Render to Caesar the Things that Are Caesar’s
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Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
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Season 1, Episode 35: Matthew 22:15-22. Lectionary A, Proper 24
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Render to Caesar the Things that Are Caesar’s
Herb Montgomery | October 20, 2023
To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.
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There are times when those teachings call me to lean more deeply into my civic duties because of the demands of love of neighbor and the belief that every person is the object of Divine love. As Dr. Emilie Townes so poignantly says, “If you begin with the idea that God loves everyone, justice isn’t very far behind.” And there are times when the state demands of me actions that opposes my commitment to justice. In moments like these, this story’s wisdom is helpful in navigating a life-giving pathway forward.
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Our reading this week is from the Gospel of Matthew:
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away. (Matthew 22:15-22)
Jesus’ saying in our reading this week appears in all three synoptic gospels and in the gospel of Thomas. It’s one of the sayings of Jesus that’s most misunderstood today, especially by the Christian Right.
If we are going to arrive at a life-giving interpretation of this story, we’re going to have to back up some and consider some historical context.
Archeologists tell us that the most circulated coin in Jesus’ day was a small coin with Tiberius Caesar’s image on one side and a seated woman holding an olive branch and a scepter. On the side with Ceasar’s image were the words, “TI CAESAR DIVI AVG F AUGUSTUS”: Tiberius is both Caesar Augustus (emperor), and the son of the Divine Augustus.
Augustus, Tiberius’ father, had been declared divine by the Roman Senate in 14 C.E. upon his death. During his life, Augustus had circulated coins that referred to him as the son of God. After Julius Caesar’s death, a star (really a comet), had appeared at the summer games dedicated to his honor. Many Romans interpreted this as a symbol of Julius Caesar’s soul ascending to the heavens to dwell with the gods. A year and half later, the Roman Senate declared Julius divine and the star that appeared in the summer began being referred to as the “Julian star.” (I find it fascinating that when Jesus is born, Matthew’s gospel describes a new star appearing in the heavens.)
Because of this tradition, Augustus had coins minted and circulated that had his image with the words “Augustus Ceasar” on one side and, on the back, the Julian Star with the words “Divine Julius,” indicating that Augustus was the Son of God. Each succeeding Caesar after Julius and Augustus also described himself as the Divine Son of God (“God” being the previous Caesar), all the way to Tiberius in Jesus’ time.
As we’ve said, on the back of the coin most likely held up in our story this week was the image of a woman holding both a scepter and an olive branch to symbolize of both the rule and the peace of Rome (or Pax Romana). The woman is most often identified as Tiberius’ mother Livia, the mother.
This gives our story this week a bit more context. When Jesus held up the coin and asked whose “image” was on the coin, there were two images, one of Tiberius Caesar claiming he was the Divine Son of God and the image of his mother Livia, the mother of the Son of God. Keep this imagery and its claims in mind for a moment.
In our reading, Jesus doesn’t tell his followers to pay the Roman tax, nor does Jesus tell them not to pay the tax. What Jesus does tell them, holding this coin with its imagery and claims, is to know the difference between their obligations to Caesar and their obligations to the God of the Torah.
Now, consider those coin images and their claims again. Jesus’ Jewish listeners that day would have heard his reply and remembered the words of the Torah itself:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” (Exodus 20:2-5)
On the surface, the words “give to Caesar Caesar’s due” would have sounded like an affirmation of paying taxes to Rome and thus kept Jesus out of trouble with the Romans. But to his Jewish listeners who knew the words of the Torah the following words “given to God what is God’s” would have held a much deeper, subversive message.
According to the Torah, someone could not both honor Caesar’s divine claims and honor the God of the Torah. These two claims were diametrically opposed to each other such that one could not honor one without violating the other. You could not serve both the God of the Torah and Caesar as God. The question that had been given to Jesus was an effort to entrap him before the Romans, yet his response had turned the trap around, indicting the elites and powerful who the poor viewed as serving Rome through their positions in the Temple State.
Honestly, I love how slick this story is in the end. The people questioning Jesus sought to render him guilty of violating the Pax Romana before Rome, and instead, they end up being rendered guilty of infidelity to the God of the Torah in the eyes of the people.
How might we apply the lessons of our story in our context today?
I live in the United States. There are times when the claims of my citizenship here are in perfect harmony with the teachings I believe are in the Jesus story. There are times when those teachings call me to lean more deeply into my civic duties because of the demands of love of neighbor and the belief that every person is the object of Divine love. As Dr. Emilie Townes so poignantly says, “If you begin with the idea that God loves everyone, justice isn’t very far behind.”
