Sermons

October 2002 (click here to return to "October 2002 Sermons" page)

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 20, 2002)

"The Things That Are God's" Dr. Van Kemper

Text: Matthew 22: 15-22

SERMON

Yesterday, we had yet another memorial service in this sanctuary. Rosanelle Greenhaw – a member of Trinity for 56 years – was remembered for her wonderful life of Christian service and was commended to our Lord as a new member of the Church Triumphant. In effect, we gave Rosanelle back to God. And this morning many of us return to this sanctuary to hear about Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees and Herodians on the question of paying taxes. The unanticipated coincidence between yesterday’s service and this morning’s brings to mind the old saying that life’s only certainties are “death and taxes.” Hang on to this saying, we shall return to it later.

In Matthew’s gospel, “The question about paying taxes” follows a series of parables – including those about the two sons, the wicked tenants, and the wedding banquet – on which Julie has been preaching for the past three Sundays. Now, Jesus is still in the Temple precinct in Jerusalem, but the chief priests fade into the background, while the disciples of the Pharisees, along with the Herodians, come forward with a conspiracy to entrap Jesus. From what Matthew has already reported in earlier chapters, his readers would have been well acquainted with the Pharisees’ hostility toward Jesus. The added presence of the Herodians – those who followed in the tradition of Herod, the King who had attempted to kill the baby Jesus – simply enhanced the plot.

In the eight short verses of this story, Matthew establishes the evil intent of the Pharisees and Herodians, takes his audience through the question about paying taxes, demonstrates Jesus’ awareness of their malice, and then gives Jesus the opportunity to respond to these “hypocrites” with questions of his own. As always, Jesus turns the tables on those who would challenge his authority.

Jesus began his questioning innocently enough. In verse 19, he says, in effect, “Show me the money” – long before Cuba Gooding, Jr. spoke that line in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire.

In response to his challenge, the Pharisees and the Herodians brought a silver denarius to Jesus. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’ They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’

At this point in the story, we 21st century listeners are all ready with the answer. Just as we all know the old saying about the certainty of “death and taxes,” we also know the old saying “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” But when the Pharisees and the Herodians heard Jesus offer up this imperative, “they were amazed, and they left him and went away.” How can we explain their behavior?

The Pharisees and the Herodians were certain that they really had trapped Jesus this time. No more parables, no more tricks. If Jesus answered that the Jews should pay taxes to the Roman government which occupied their lands, he would lose the support of the masses. If Jesus responded with a rejection of the imperial tax, then he would be in trouble with the Roman authorities. From the perspective of the Pharisees and the Herodians, it looked like a no-win situation for Jesus.

But Jesus turns the tables. He outwits his questioners and exposes their hypocrisy. With their own coin yet! “Heads I win, tails you lose.” And their response: they went away! Sore losers!

What was going on between Jesus and the Pharisses and the Herodians? In first-century Judea, two kinds of coins circulated as legal tender. First, there were the regular Roman coins, minted with the likeness of the head of the emperor. In those days, when Tiberius was emperor, the silver denarius were labeled “Tiberius, Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, the high priest,” or “Tiberius, Caesar, the majestic son of God, the high priest.” To pious Jews, the image on the coin violated the second commandment prohibition against idols. As if that were not bad enough, the language on the coin reminded them that they were a conquered people whose own high priests were subject to the Roman Emperor, who was called the high priest.

But, and this is the interesting bit, the politically savy Romans made an alternate set of image-free text-only coins for Judea. This first-century accommodation was a precursor of today’s Internet, where user-sensitive Websites provide a “text only” version for folks with limited computing power. The point is that the Roman government provided a way for traditional, law-abiding Jews to avoid being “contaminated” through handling the regular coins – in effect, business still could be conducted and imperial taxes still could be collected.

So, when Jesus asked those Pharisees and Herodians to show him the money, and they brought him a silver denarius bearing the emperor’s head and title, they convicted themselves of being hypocrites! The Pharisees and Herodians were “amazed” not out of their new-found respect for Jesus, but because Jesus found a way to show them a “truth” about themselves that they could not face. So, “they left him and went away.”

Of course, if Jesus were to appear among us right now, and said “Show me the money,” I think that He might be amazed by what he would encounter. First, we would show him our U.S. currency – with its bold declaration “In God We Trust.” And some among us might even remark with a certain pride, “See, Jesus, as a people we trust in God all the time – we even say so on our money!

But, then Jesus might ask about the “alternative currencies” nearly all of us carry around in our wallets and in our purses. Let’s see: bank credit cards, debit cards, and ATM cards; cards bearing the codes for direct governmental deposits and withdrawals to and from our personal accounts; various affinity credit cards, discount cards, advantage cards, preferred membership cards, and even cards that give charitable organizations – including our own Trinity Presbyterian Church – a kickback on purchases made at those businesses. Today, we have so many “currencies,” and so many “emperors” to go with them, that I wonder if it wouldn’t be Jesus who would be amazed, and then tempted to leave us and go away.

