Oct 17, 1999
INTRODUCTION
TO GOSPEL READING OF MATTHEW 22:15-22
By the time comes round which
finds Jesus in the temple in the episode which Richard is
about to read, it's clear that there are many folks who
just don't like Jesus. To his enemies among the high
priests, scribes and Pharisees, a new group now is added
- THE HERODIANS. We know that the Herodians were Jews,
highly Hellenized Jews, who supported the rule of the
Tetrarch Herod who ruled over most of Palestine at the
pleasure of the Romans with his brother Philip governing,
also on behalf of the Romans, the lands east of the
River Jordan.
Normally the scribes and
Pharisees despised the Herodians for they saw them as
secularized Jews who were turncoats. That these opposite
parties can come together to try to trap Jesus indicates
the high degree to which Jesus is now perceived by all
the status quo powers as a common threat.
Richard Lee reads: Matthew
22:l5-22 - the parable of the coin with Caesar's image on
one side and an inscription to the Divine One on the
other side.
The Message:
"Coins in Our Pockets and the
Universe"
The question was, of course, a
trap. "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?"
If Jesus argues against paying the tax, they will be able
to accuse him of anti-Roman activities. If he supports
the tax, he will lose some of the popular support he has
been gathering. For the tax was seen an economic burden
imposed by a distant imperial power upon a poor people.
The question is political in nature but phrased as a
religious question to the troublesome rabbi, Jesus. "Is
it lawful…?" Does paying taxes accord with the word
of God?" The trap is laid.
Here is where we can be proud of
Jesus' wit and clever rhetorical skills. Instead of being
hauled into the heart of a dilemma, he resets the trap
for his questioners. He also raises issues which will
forever confound all who seek the meaning of his
teaching. He forces the issue of Caesar and God…of
the proper authority of the political order versus the
divine order…into our very hearts and consciences.
Last week visiting in Sichuan
Province I rediscovered that coins have practically
ceased to circulate in modern China. Everything is done
with paper money down to one yuan. But in Jesus' time
only coins circulated and when Jesus asks his questioners
to draw a coin out from their pockets, he is quickly
handed a denarius.
The denarius was at this time a
Roman silver coin. Like all Roman coins, this one, if
recently minted, would would show the profile of the
reigning Emperor Tiberius Caesar; if an older one of the
first divine Caesar, the Emperor Augustus And on the
reverse side would have been the imperial inscription:
"Caesar, the Divine One, the Pontifex Maximus." Pontifex
Maximus meant the Ultimate Ruler; the title was retained
later by the popes and interpreted as Supreme Priest.
All present knew that Exodus
20:4 prohibits "graven images" of any kind. Yet here, in
the holy land of the Mosaic law, the religious leaders
pull from their own pockets coins which violates the law
of their own religion for they show a human image which
is proclaimed as the divine one and the Ultimate Ruler of
the Universe.
As the questioners are quite
happy to do their worldly business with coins which
violate the graven images prohibition, Jesus has placed
back upon the questioners the burden of a correct
answer. But to defend himself from their malice which
sought to portray him as a political rebel, a charge
which in fact would be made against him a few days later,
Jesus continues: "GIVE TO CAESAR THE THINGS THAT ARE
CAESAR'S." But then he adds the force of his own personal
view: AND TO GOD THE THINGS THAT ARE GOD'S.
*********
Many readers of the text believe
that Jesus was simply saying there are two realms: one is
political, material, and in Jesus' day was ultimately
defined by Roman imperial rule. The other real is
spiritual and divine and must be guided by loyalty to
God. The sincerely religious person should balance and
accommodate these two realms, being a law abiding, tax
paying, loyal subject of the government, which controlled
the political realm, and, at the same time, a faithful,
dedicated and generous person of faith.
In my opinion this is not what
Jesus is saying to us. The real burden of Jesus' thinking
is conveyed in his phrase: GIVE TO GOD THE THINGS THAT
ARE OF GOD. This thought cancels out the first phrase
about the things that are of Caesar.
Later when Jesus is being
interrogated by the highest Roman authority in Palestine,
Pontius Pilate, Jesus tells Pilate that any power that
comes to human rulers comes from God. His point to Pilate
is not that political power is thereby given a divine
nature, but that all earthly power is tentative,
conditional, and limited by divine power. Because
earthly power is ultimately from God, and ultimately
accountable to God, Jesus probably would have accepted
that laws and taxes, even when originating with an alien
and heinous political source like Rome, were rightly to
be obeyed.
But ultimately God is a God of
liberation who seeks justice for his people and who
places standards of the highest conduct and service upon
all political authorities that all such earthly powers
must be condemned as beneath the divine purpose and glory
of God. Those earthly powers be they Caesar, Pilate,
Herod and every other ruler will eventually be power-less
because God will reclaim the secular system and conform
it to his Kingdom of God.
Jesus' rhetorical tactics were
successful for the moment because we are told that his
critics were amazed and, at least for the while, shut up
and went away. Their temporary truce is all the more
amazing considering that Jesus has just called the group:
YOU HYPOCRITES.
This hour it is us whom Jesus
addresses as hypocrites. Or would you deny that there are
any coins of hypocrisy in your pockets! Have not we all
put our energy, our hope, our trust in the coins of
Caesar, of this materialistic realm which we honor,
celebrate, and which we try at our darndest to keep
separated from our faith?
Surely most people, including
most Christians, in Hong Kong, try to encapsulate life
into monetary and other measures of worldly success and
earthly aspirations; and most people in Hong Kong, like
everywhere, begrudgingly pay their taxes.
