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Sunday, March 22, 2009
SHOULD WE PAY TAXES TO CAESAR?
12th in a series on Questions from the Bible
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: Mark 12:12-17 New Revised Standard Version 12 When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away. 13 Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. 14 And they came and said to him, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? 15 Should we pay them, or should we not?" But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, "Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it." 16 And they brought one. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." 17 Jesus said to them, "Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." And they were utterly amazed at him.
The interchange we heard about in the gospel of Mark would have been very emotionally charged and intense. The crowd who saw this attempt to trick Jesus would have been very much on edge. Let’s set the stage for this charged conversation. Jesus is in Jerusalem for the last few days of his life. We know this as Holy Week. He has entered the city on Sunday, Palm Sunday, when the crowds are cheering him and praising him and waving palm branches. The palm branch is still used today in Israel on some coins and it is a symbol of nationalism and military victory. When the Romans saw the palm branches being waved, they could have become very uneasy. They would have also been uneasy when the crowds were hailing Jesus as the descendant of King David because King David, 1000 years before Jesus, was the most beloved military and political hero in Jewish history. Jesus was entering Jerusalem during Passover week when hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims filled the city for that holy festival and when thousands of additional Roman soldiers were brought into the city to keep the peace and make sure that no riots occurred. Do you remember the next thing that happened when Jesus came into the city and went to the Temple the next day? Something like a riot did occur when Jesus saw all the merchants selling sacrificial animals and changing money, not because they were present, but because they represented a corrupt monopoly and temple bureaucracy, and they were cheating and overcharging the religious pilgrims who had come to worship during the holiest festival of the year. Passover was for the Jews what Easter is for us, the time they saw God visibly at work in history to change the course of events and to rescue them from bondage. Jesus went to the temple on Monday morning; saw the unethical business dealings and he spoke the words that we have on our wall in the hallway outside the sanctuary: “My house shall be a house of prayer for all people.” Then he adds a line: “But you have turned it into a den of robbers.” In John’s gospel, he took a whip and used it to drive the merchants out, turning over their tables at the same time. So much for our third grade Sunday school of gentle Jesus meek and mild! The holy folks are outraged by his behavior because he has just interrupted their profit stream. They are looking for the quickest way to kill him, but they are very cautious because Jesus is very popular with the crowd. He remains in the Temple every day of Holy Week teaching people and answering questions. At the end of the day, he leaves the city of Jerusalem and goes back out of the city with thousands of other pilgrims to camp out on the Mount of Olives or to sleep in one of the many caves still found there. He and his friends were hiding out. He did not want to be visible to the religious leaders because he knew they would want to arrest him at night if they could find him because there would be no crowds around him at night. During each day in the temple, the scribes and Pharisees, the holy folks, tried to make him look bad with the crowds by asking questions that would trap him, cause him to give an unpopular answer. They would ask him a question about life after death and he skillfully avoided answering it in a way that would have caused a riot between the two major religious groups, the Pharisees and Sadducees. He told them a parable about a vineyard, and the holy folks easily recognized that they were the villains in the parable and they became even more determined to kill him, but still they were afraid of the crowd. In the midst of his teaching Jesus saw a poor widow come to the temple treasure box and drop in two small coins known today as a widow’s mite. He pointed to the poor widow and said that she had given more than all the others who had put their money in the box very noisily. The crowd was astonished because they had seen and heard many affluent persons dropping their money in. Jesus praised the widow and said, the others gave out of their leftovers, their giving was not sacrificial, but her giving was sacrificial and really costly to her. In the middle of Jesus’ teaching, some holy folks came with a question they knew would trip up Jesus and either cause him to immediately be arrested or cause him to lose the crowd entirely. Perhaps it is appropriate that we deal with this question on a day just 25 days before April 15 in our country, and in a time when there is tremendous uproar about the use of taxpayers’ money in America being used to bail out companies with questionable practices. The question can seem simple on the surface. Should we pay or not pay taxes to the emperor? This is a simple sounding question but was extremely dangerous. One scholar offers a dubious reason that should not