By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Oct. 22, 2023)
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight. Oh God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
So Jesus is in this argument with the Pharisees and the Herodians today, and actually it's the continuation of a longer dispute, an ongoing escalation of an argument that began several weeks ago. Well, several weeks ago by our church calendar. It's just a couple chapters ago in the Gospel of Matthew. But Jesus goes into the temple, and he overthrows the tables of the money changers. I'll have more to say about them in a little bit. And after he does this, the leaders come to him and say, "By what authority have you done these things?" And Courtney preached a wonderful sermon about that a few weeks ago.
And it's in the wake of that question by what authority that they keep trying to trap Jesus, keep escalating the argument. And it will culminate in them deciding to have him arrested, but we're at this point now where they try to set this trap. This trap for Jesus around the question of taxes.
So what's the nature of this trap? I think we get the impression when we hear this read, that the Herodians and the Pharisees were joining forces to trap Jesus. It says the Pharisees went to trap and then they went along with the Herodians, and then they asked him this question about taxes. I don't think that they were working together, in fact, because the Herodians and the Pharisees hated each other. They didn't like each other. The Herodians were those installed by Herod the King, a Hellenized Jewish person. The temple priests were from this class. They were the elites. They're committed to temple practice. They were in with Herod and Herod was in with Rome. And they didn't like Jesus because of the way he had undermined the authority of the temple in these recent actions.
But the Pharisees were the opposite. The Pharisees were working class people, not elites. They were teaching about faithfulness to the law and teachings that, in many cases, sound very much like the teachings that Jesus gave. They hated that the Herodians were in with Rome, and so they're not really working together to try to trap Jesus into a single trap. They are trying to figure out whose side Jesus is on. Is he with the Herodians or with the Pharisees? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or wrong?
And Jesus offers a clever response. They give him a difficult question and he gives a quippy answer, "Show me the coin," and then in the most traditional translation, the authorized version or the King James version, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's."
And it's clever because what doesn't belong to God? He evades the question. Neither the Pharisees nor the Herodians want to say that second part for the political implications it might have, but the implications have been made clear by Jesus. What doesn't belong to God? So give to God what belongs to God and give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. It's a clever answer. It's a good answer.
But I need more than cleverness from Jesus today. I don't want him evading a tricky question. I want good news in this world, which is so broken, in this world, which is riven and divided by violence and hatred. I want Jesus's answer to stand up to that in some way with more than cleverness, more than evasion. So let's dig deeper because I think it does.
Jesus says, "More than render unto Caesar and render unto God." Jesus says, "First, show me the coin," and this is important. He says, "Show me the coin." And they bring a coin and he asks for two things. He asks them to look at the coin and he asked them two things, "Whose head and whose title?" Now coins then, like coins now, had a head pressed in the metal. This is true at this time. Two, and the head pressed into the metal here was Tiberius and the title, printed there was this: Caesar Augustus Tiberius. Son of divine Augustus.
What's printed on the coin is that Caesar is the God, and Tiberius is his son. What's printed on the coin is a blasphemy, which is why they needed money changers in the temple. They could not use this coin in the temple, because printed upon it, stamped upon it was the declaration that this other person, the emperor and the emperor's son were divine. So Jesus is calling forth not just this question of who to give taxes to, he's calling forth what is written on that coin.
They're not supposed to have this coin in the temple. So the title's important, but he asked for two things. He also asked for the head, and I want to talk more about him asking what head is there. The word which is translated into English now in our reading, as head, is actually the Greek word icon. We have that word in English, icon as well. But in Greek, and biblical Greek, icon meant likeness or image, or it could have meant like a bust or a head, so this is why it says head. Whose head is there?
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But it's important for us to sink into the actual word that's written here, which is icon, because that in itself is another scriptural reference. Judeans of this time read the Bible mostly in Greek. The Greek version of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible was called the Septuagint, and the word icon is used in a very important place in that book. It says, in Genesis One, that when God created humans, God made them in the image of God, in the icon of God. Jesus is calling attention back to this earlier reference, saying, "The image of Caesar is on the coin, but the image of God is on us, on humans." This is where his response becomes more than clever, becomes more than just a quippy evasion. This is where he becomes more radical and gives an answer to the hatred and division which is around him because the question or the answer is not really what doesn't belong to God, the answer that he's giving, that he's asking them is, who doesn't belong to God?
