About seven or eight years ago, my Dad decided he was going to sell the boat that he and my mother had bought for our family when my sister and I were teenagers. My family spent many wonderful weekends out on the lake, skiing, tubing, swimming, and just generally having fun. But with my sister and I out of the house and established in other cities, my parents decided there was no point in hanging on to the boat anymore either. So, my Dad ran an ad in the local paper. The first day the ad ran, Dad had four calls about the boat and two different people came by to look at it that same evening. Both of those individuals were very interested in the boat, and one of the guys gave Dad a cash deposit to hold the boat for him while he made a final decision. In the meantime, the other interested party came by. He offered to pay Dad the full asking price on the spot, but that man had one condition. He wanted Dad to put only half the price of the boat on the bill of sale. "That's the way we do it in these parts," he said. If my Dad complied, the man wouldn't have to pay half the state sales tax, which amounted to several hundred dollars.
My Dad was torn. On the one hand, he really wanted to sell the boat and get full price for it. But on the other hand, he knew what this man was up to, and he did not want to be a part of such cheating and lying. Thankfully, my Dad had a good excuse not to take the man’s offer. He explained that another person had already handed him a cash deposit to hold the boat and that if that offer fell through, he would call this man back. But as Dad sat at dinner that night, he shared his deep misgivings about that second offer. He told my Mom that he couldn’t even believe the man would ask something like that of him. For one thing, it would be breaking the law. But even more than that, my Dad reflected, doing what the man asked would mean going against his identity as a Christian because he would be participating in illegal activity and lying about it. In the end, my Dad decided that even if the first offer fell through, he would not call the other man back. He felt the most important thing was to be obedient to God’s standards. As it turned out, the boat was sold by the weekend and at the full asking price, with all the dealings “above board,” as they say.
Many times in the last 2,000 years, most especially in our modern age of extreme partisanship, this passage from Matthew has been cited as a clear statement of Jesus’ beliefs in the necessity of separation of church and state. “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” Jesus says. To which we all reply, “Right, of course, separation of church and state.” But here’s the thing, and if you don’t go home with any other message today, make sure you hear this one, Jesus was NOT making such a political statement. Jesus was not advocating for the separation of church and state, or any other policy. Rather, Christ was challenging his hearers to consider the focus of their greatest allegiance.
Ironically, Jesus’ challengers thought they were doing the same thing to Jesus. As you heard, they were trying to trick him into a response that would get him in trouble. Either he would renounce the need to pay the tax to Caesar and thus be revealed as a traitor, or he would uphold the tax to Caesar and thus defy the Jewish traditions against making and worshipping idols. But Jesus did neither. You see, the Ten Commandments taught that the Jewish people were not to make any idols, and they were to put not gods before God the Creator. Yet, by using a coin with the image of Caesar on it and the inscription, “Tiberius Caesar, august and divine son of Augustus, high priest,” many Jewish people felt they were living outside the law of God, and they wanted Jesus to affirm their belief, to step forward as a revolutionary in defiance of Roman rule. But, even though Jesus was a revolutionary who came to establish the kingdom of God, Jesus widens the question of his challengers in such a way that it has nothing to do with coins or politics—nothing at all to do with the threat of being arrested.
The Bible tells us multiple times that we are to be good citizens and to follow the law of the land. And Jesus upholds that teaching as he responds to the Pharisees and the Herodites. But he takes it a step further. When Christ says to the people, “…and [give] to God what belongs to God.” He is saying in essence that all of our lives are to be a living sacrifice to God alone. And we all have to decide for ourselves what it is that bears God’s image. Because here’s the thing, what doesn’t belong to God? Caesar can stamp his picture all over the place, but he can’t come near the true ruler who gives us life. So when Christ commands that the people “[g]ive to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” he is telling them that they should give Caesar what belongs to him, but they should do so on God’s terms, and according to their identity as God’s people. Because here’s the thing, if we actually give to God what belongs to God, then the coin is a non-issue! What matters is what we do with our lives.
And this is where Jesus’ words once again become challenging. We have to decide who we are going to give our lives to. Our constant temptation is to collapse loyalty to emperor and loyalty to God into one. That was what the Pharisees and Herodians were doing. Or, on the flip side, we try and pull church and state into completely separate spheres, as if one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. But Jesus rejects both of these approaches, and he leaves us with this difficult task. We have to sort out our loyalties. We must discern how to make our duty to Caesar, to the state, an expression of our duty to God.
Do you see where this is going? The issue for most of us in the twenty-first century is not really about paying taxes. That’s the reality my dad faced. It’s not a choice, especially if we want to conduct our lives with integrity and not get caught up in a web of lies. But even as we “render under to Caesar,” we can still be bearers of the image of God. When your peers look at you, what do they see? Are you a taxpayer and citizen of the United States first and foremost, or are you a Christian and a citizen of God’s kingdom? The kingdoms of this world are all about power, oppression, and violence. But Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God is about peace, justice, mercy, and life. How are we, as Christians, advocating for peace in our world? Do we speak out against unnecessary wars? Do we in any way condone countries which are constantly seeking to overpower their neighbors? And what about justice? How are we giving a voice to the voiceless? What are we doing to serve the homeless; not just in terms of giving them an occasional meal, but actually working toward long-term and sustainable solutions for them? Or disabled veterans, how are we advocating for them?
Then there’s mercy. Our natural, human reaction is to respond in anger and perhaps even violence toward those who harm us. But Christ teaches us that we are to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute [us].” Do you show love and mercy, or do you perpetuate the ways of the world? What about life? Jesus Christ came so that we might have abundant life, and yet, I think this is where we get it wrong the most. Do you hold a consistent ethic of life; from beginning to end, for stranger and criminal, for friend and foe? What are you doing to help others know of the life-giving relationship they can have with God in Christ Jesus? These are the things that matter. The coins that we hand over to our worldly leaders are nothing. What matters is that we live our lives as citizens of God’s kingdom.
We all have fine lines to walk as we negotiate the many conundrums that fill our days. Most of us live sometimes as collaborators in God’s kingdom, and other times as traitors, caught up in the ways of the world. We can take comfort in the fact that Jesus refuses to make the problems of daily living into an easy question. Jesus knows our hardship and sufferings. The answers to the challenges of this life are simply only for those who choose to make Caesar as God, or as the devil. But we are Christians, bearers of the image of God, even as God’s hand carries our image.
Indeed, the image of God in this world can often be difficult to discern. When we look at each other, or even observe ourselves in the mirror, we tend to see the marks of the world upon us. We are what we look like, what we have, what we wear, what we do, the friends we have. But what we need to see is that underneath all those things is a much deeper mark: the image of the cross engrained upon our hearts and our lives, a special shimmer in our eyes, the light of Jesus shining through us. This is the image that God sees among his people, and it is that image which God desires us to reflect to the world.
“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
Do you bear the image of Caesar or the image of God?