And there are times when the state demands of me actions that oppose the teaching I perceive in the Jesus story. I think of times when I’m asked to pledge allegiance to and support the American military-industrial complex. I think of the times when I’m asked to pledge allegiance to the economic exploitative and poverty-creating elements of a global capitalism. I think of when I’m called to pledge allegiance to American policies that still systemically hurt those made vulnerable. I think of the systemic racism and misogyny still baked into how we do things.
Being a Jesus follower who is also an American is complicated. Sometimes I’m proud of this nation and happy to participate in its society and fulfill civic duties. At other times I’m ashamed of our national actions and I participate in our society by speaking out and by obstruction. As someone who both loves the Jesus of the Jesus story and many of America’s democratic aspirations, even when I speak out, it’s because of love. Love of neighbor is my highest call. But I also love this nation, or rather, I love the ideals this nation claims to aspire to. If a human society actually could live up to these high ideals, they would not contradict the ethics and values I read in the Jesus story. What I read in the Jesus story would lead me to lean into those high ideals and my civic duties if those ideals could be realized. And that’s the big “if.”
The values of the Jesus story call me to continually choose to work toward making our world a safe, compassionate, home for everyone. Wherever people are working to make American society a safe, compassionate home for everyone, I can come alongside them and participate in the work. Where they are working to make American society unsafe, lacking in compassion, and unjust, I can come alongside those working to oppose them. My allegiance is to love and justice and compassion first and foremost. My allegiance to America is contingent upon its fidelity to these values. I don’t give my country a blank check when it comes to my allegiance. When I oppose spaces that contradict the values I am most deeply committed to, I oppose them out of love for what we as a society could be if we leaned more deeply into the just demands of love of neighbor.
This is what the gospel teaching render to Caesar those things that are Caesar’s and to God those things that are God’s means for me in my context today. It means to know the difference between the obligations of my civic duties as an American and to understand my higher commitments to love, justice and compassion. It means to hold the former wholly dependent on my fidelity to the latter.
HeartGroup Application
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.
2. How are your own civic responsibilities contingent on your commitments to love, compassion, and justice? Share and discuss with your group.
3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?
Thanks for checking in with us, today.
I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate.
You can find Renewed Heart Ministries on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. Also, if you enjoy listening to the Jesus for Everyone podcast, please like and subscribe to the JFE podcast through the podcast platform you use and consider taking some time to give us a review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our new YouTube show called “Just Talking” each week. Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.
And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.
My new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels is now also available at renewedheartministries.com
Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week.
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Herb’s new book Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is available at renewedheartministries.com.
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Choosing the Common Good
Herb Montgomery | October 30, 2022
To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.
“Is my Jesus-following contributing to harmful policies toward those who are different from me? Or does my Jesus following move me to listen to those whose experiences in our communities are vastly different from my own, those whom our system makes vulnerable to harm rather than safe?”
I reading this week is from the gospel of Luke:
“Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.’ So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
All the people saw this and began to mutter, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’
But Zacchaeus stood up and said, ‘Look! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’” (Luke 19:1-10)
We miss a lot in this story if we don’t understand it in terms of how much Roman imperialism harmed the masses in Judea and southern Galilee. Roman occupation benefitted the elite who had become wealthy to the detriment of others and through the Roman economic system. But for many others, Rome drastically changed the economic landscape and how Rome’s client rulers acted in their region.
In this week’s story, Zacchaeus is a tax collector for Roman imperialism and has become rich through his work.
To understand this context more, read this month’s Renewed Heart Ministries book of the month, Richard Horsley’s book Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder.
Horsley brings to our attention what Roman taxation looked like for many in Jesus’ region:
“In one of the most serious omissions, studies of the historical Jesus have failed to investigate the fundamental social forms within Galilean society. The Galileans among whom Jesus worked, indeed the vast majority of people in any traditional agrarian society, would have been embedded in households and villages. Villages were communities of families or households engaged in subsistence agriculture (and/or fishing), a substantial percentage of whose produce was expropriated by their rulers. These rulers intervened in village affairs fairs mainly to extract their tax revenues.” (Kindle Locations 788-789)
Because of heavy Roman taxation, former land owners had become peasant farmers on lands that used to belong to their families. Their role in the economic system became especially oppressive.
“As the productive economic base of the Jerusalem Temple and priesthood and of the Herodian capital cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias in Galilee, the peasants’ role was to render up produce in tithes, taxes, and tribute for the rulers’ support.” (Kindle Locations 516-517)
The placement of Herod Antipas as a client ruler of the Roman empire marked a first in the history of Roman imperialism for this region: a “king” representing Rome lived directly in Galilee. This brought an “unprecedented rigor in the collection of taxes” (Horsley).
Horsley’s research demonstrates that the political climate among the people in response to this deep economic oppression inspired their reimagining the liberation themes and stories within the Hebrew tradition and then expressed in various forms of resistance.