Who doesn't belong to God? Every human is an image of God. Every human belongs to God and he is gesturing to everyone around him. The crowd who was gathered here, to hear our argument, each of them, an image of God. You herodians and you Pharisees, though you hate each other, each of you belong to God. Judeans and Galileans and Romans belong to God. Even Caesar and all his pride stamped on that coin belongs to God. Neighbors, enemies. Who doesn't belong to God? All. All of them in the image of God.
And the idea of belonging in this sense moves away from this idea of possession, that the coin connotes and more to a sense of belonging. We belong to each other. We belong to God. This is what Jesus is saying, and this is the trap. This is the answer to this trap. This is why Jesus accuses them of being hypocrites.
"Show me the coin, you hypocrites." Because these folks, the Herodians and the Pharisees, are trying to figure out why they hate Jesus. They are trying to organize the world by their hatreds. And hypocrisy is, what Jesus shows them, is that the organizing principle of the religion they share is not one of hatred, but of belonging and of love. This is the hypocrisy. Show us why we hate you. Show us which of us should hate you and for what reason, and Jesus says, "God loves us all."
And in this sense, I think the passage does speak to our own world in its brokenness, in its pain, in its division, in its hatred. Because doesn't it seem that so many spend so much energy in our lives and in this world trying to organize this world by their hatreds? We see that in domestic politics.
We also see it in war torn places. Folks eager to organize the world and others' responses, others' reactions, by respective, reciprocal and retaliatory hatreds. And we must reject these as Christians. We must reject these hatreds, but as we reject them, and we must, I want to offer a couple of cautions. We must reject hatred, but we also have to show some understanding.
If my child had been kidnapped, my child had been killed by a missile strike in a shelter, I would be full of rage. I would hope that I could wish for peace, but I know I would cry out for vengeance. We Christians must cry out for peace, but if we only cry out and ask for peace with trivialities or niceties, we risk giving the impression that we do not understand how deeply these children of God had been hurt.
If we only call for peace with platitudes, then we are rejecting the manifest pain, the abhorrent and abominable, horrible pain, that children of God are feeling in our world. The compassionate response is to understand and to be willing, as Steph said in her prayers, to be willing to sit with that pain and look at it, not turn away from it, with trivial calls for peace, but willingness to sit with it, patience to endure it, and to accompany others into some sort of healing and peace.
It's so much easier to turn away from suffering, even to turn away from suffering with righteous platitudes for peace. A harder thing to sit with those who cannot imagine peace, and hear the extent of their pain and their justified rage. So that is one caution for us Christians who do reject hatred and who do call for peace.
The other is more pointed, because there's a specific accusation in this passage, Jesus calls his questioners hypocrites. It's easy to be hard on them, these Herodians and these Pharisees from 2000 years ago. But hatreds we know have histories and this history, as I said two weeks ago from this pulpit, as I say again today, these histories are ours. They belong to Christianity.
We can and we must condemn Islamophobia, but in the same breath, we must also acknowledge that for hundreds of years, Christians were journeying to the holy land in religious war and massacring Muslims. We can and we must condemn colonialism, but then in the same breath, we also have to acknowledge that it's Christian churches who colonized the world. We can and we must condemn antisemitism, but we know, as I have said from this pulpit many times, that antisemitism is deep, deep within the Christian tradition. And it's not abstract either. I do talk about this a lot from the pulpit about how these are our histories, but not just in some general way. In the past, a member of this church told me this week something I did not know before. That in 1935, the German consul in Boston, who was a Nazi, came into this church and laid a wreath with a swastika in the wreath in this sanctuary, and we allowed it. This is not some other Christianity's history. This is our history, not some abstraction.
Jesus demands, his call for peace demands that we also call for peace. His rejection of hatred means that we must reject hatred. But how do we do that? We Christians, with our histories, how do we do that without being rightfully accused of hypocrisy?
There can be only one Christian prayer for peace, I think, and that Christian prayer for peace must also be a call for penitence. We Christians must stand against all hatreds. We must stand for peace. But it may be that, in making that stand, we must begin by falling to our knees.