, their gifts, their resources, their lives, they bore the image of God. As it says in Genesis 1:27, as the first human beings were created, “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.”
“Give to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus says. Just as the coins bear the image of the emperor and should be given to him, human beings bear the image of God – and so we are called to give our whole entire selves to him. We are to dedicate everything we have, everything we are, to God, whose image we bear.
In his book, “Giving to God,” Mark Allen Powell tells a story about the mission work done among the Gauls in medieval times. The Gauls were a bloodthirsty people living in what is now France and Belgium. Christians missionaries entered the region to share the gospel and were very successful. Many of the Gauls converted to Christianity, even many of their warriors. Before sanctuaries with baptismal fonts, baptism took place by full immersion in a river or a lake, and when the warriors were baptized, many of them insisted on leaving their right arm out of the water. They explained that they wanted to leave one arm unbaptized so that they could continue to slay their enemies without mercy.
Powell suggests that this is more of a medieval version of an urban legend than historical fact, but it does provide a striking metaphor for something that afflicts God’s people of all times and places. We don’t want to give our whole selves to God. We might not leave one arm unbaptized so as to keep on slaying our enemies without mercy, but we are very good at compartmentalizing our lives, leaving God out of certain parts. We all hold back parts of ourselves from God so we can keep on doing some things our own way. I once saw a cartoon in a stewardship book that had a guy getting baptized with one arm out of the water, but instead of holding a sword he was holding his wallet.
“Give to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus says. That means everything. It means both arms. It means every body part (yes, even those ones). It means every last part of you, every last part of your life. It means your entire, undivided heart. It means all your talents. It means all your treasures, all your coins – no matter whose face is on them. This doesn’t mean all or even most of our money needs to be given to the church, but all of it is to be used for the glory of God. All of our lives are to be given over to God in joyful obedience. We were made in the image of God, and so we are to give ourselves, every last part of our lives, to him.
So didn’t Jesus care about the question at hand? Didn’t he care about that hot button issue? Didn’t he care about the difficult position the Jewish people were in as they had to carry this idolatrous money around in their pockets all the time, money they had to use to fund their own oppression?
I’m sure he did. But Jesus didn’t come into the world to sort out those problems, as pressing and difficult as they were. Jesus didn’t come to enforce the commandments, even the commandment against idolatry – as important as that is. Jesus didn’t come to start the Jerusalem Tea Party, starting a revolution against Rome and their taxes.
Jesus came to do something much bigger. Jesus came to conquer a much bigger enemy.
Jesus came to save the Pharisees from their hypocrisy. He came to save the Herodians from their complicity. He came to save ordinary Jews from their idolatry. He came to save all human beings from their sin.
Jesus didn’t come to overthrow Rome, he came to overthrow the power of sin, death, and the devil. He didn’t come to offer his thoughts on the tax code, he came to collect for God all the precious human beings made in God’s image. And when we refused to give ourselves entirely to God, he gave himself entirely for us on the cross.
There is no doubt we have many pressing and difficult problems in our own time. There is no doubt that the American people, including us here in this sanctuary, are as divided about many of those problems and their possible solutions as the Pharisees and the Herodians were about theirs. We are not called to put our heads in the sand about these issues. We are not called to ignore them or pretend they don’t exist. One of our vocations is that of citizen, and so we are called as Christians to engage in those hot button issues.
But at the same time, when we gather to hear from the Lord Jesus, we can’t let those hot button issues get in the way of what Christ has to say to us. He comes to us with even bigger concerns in mind. He comes to address our deeper problems.
Today our Lord Jesus reminds us of something we forget all the time: that we are made in the image of God – every person, every body part, every cell. In holy baptism Jesus goes a step further and inscribes his name on us, so that we would be certain that we belong to him!
“Give to God the things that are God’s,” he says to us today.
God wants more than chump change. God wants you. And through the saving work of his dear Son, he has claimed you, he has redeemed you, he has saved you, he has cleansed you through the forgiveness of sin and made you his own.
Give to God the things that are God’s. You are already his, so let the whole of your life bear witness to the image you bear and the name which was inscribed upon you.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church