be taken seriously. The reason has to do with the people’s taxes being used about this time to prop up a Roman entity known as the Antiquities Industrial Group or AIG of Rome. It is not a serious theory and should be discarded. The tax burden of the occupying Roman government was extremely heavy, heavier than our tax burden today in America. Taxes were extremely unpopular because they supported an occupation army that was harsh and unforgiving. To make matters worse, the tax collectors for Rome were Jewish citizens who made their money by overcharging their fellow Jews so these people were hated and despised. Do you remember any Jewish tax collectors by name? Perhaps you know two of them. Matthew, one of Jesus’ disciples was a tax collector, and a little fellow from Jericho who became a follower of Jesus was also a tax collector. His name was Zaccheus. The people trying to trap Jesus thought he could only answer one of two ways and either would destroy his credibility. If he said that people should pay their taxes to the hated Roman occupiers, he would lose his credibility with the crowd, they would leave his group, and Jesus could finally be arrested. On the other hand, if he encouraged people not to pay taxes, he would immediately be arrested by the nearby soldiers and charged with treason, the charge he was eventually executed on anyway. What Jesus did was stunningly brilliant. He showed the hypocrisy of the holy folk by asking one of them for a coin, which they had but were not supposed to have there in the temple. Roman coins had a graven image, something distasteful to Jews, and they had an inscription calling the emperor a god, anathema to Jews. That is the reason there were money changers at the temple, to exchange at an exorbitant rate, Roman coins for Jewish money that had no graven image. When Jesus has the coin he points out that if the Emperor’s picture is on it, it must belong to the emperor and that people should give it to the emperor, but then he twists the question back. People should also be giving to God what belongs to God and that means us. We belong to God, we come from God, we return to God at the end. We say those words at funerals. We say those words in one of the psalms. The earth belongs to the Lord and all who live in it. Jesus says our loyalty to God is the highest loyalty, above any other loyalty, above loyalty to any government. Jesus is not starting a revolution against Rome, although a couple of his disciples hoped he would. Probably Judas hoped for that because he thought Jesus was going to be a military and political messiah like King David. In this interchange, Jesus seems to affirm that we need to have government, not like that of the Romans, but some kind of government. The current debate is about the role of a federal government, where one group wants to shrink government to be small enough to drown it in the bathtub and other groups are more willing for there to be a strong central government with the assumption that there may be some things that only a strong federal government can do. There are some church groups who do not want to acknowledge any role for a federal government and who, therefore, do not stand for the national anthem or participate in the Pledge of Allegiance. Jesus seems to assume that government has some role, but he also gives us a higher authority that gets echoed later on in the Bible when two church leaders are willing to be arrested again as they tell their captors that, as people of faith, they must obey the laws of God and not the laws of humans because the law of God is higher than, and takes precedence over, human law. Does that notion sound familiar? We affirm that every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance; when we say that our nation is under God, under God’s judgment, accountable to God. Abraham Lincoln believed that when he said those words, he was not concerned about whether God was on the side of the confederacy or on the side of the Union. He was very concerned that we be on God’s side of justice and freedom. The prophet Isaiah said it when he said, on behalf of God; my ways are higher than your ways. We have a group of 18 people from our congregation who are remembering this truth from Christ, about giving our highest loyalty to God, as they are taking a six day civil rights pilgrimage in some of the places where people in the 1960’s lived and suffered and sacrificed because they believed that God’s call for freedom and equality, for all persons, took precedence over human laws enforcing segregation and discrimination. They have been present the past few days in Birmingham and Montgomery and Selma hearing the stories again and taking time in prayer. On the first day of the pilgrimage they were at Little Rock High School with Carlotta Walls. She was one of the nine school children who helped break down the barriers that were trying to keep some people down. Carlotta walked among hateful crowds, who were cursing and spitting, so that liberty and justice for all persons could become a reality and not just words in the Pledge of Allegiance. Give to the government what belongs to them, but give to God what belongs to God, your highest loyalty, your attention, your heart. Jesus makes a promise a little earlier in this gospel of Mark. When we give God what belongs to God, when we offer to God our hearts and our lives, when we decide to trust God first and foremost and decide to follow Christ, when we decide to live as servant leaders, in humility, that is when we find life. That is when we live most fully and most joyfully.