Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
18.Sunday after Pentecost, 10/16/2011
Sermon on Matthew 22:15-22 , by Luke Bouman
Matthew 22:15Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. 16So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. 17Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" 18But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19Show me the coin used for the tax." And they brought him a denarius. 20Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" 21They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." 22When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
Whose Image?
Groups from around the political spectrum are fed up. This phenomenon is not limited to one country or one continent. From the "Arab Spring" in the Middle East and North Africa, to protests and sit-ins in the United States, people are registering their dissatisfaction with the way that governments are functioning, (or dysfunctioning, as the case may be). These protests may be conservative, as with the "Tea Party," or liberal, as with some of the "Occupy Wall Street" sin-ins. Whatever else may be going on, the trust in institutional authority is, at least for the moment, eroded. With that erosion of trust has come an increased reluctance to pay taxes. As one person put it to me recently, "It isn't that I am greedy or want to keep the money for myself, it is just that I don't trust the government to do anything but waste it."
This mistrust in authority, has, inevitably, led to a mistrust of Churches as well. Scandals of many stripes have rocked large church bodies, and small congregations. Beyond the headlines, many young people turn away from congregations where they see the petty infighting of members and the lack of any concerted mission. It is no wonder that in this climate people no longer invest themselves in the mission of God through the church. They don't want to help with something that they can't see or don't trust. What people do not trust, they do not give money to.
It seems, in fact that today's lesson is far from the reality that most people live. Today many, perhaps most people do not render to "the emperor" if they can help it, and they certainly do not render to God. We have, many of us, lost the concept that there is anything bigger than "us" out there, whether the "us" refers to our group, or to us as individuals. Especially in North America, where individualism is a strong current, we seem to have become a nation obsessed with personal triumph, personal wealth building at the expense of anyone and everyone who might stand in our way. We flock to religious institutions that proclaim a "prosperity Gospel" as a faith in our hope that we, too, might become more prosperous. We even support the notion that it is okay that an increasingly larger percentage of the world's wealth and resources is in the hands of an ever-smaller percentage of the world's elite wealthy class.
In a world in which we have created gods in our own images, whether these gods be religious or political, we seem to have found a loophole in Jesus challenge to the religious/political authorities of his day. When what we have pretends to bear the stamp of our own image, then we render only to ourselves. The difficulty with this is that the world then becomes filled with an array of "little gods" each pretending that he or she has ultimate authority, when in fact that authority is an illusion. We have no authority over one another, in this individuated system; we hardly even have authority over ourselves. We become enslaved, all of us, to a system which demands more an more from us in order to maintain our illusions of wealth, power, and status, only to find that we cannot escape that final authority, that looms over all of us: death.
All of this reminds me of an old German folk proverb that my father used as a joke years ago. "Arbeit, Arbeit, Spar, Spar, Bau ein Haeusele, Vereke!" or so it went in German. Roughly translated, it goes, "Work, work, save, save, build yourself a little house, croak." This proverb points to the meaningless of existence when the rat race is all there is. It is a race that can't be won, since all the rats end up dead in the end.
Created in God's Image
Hidden in the text is not only a rebuke of the way of life that seats ultimate authority in our selves, but also a gracious way out. Jesus responds to the rebuke of the Jewish authorities of his day with several brilliant moves. First, he asks them to show him a coin. The fact that they are able to do so reveals the first trap for them. Carrying a graven image of the emperor, who had by this time set himself up to be divine, was in direct contrast to their own faith. These coins were the currency of the empire, but forbidden to the pious Jew. Producing a coin means that they are caught with something they were not supposed to carry.
Second, Jesus asks them about the image on the coin, and upon hearing that it is the emperor (I suspect he knew before he asked) he simply responds that they should give to the emperor those things that belong to the emperor and to God, those things that belong to God. This alone was enough to quiet them. But hidden inside this, is something that ought to challenge all of us.
Jesus never defines what things belong to God. Over time, many people have used this passage to insert whatever they would like into that void. It has been used, for good or ill, to tell people what to give to God. But by asking the question of the image on the coin, Jesus is offering us an alternative to guessing. He is, in some sense, pointing us to the question, where do we find the image of God?
The answer to this question is found throughout the Bible, from start to finish. We don't have time to go through all of the citations, so let's just look at the first one, from Genesis 1. When God created us, as human beings, it says that we are created in the image of God, male and female. We are created as beings that bear the very stamp of God's self. The ancient commandments of our faith encouraged us not to make any graven images, any static images of God, because God has left his image on all of us, as a human community.
Now we get to the heart of what belongs to God: we do! And this image is not us, as individuals, but us in relationship with one another. God claims all of us with his own image. And when we go wrong, when we turn away from God and one another to become our own authority, God continually comes again among us, to claim us week after week.
When the people of Israel mistook their mission of old, creating "us vs. them" out of the call to be a "light to the nations", it led them to disaster; to the loss and grief of exile. When we do the same today, it leads us into chaos as well. We react by pointing fingers and casting blame on the church, on the government, on the political parties, everywhere but ourselves, where the true responsibility lies.
Of old, God called his people back through covenant, prophets, finally his own presence in our midst, so that we could see God's image reflected in a face like ours. God continues to call us back in the same way today. And when we see the image of Christ, reflected in the people around us, we are reminded that Jesus' command to "give to God what belongs to God" is asking for no less than an offering of our whole selves. Even "the things of the emperor" belong to God. Even the whole universe belongs to God.
It is somewhat nonsense, of course, to pretend to give to God something that already belongs to God. But the offering that we make is not for God, but rather for us. It is our acknowledgement that we know in whose image we are created; that we know to whom we belong. Such an acknowledgement turns us inside out and leads us to a fuller participation in relationship with God and one another in the here and now, as a rehearsal for the final and total participation we will share with God and one another when all other kingdoms and empires have passed away, and there is only God's reign to call forth our loyalty.