More to our consciences are
those spiritual hypocrisies we hold in order to put God
in our pockets. We are forever laying upon God our human
expectations, definitions, needs, doctrines, trying to
cut God down to our size and our expectations. We really
like a small God whom we can manipulate to give us the
assurances and answers which make us feel comfortable.
Puny humans like small gods.
And when we reach into our own
pockets to inventory the good things we've put in there,
we may come up empty handed.
But don't despair. Unlike the
Pharisees and Herodians, we need not go away for just a
while and then start plotting for the kill. We are here
in the presence of the unseen divine God to ponder his
guidance for us.
We know that God has inventoried
our pockets, as our lives, long before we get around to
the uncomfortable truth of self-awareness. And we are
standing in the presence of the Divine One who is
interested, not in entrapping us, but in liberating us.
We are in the presence of the God who knows all about
empty pockets, broken human vessels, wayward sons and
daughters, and works to transform all those disabilities
into his purpose and to be his beloved children.
*********
To get both an intellectual and
an emotional grasp on what Jesus is saying to us in
today's text I invite you to join in a little meditation
adventure with me. We'll listen to some of "Cantate
Domino", composed by Enrico Bossi, to help us on our
journey. .(Readers of this sermon on the Web might enjoy
the meditation more to put on this composition or
similarly heavenly music of Handel or Mozart or Gustav
Holtz!)
My idea for this meditative
journey originated as I waited before the great portal
door of St. John's Cathedral last Sunday night for our
confirmation students to join me for a tour of the
sanctuary and then Evensong; and from an idea for travel
in space meditation from the Rev. Todd Townsend of
Canada.
Please place yourself with me at
the cathedral door of St. John's. It is evening. Far,
far down the nave the candles have been lit on the high
altar for the evening service. As we enter the great door
we see persons sitting quietly in expectaton, and some
kneeling in prayer. The organ is playing
prelude.
Immediately as we enter is a
large, a modern mosaic on the floor. It shows symbols of
the Divine One: the eagle of truth, the flames of the
Spirit, the crown of majesty. We walk then across it and
see other Christians icons here and there. At the far end
in the great east window is a cross with Christ upon it;
as evening has fallen we can make out only the outline of
the cross. The rich colors are fast fading into grey.
Now let us take a seat near the
front. Are you comfortable. Close your eyes and let your
mind and imagination begin to float with the music. I
invite you to see yourselves seated there in the
cathedral. Now let yourself float and rise with the
music around the cathedral; you might recall the symbols
of cross, and fire, and majesty we have seen and imagine
other symbols placed here and there, the sun, the moon,
stars, blue for the firmament skies.
Now as you are floating outside
the cathedral, rising above it. Open your
eyes!
Everything in Hong Kong, begins
to look smaller and smaller as we rise higher and higher.
Even the great towers of the Hong Kong Bank and this very
tower grow tiny as we ascend into the sky.
Then all of Hong Kong starts to
fade and is a grey blur with yellow luminosity. We rise
to the 30 miles or so of the orbital astronauts and see
the outline of east Asia and the darkness of the pacific
Ocean and the dim outlines of the American continents to
the east and just the hint of Africa on the west.
Now we are high enough to see
the entire planet earth grow smaller and small as we
shuttle into the infinitude of space. Earth looks like a
marble. We see the other planets and the sun. Zooming
backwards or outwards at a speed beyond light we can see
the whole solar system and how God makes it balance and
relate and move. Now the Galaxy comes into view and soon
it fades, also, to the size of a marble, really a mere
coin. You can see that one coin but then you see
hundreds, even thousands of other galaxies, glittering as
a myriad of gold and silver coins.
The immense elements of the
universe are reduced, as it were. To heavenly pocket
change.
So can you start to think as
Jesus was thinking when he said: "RENDER UNTO CAESAR THE
THINGS THAT BELONG TO CAESAR BUT GIVE TO GOD THE THINGS
THAT ARE OF GOD." Nothing at the beginning or finally at
the end belongs to Caesar; nothing belongs to any of us.
God has done it all; everything belongs to God; how
childish to think we can play games with God's providence
deciding that this belongs to the political realm, this
belongs, to us, and this, this little bit of change and
paper is worthy to be tossed at God so as in our human
accounting to square and balance our account with the
divine one!
We may want to go even further
out hoping finally to see God. But we can't see God , not
in outer space nor here. As the reading from Exodus warns
us: God says to Moses: I shall show you my glory, but you
shall not see my face.
We can see God's masterpiece -
the universe - as the back of God but we can't see
God.
In fact, to see something more
more of God, we must hasten back through the galaxies,
through our solar system, to this earth which we now
know so very well, to our city, to the place of worship
where we began our meditation.
We come back to the place where
our meditation began and looking up see again the cross
of Jesus hanging before us at the far end of the nave.
His teaching for us today is not
that there are two, more or less equal and balanced
realms, to which we owe proportional loyalties.
Jesus' perspective is that
everything comes from God and everything returns to God
and we are privileged, if we have imagination to go on a
faith journey in this life and on this earth, much like
our meditation adventure, to enjoy the marvellous
provisions God has given us.
The emperor no matter what
uniform or crown or constitution he uses to legitimize
his authority is just one among us. We all have jobs to
tend the earth and the riches of life on behalf of
someone else. It's all God's. And when we stop entrapping
ourselves, truer answers will come to us.
We belong to God and God has
chosen to give us the sign of his ultimate blessing. It
is a costly blessing to God and it may be a costly
blessing for us to receive. In the cross of Jesus
blessing and sacrifice are linked. The designers of St.
John's got it right….at the end of the nave like at
the end of our journeys in life there will be finally the
cross of blessing and of God's sacrifice.
Pastor Gene
Preston
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