WHAT BELONGS TO GOD
Isaiah 49:13-16a; Matthew 22:15-22
October 16, 2011
Rev. Janet Robertson Duggins
The first thing you need to know is that the Pharisees and the Herodians didn’t normally see themselves as friends and allies.
The Herodians were supporters of Herod Antipas, who had been
named king of the Jews by the emperor of
This tribute or tax was supposed to be paid with a special coin. It has the head of Tiberius Caesar along with an inscription which reads “Tiberius Caesar, august and divine son of Augustus.”
The Pharisees were devoted and careful followers of the laws and commandments of God. Last Sunday, we heard about the Ten commandments, and if you were here, you might remember that the first two commandments go something like this:
“I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other Gods before me”
“You shall not make any images of anything to worship.”
The Pharisees considered the paying of tribute – especially with a coin declaring the emperor divine - a violation of those commandments.
You can see, I think, why the Herodians and Pharisees didn’t often see eye to eye.
But they could agree on one thing: Jesus was trouble. He was too ready to say outrageous things, challenge the status quo, to point out hypocrisy, to pay attention to the people on the margins of society, to ask uncomfortable questions. So they decide to collaborate and try to trick him into saying something that will get him into trouble, or at least discredit him and turn people against him. Bringing up a controversial issue involving taxes and politics probably seemed like a trap that couldn’t fail.
If Jesus advises paying tribute to the emperor, he looks like a traitor to his own people who are oppressed by the foreign occupiers of their land and burdened with taxes demanded by a government they had no say in. Not only that, he compromises his integrity as a preacher and teacher and person of faith; he could be accused of heresy by the Pharisees, who will point to those first two commandments which clearly say that there is only one God and no one and nothing else should be honored as a god.
If Jesus advises NOT paying the tribute to the emperor, he will be accused of tax evasion or treason or fostering rebellion among the people. The Romans aren’t going to look kindly upon that.
It’s a no-win situation for Jesus. Or so it seems.
But Jesus takes what seem like a touchy political issue and reframes it as a theological question. It sounds deceptively simple at first. “Let’s look at the coin. Whose picture is on it?” “It’s the emperor’s” “Well, then give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor and to God what belongs to God.”
Sometimes it sounds to us here like Jesus is describing two separate duties, religious and civic, which have nothing to do with each other. But Jesus is not tidying life into neat compartments for us – religion over here, politics there, family life, work, entertainment, and so on, everything separate from everything else. And he’s clearly opposing any notion that loyalty to the emperor (or the state) is identical with loyalty to God – which would have been the Roman assumption.
What Jesus is doing is broadening the scope of the discussion to take in the whole of life, not simply this one specific question about paying taxes and when one should or should not support the actions of the governmental powers.
I think the connections Jesus is making here are more clear if that word sometimes translated as head or likeness is translated as “image.” The word in Greek is eikon, from which we get the English word “icon.” The coin bears the image of the emperor; it was the emperor who had the coins minted with his image imprinted on them; this is the kind of thing that belongs to the emperor.
But what belongs to God? (Well, what doesn’t belong to God?)
And what is it that bears the image of God?
“As God’s people WE bear the image of God.” What does that mean?
It means that something about us reflects what God is like.
What might that something be? Believers have answered that question in many different ways:
Our creative abilities
Our reason
Our capacity for love and relationship
Our ability to give
The complexity of who each one of us is
Our diversity of who we all are together.
Bearing the image of God also means that we are called to look like God in what we do and say.
It means we belong to God.
It means that the relationship we have with God is not an occasional encounter but a deep and continuing connection.
Someone put it this way:
“We have God tattooed on our foreheads and on our
hearts” (Mary W. Anderson)
But what’s really interesting and amazing is that this deep connection is a two way street. Not only is God’s image imprinted on us; In Isaiah we read this description of God saying to God’s people, “… I will not forget you…. I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.” (Is. 49:15-16)
An emperor can put his face on coins and eventually demand them all back again in tribute. But compare that with a Creator whose love is expressed in flesh and blood and in the potential for replicating that love… well, there’s no comparison at all.
God’s people have God’s DNA of compassion imprinted on them. We look at the world, at other people, at the actions of governments and the choices we have to make in our daily lives, at all the things competing for our time and attention and money, … at everything through the lens of God’s love. We care about what God cares about. We want to imitate God’s generosity, God’s forgiveness, God’s truthfulness in everything we do. We want to be like Jesus. We want other people to see God’s Spirit at work in us.
The way we give to God what belongs to God is that we give ourselves, our whole selves - our whole lives, all our hopes and talents and energy, everything we are and everything we have. The various other commitments of life are all supposed to be guided and clarified and tested by that larger giving of ourselves. The fact that the trick question posed to Jesus has to do with money, taxes, and government makes us reflect on just how we as Christians exercise our responsibilities in those areas while being faithful to God above all. But the trick question could be about something else. The real question is the one Jesus brings forward: what belongs to God?
It was a challenging question then, and it’s a challenging question now. Not so much coming up with the “right answer”; it’s easy enough to say, “well, everything belongs to God.” What’s challenging is putting that into practice every day, figuring out what it means to believe that our family life, our money, our work, our friendships, our loyalties, our time, our votes, our church, our voices, our pleasures, our homes, our talents… all belong to God.
Where it begins is being able to say, with conviction, again and again day after day, “I belong to God.”
Resources:
“Matthew 22:15-22” in Feasting on the Word, Year A, volume 4
“Living by the Word,” Rev.
Mary A. Anderson in The Christian Century,
October 4, 2011