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.
