“Obligation” (Oct 16, 2011)

Matthew 22:15-22
Yr A, 29 Ordinary, October 16, 2011

Every once in a while, what we hear being discussed in the papers and on TV bumps right up against a passage in the Bible that seems to be addressing the same issue. This is one of those times—the issue is paying taxes, and the question is: “What is the right balance to strike between our obligation to the state, and our obligation to God?”
But before we plunge down that path into the woods, it is important to take a couple of side treks. First, let’s seek to understand the nature of the issue in Jesus’ day. Briefly, there were two factions. On the one hand were the Herodians, followers of the Roman-appointed leader, Herod Antipas, who the authorities named “King of the Jews”. The Jews were forced to use a special coin upon which appeared his image and the inscription, “the divine Caesar”. The Pharisees saw the use of this coin as a violation of both the first and the second commandment. The Herodians saw refusing to use the coin as kin to sedition against the Roman Empire.
There is one more side trek that is important to take before we begin to talk about the relevance this passage may have for today. Part of both the insistence and the resistance in ancient Palestine around this issue came from the fact that the Jews were being forced to take part in the same economic, political and military system of government that was being forced on them from the outside. It wasn’t just a question of whether to violate the first and second commandment for them, it was also a question of whether to support those who occupied their country and controlled their resources by force.
Most people today, even those who are most adamantly against taxes, would not suggest that our situation is the same as that of first century Palestine. Nonetheless, though there was little that the two sides, the Herodians and the Pharisees, would have agreed on, they did come together for this:
To seek to entrap an upstart religious leader named Jesus, whose following both sides deemed threatening to their own base of power.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” They teamed up and sent “disciples” to Jesus to ask him this because they knew it was a “lose-lose” situation for him. If he affirmed the need to pay taxes, he was encouraging others to violate the Word of God, and if he rejected the need to pay taxes, he was rebelling against the powers that be. Either answer could bring him a death sentence.
So our Lord gave neither answer. Instead, after getting them to name the person and title on the coin, he said these famous words, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar and unto God the things that are God’s”. Such a simple phrase, but we have been probing its depths for meaning, and taking sides, ever since.
In our discussion of this phrase there are several logical fallacies we might make. The first is to take either one of the sides claiming that is (really) what Jesus did. For no matter how you look at it, Jesus did not coyly suggest that we ought to NOT pay taxes—the word translated as “render” (apodate) means not just to give, but to give what is due by obligation. Whether they liked it or not, the people living in Palestine—no matter what their religion or position—benefited from what Caesar had done for them. In addition to the roads, buildings, water systems, sewage systems and security that Rome had provide the city and its citizens; the Romans had also rebuilt the temple to a magnificence not seen for centuries before their occupation. It was not for Jesus a question of whether to pay taxes for all this, but how to maintain ones obligation to God as well as Rome.
Neither did Jesus say that no obligation was owed to God. By asking his questioners to point out the obvious blasphemy on the coin first before giving them his answer, he underscored the brokenness and idolatry of the Roman/Jewish alliance that then ruled Palestine. He makes no excuses for this, and he is not shy to suggest that “something was wrong in the state of Denmark”. Godly people ever since have always found a way to hold the state accountable while at the same time anchoring that accountability to faith in God.
Another logical fallacy is much more prevalent in our society today, I think. It is the idea that obligation is always a matter of personal choice. Jesus reminded people that they are obligated to both church and state (in the modern parlance), but he did not say—each of you may now personally decide if and how you will pay your tithe and/or your taxes. Obligation, duty, in the first century was not an individual matter—it was a preference for a lifestyle of civic responsibility within a society where duty and honor were finite commodities, not personal choices. Not everyone had to be honorable—take Jesus’ hero John the Baptist for instance. He did almost nothing “honorable” according to his society. He fled the city, flaunted the faith, proclaimed God’s independence from the structures of temple and tradition, and called everyone to accountability regardless of their place or station in society. Yet, key to understanding John and Jesus love of John is this—John did all of this because he believed God wanted society to change, not because he chose to live in the desert and eat bugs.
So if our obligation to church and state is not personal, then what else might it be? In some countries, and for a long time, the obligation to church and state was the same. In America, we rejected this idea—at least in principal if not always in fact. Debates still rage over how exactly to live out the constitutional provision for the separation of church and state. Such questions are still being argued, but for the most part, we continue to reject the idea that God smiles on our every action as a nation, though we try our best to still allow faith to inform who we are as a people. But Jesus response can not be used to justify our greatest hope that we are “one nation under God”, for he clearly says that loyalty to nation is not the same as loyalty to God.
The theologian Jurgen Moltmann reminds us that obligation to God must always look to the context of the day and age in which a Christian lives. In his words, “The image of Christ and the image of the church also always reflect the ‘spirit of the age’, the political and economic circumstances, and the cultural and social conditions, in which the churches are living.” (Moltmann, The Church and the Power of the Spirit, 66-67). Hence, we direct our consciousness toward Christ, the object of our faith, but how that looks depends on the situation.
An example of changing situations that change obligations

My wife wrote this in her doctoral dissertation: “To whom we belong and in whose name we gather, is intimately connected with who we are, what we do and how we do it” (Wilson, p.24). We can best understand Jesus answer to those who would trip him up by keeping this idea in the background.
Our loyalty and obligation is not ultimately tied to the powers and principalities of this world, whether those powers share a national identity or a religious one. Our ultimate obligation is to the God of Hope, the cross of Christ, to whom we belong and in whose name we gather. We are the followers of Christ and what we do, whether it is come to church on a Sunday morning or pay taxes on April 15th, is motivated by our belief that when we do it in Christ’s name, it is an act that furthers the Kingdom of God. In God is our hope, and in this is God’s hope: that we do whatever we do in Christ’s name, believing in the phrase he taught us: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”.