“Judean and Galilean peasants were cultivating their own popular version of Israelite tradition that, far more than the version accepted in Jerusalem, emphasized stories of liberation from oppressive rule . . .” (Kindle Locations 519-520)
“In order to protect their own minimal subsistence, the always marginal peasants regularly sequestered portions of their crops before the tax collectors arrived or found various ways of sabotaging the exploitative practices of their rulers.” (Kindle Locations 700-702)
Roman imperialism through economic oppression also meant that Jesus’ society began to break down:
“Roman conquest and imposition of client rulers, with the resulting multiple layers of taxes and socially disintegrative economic and cultural practices, set the conditions of and for Jesus’ mission and other, parallel movements. In generating and articulating his program, moreover, Jesus drew thoroughly on Israelite traditions of opposition to imperial and oppressive domestic rulers. There is no need to debate whether he was ‘apocalyptic,’ because both Jesus and the apocalypses produced by scribal groups shared the widespread common Israelite pattern of God’s judgment against foreign rulers as a prerequisite of restoration of the subject people, a pattern dictated by the recurrent circumstances of Israelite peoples under imperial rule. In this regard Jesus stands together with activist Pharisees and other teachers and administrators who formed resistance groups such as the Fourth Philosophy. They stand on precisely the same grounds in rejecting the tribute to Rome: they owe exclusive loyalty to God as their only ruler and lord. Surely the vast majority of Judeans and Galileans believed that, and attempted to resist Roman exploitation in whatever ways they could whenever they could.” (Kindle Locations 1339-1346)
We must read this week’s story within this context. This backdrop also gives new insights into the political, economic, and social meaning of the gospels. Jesus’ preaching, teaching, and demonstrations of the “kingdom of God,” the rule of God, or God’s just future must be understood as an answer to the people’s desire for liberation from Roman rule and imperialism.
In our story this week, conviction has come home to Zacchaeus who has participated in the empire and become personally wealthy from systems that were to blame for the disintegration of his own Jewish society. This is a story of repentance and change that manifests through economic and political change for Zacchaeus here and now, not after death. Life as usual doesn’t continue on for Zacchaeus. No: Zacchaeus choosing to embrace Jesus’ program meant him choosing to let go of his ill-gotten wealth and use it for reparations and restoration after the harm Roman imperialism had done. He is rejecting the kingdom of Rome for the rule of the God of the Torah, not just religiously, but also politically, economically, and socially in concrete ways for his community.
In response to this holistic change, Jesus states, “Today, salvation has come to this house.”
As Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney insightfully comments:
“Riches may buffer some of the hardships of life, but one can have all the wealth in the world and still be deeply lost.” (In A Woman’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year W, p. 278)
What does following the Jesus of these gospel stories mean for us, today? This Jesus prioritized the marginalized and disenfranchised. This Jesus called those complicit with social harm, like Zacchaeus, to join his program of liberation?
Today, some who claim the name of Jesus are responsible for the political, social and economic harm being perpetrated against LGBTQ people. Some Christians have chosen to put women’s lives in jeopardy because of their shallow understandings of women’s healthcare needs and basic human rights. My own Appalachian communities have been harmed through politics that Christians have been duped into supporting (i.e. “pro-life” being the opposite of life-giving, as an example), and also Christians have not educated themselves out of forms of Christianity that make them especially vulnerable to political manipulation.
Yes, Zacchaeus’ story has something to say to those whose wealth has come to them through harming others. It also has something to say to all Jesus followers who live in other forms of social privilege. This story speaks deeply to me. I am not wealthy, but I am white, straight, cisgender, male, and have middle-class privilege. Reading this story, I ask myself: Is my Jesus-following contributing to harmful policies toward those who are different from me? Or does my Jesus following move me to listen to those whose experiences in our communities are vastly different from my own, those whom our system makes vulnerable to harm rather than safe? The story of Zacchaeus calls me to question ways in which I, too, am complicit in the harm of others and can choose change.
I and others who share my social location can do better, and our doing better is not an act of charity. It’s the work that Zacchaeus did, of reclaiming our own humanity through acknowledging, valuing, and honoring the humanity of others.
The lessons are deep and life changing this week, and I’m thankful for them.
What would it take today for those who live in social locations of privilege to hear the words, “Today, salvation has come to this house.”
HeartGroup Application
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.
2. In our story, Zacchaeus chooses not only to change, but to also make reparations for harms he has committed in the past? Discuss the kinds of reparation you believe we as a society should be making with your group.
3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?
Thanks for checking in with us, today.
You can find Renewed Heart Ministries on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. Also, if you enjoy listening to the Jesus for Everyone podcast, please like and subscribe to the JFE podcast through the podcast platform you use and consider taking some time to give us a review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
And if you’d like to reach out to us through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.
Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week
Begin each day being inspired toward love, compassion, action, and justice.
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