“No!” you say, “Jesus wouldn’t do that.” Not Jesus. . . . after all, he is all about love and compassion and mercy. Well, yes, . . . but consider the Jesus that Matthew portrays in this very story. Go back to verse 18, where Jesus said to the Pharisees and the Herodians, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?” In this chapter and in the following chapter, Jesus called the chief priests, the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees “hypocrites” eight times!

An interesting word, “hypocrite” is from ancient Greece, where it was used to describe an actor or stage player. Later, in the New Testament, it was used figuratively to mean someone who pretends to be someone other than who he is. So, when Jesus called those religious and political leaders hypocrites even before he asks them to show him the money, he was declaring that they were frauds, pure and simple.

Matthew’s audience certainly would have remembered an earlier set of sayings from Jesus, including 6:21, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” and the related phrase, in 6:24, “No one can serve two masters; . . . You cannot serve God and wealth.”

So, at last, we get to the “heart” of the matter. When Jesus says to the Pharisees and the Herodians that they should “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s” what he really conveys to them – and this is why they are so amazed that they must go away – is how corrupt and hypocritical is their relationship with the emperor and the earthly powers represented by the Roman empire. Jesus’ imperative is not to remind them to pay their taxes on time, but about the hypocrisy and sinfulness inherent in the human condition.

Having dealt with “the things of the emperor,” Jesus turned to “the things that are God’s.” I need to stop at this point and put on my other robe – my academic robe as a professor at SMU. I must admit that if I saw a phrase like this in an essay submitted by one of my students at SMU, I would circle it in red ink and write in the margin, “too vague. . . what do you mean by ‘the things’? It is hard enough to imagine what you mean by ‘the things that are the emperor’s,’ but I am having a real problem with the juxtaposed phrase ‘the things that are God’s!’”

Now let me change back into my preacher’s robe to see if I can find us an answer to my query. A look at the original Greek phrase doesn’t help us much at all. In fact, it makes matters worse! It is a short, but beautiful, phrase in Greek: transliterated as "ta tou theou tow theow." Literally, the phrase means “the of God. . . to God.” But, in English, we can’t follow a definite article with a possessive definitive article because we lack the concept of “case” in our language. In English, we must supply a noun – such as “things” or “stuff” – to solve the translation problem. In a sense, we lose the mystery of the original Greek when we are forced to translate the phrase into English. Far better to retain the mystery and the open-endedness involved with God’s unstated claim upon all of creation and all of us.

But I have another problem with Jesus’ mandate to the Pharisees and Herodians. The NRSV translation of the Greek verb (ápódote) translated in the NRSV as “give” misses the point completely! The verb used here – and elsewhere in Matthew – does not simply mean “give” – as in a gift – instead, it really has the meaning of “give back,” “pay,” or “repay.” These meanings are captured by the King James Version and the Revised Standard Versions – both of which translate the verb as “render” rather than as “give.” In fact, this specific imperative form of the verb occurs only five times in the New Testament: here in this passage and in its parallels in Mark and Luke, and then once in Romans 13:7 and once in Revelations 18:6. Curiously even the NRSV uses “pay” and “render” in these other cases: in Romans 13:7, “Pay to all what is due them-- taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.” And in Revelations 18:6, “Render to her as she herself has rendered, and repay her double for her deeds; mix a double draught for her in the cup she mixed.”

So, now we have a better idea about what Jesus demanded of the Pharisees and Herodians: nothing less than a recognition that they should repay to God the value of all the things – all the “stuff” – that came to them from God. No wonder they were amazed and went away. It reminds me of the earlier response that Jesus made to the rich young man (Matthew 19:16-22) and the continuing dialogue with his disciples, who “were greatly astonished and said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ [And] Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.’”

Clearly, Jesus knew that he was demanding the impossible. He knew that mere humans could not repay all that God gives us – our birth, our upbringing, our families, our friends, even the blessing of death when living becomes too burdensome. And how could anyone repay God for all of creation – the light, the water, the earth – all that we take for granted? Too many blessings, too small a balance in our checking accounts and too low a limit on our credit cards. When God says “Show me the money” all the stuff we possess – all the silver denarius coins, all the Federal Reserve notes, all the credit cards, all the retirement funds – fail to cover the price.

In fact, even God the creator eventually realized that the old covenant with the people of Israel was inadequate to the need. So Jesus broke into human existence to establish a new covenant, to pay the ultimate price, to suffer the cross for all of us, and then – speaking of amazing – to be resurrected to new life, a new life available to all of us.

Yesterday and this morning, the so-called certainties of “death and taxes” have been turned upside down before our eyes. If we properly understand Jesus’ imperatives to the Pharisees and Herodians, then the mandate to us is clear. We must lay aside our human hypocrisy and we must open ourselves to the mystery of all “the things that are God’s.” Amen.