Sunday, October 22, 2017

Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22:15 – 21
There was a woman sitting on the beach sunbathing. A little boy came up to her and asked, “Do you go to church?” She said she did. A minute later, he said, “Do you read the Bible?” She replied that she read some every day. A few minutes later he asked, “Do you pray every day?” She replied, yes, and often more than once. The little boy was silent for a while, then said, “I guess I can trust you to hold my quarter while I go in the water?” It's hard to find jokes about coins. But don't worry, the joke has nothing to do with today's gospel.
Separation of Church and State. Religion doesn't belong in the public square. You can believe anything you want, as long as you are sincere and don't bother other people with your beliefs. I suspect these and many other ideas about the proper spheres of religion and politics, or perhaps religion and everything else, can be read into the words of Jesus: “Repay to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's”. It's interesting that during most of human history no one would have separated Church and State. In fact, in this year in which the world celebrates the 500th anniversary of the Protestant reformation, it's not very widely known that Martin Luther was probably the first Christian to use these words of Jesus to proclaim that the State and the Church should be separate and independent of each other. Luther knew that as long as the people had to follow the religion of their ruler, there would be little hope for his reformation to take place. And even in the 19th century, Pope Pius X's syllabus of errors, a list of things that he felt were not compatible with the Catholic faith, insisted that it was an error to say that a Catholic country should allow freedom of religion. And of course any Muslim majority country would laugh at this interpretation.
Jesus probably would have as well. Let's look at the story. The Jews didn't like taxes any more than anyone else, but most of them paid them, and their leaders didn't say they couldn't. After all, when the tax man came around with a few soldiers you didn't have much choice, and the rulers knew that there was only a certain amount you could extract from the population before you had open rebellion, so the system sort of worked, and a lot of the tax money did go to things that directly or indirectly benefitted the population – roads, irrigation systems, a standing army that kept the peace.
The problem was the census tax, or as the Greek has it, the tribute tax. If you were a male, you had to find a way to get a denarius – a specific coin worth about a day's wage, and you would bring that to the tax man who would write your name in his book. This was how every male in the Roman empire showed that he honored Caesar – and for the Jews, it was triple humiliation; – they had to pretend to honor someone who oppressed them and had taken away their independence; they had to do it with a coin containing a graven image and the words “Caesar Augustus, son of God” which was blasphemy through and through, and they had to take part in a census, knowing that this was forbidden by Mosaic law. Obviously the pharisees and herodians meant to trap Jesus, but they weren't asking about the morality of taxes or talking about the separation of Church and State.
Jesus answer, clever as it was, was not just clever. It was designed to make you think. What belongs to Caesar? Anyone who lives in a nation or state owes a minimum to that state. Obeying the law, paying taxes and voting come to mind. All Christians should be involved in politics but some are called to be much more involved than others; being a politician is a vocation, just like being a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman.
More importantly, what belongs to God? The Jewish answer, like the Christian answer, is everything. But in Jewish law, it was as though human beings could own things, could behave as though things belonged to them. So in Jewish law it is carefully spelled out what people owe to God. Everyone owes God one day a week, the Sabbath. Everyone is called to tithe, and in Leviticus how much you tithed of different things is spelled out in detail. And of course there are those called to give God more. Recall the rich young man that Jesus told to give up everything and follow him. Jesus did not make that request of many people, just a few. And in the Old Testament, the same could be said of the patriarchs and prophets – people who were called to give more to God than the rest.
The Pharisees and Herodians had been arguing over whether or not it was possible for a good Jew to pay the tribute tax. Some said it was totally against Jewish law, and other said paying it was the best way to go along and get along; after all, to not pay it might mean your life. But Jesus is saying, as he has said so often, the Sabbath belongs to man, not man to the Sabbath. The real issue is what you owe your political community, and what you owe God. Because if you want to follow Jesus, there are only two things that matter; how you love God and how you love your neighbor. Give to God what is God's, and give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
So perhaps rather than dividing the world into that which belongs to Caesar and that which belongs to God, the secular and the sacred, a division that leads to disharmony and forcing us to take sides, we should rather ask on this Sunday, how are we being good citizens? And should we do more? And how are we being good Christians? And should we do more? These are not opposites, they in fact often go hand in hand.