Sometimes the Bible gives us a break, and there’s a story with some images that are actually familiar to us from everyday life. Today instead of sheep, and fig trees, and jars of oil, we have an image of something we have around us everywhere: taxes and money. But I hate to tell you, even with money, things were very complicated around this time in Jesus’s life, so there’s a little explanation that might be helpful in understanding the scene we’ve just heard.
There were actually two kinds of money circulating in Jerusalem. First there were the Roman coins that were issued by the occupying power, which some Jews felt it was wrong to use for anything, much less to pay taxes in tribute to the foreign power who dominated the people of Israel. These were coins with the head of Tiberius Caesar on them. And then there was a whole other system of coins issued locally, without anyone’s image on them. Jews, in fact, didn’t want anyone’s image engraved on anything, much less their money. So if you look back just one chapter before this reading in Matthew, in the famous scene where Jesus comes into the temple and overturns the tables of the moneychangers, what they were doing there was changing one kind of these coins for another, so that people could spend non-Roman money in the temple, to pay for sacrifices and whatever else you had to pay for. Jesus had thrown piles of both kinds of money on the floor, and in the process had created enemies everywhere.
And now here is a crowd of various types of Jewish leaders, some of them on the Romans’ side and some of them not, slimily asking him if people should use the controversial Roman coins to pay an unpopular Roman tax. If Jesus says yes, then he has taken their side against Israel. If he says no, he’s a revolutionary, and they’ve got him there, too.
His answer about giving Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s has sometimes been taken very literally by some people. They think he means that some things are worldly business, and others are God’s business, and that this is in the nature of a divine plan, that the world of daily life and the world of God can be neatly separated. Yet I think Jesus was doing something else. He was asking them the question: What is God’s, after all? Where does that territory stop and someone else’s start? Jesus is not teaching us about separation, about drawing borders between different spheres of life. What he is saying here is really the exact opposite: There’s no way to divide the world up this way.
The first reading from Isaiah emphasizes over and over that the great discovery of our Hebrew ancestors is that there are not multiple gods, each with a strange thing they’re in charge of, each with their own rules and territories and countries. Instead, what Abraham and Isaac and Jacob came to believe was that there was one God, one relationship that saves us, one power that holds everything.
What Jesus is saying here with Caesar’s coin, is sarcastically challenging us to divide the world into God’s territory and someone else’s. He’s reminding us is that it’s absurd ever to think that we live in two different worlds, a secular world and a religious world, a holy one and an unholy one, two places with different laws and codes of behavior, a world where the gospel applies and another where it’s unrealistic to think that it can or should. If we give God what is God’s, then what is it we would hold back?
When we go out into the world from this church we don’t go into foreign territory, a territory where we are called to behave differently, or follow different rules, in order to survive. We are God’s people, wherever we are, and if we want to act with integrity, we will have one God, one identity, one instinct for what it is right and good to do.
Well of course, you’ll say, this is basic theology. And yet, we often find ourselves stretching to live in two different worlds. It sneaks up on us. Suddenly we find that the rules we use to treat or evaluate people at work, classifying people as losers and winners, run according to a different scheme than we might think apply in this church, since in here God seems to have a special inclination toward the losers. Two different worlds, we think. Or, we make life decisions or give advice to our friends or children based on money or status, rather than on finding what expresses our true identity in God’s eyes. You have to be practical, we say. Two worlds, we think. Or we end up feeling that what ought to happen to foreigners and prisoners is an entirely different problem from the way the gospel talks about foreigners and prisoners. Two worlds, we think, rather than one, but one is all there is.
When we say that God’s world is one world, we don’t mean that there’s only one opinion about what God is or wants, or that we need to impose our view of God’s world on people who don’t yet believe it. It means that we, ourselves, need to live lives that don’t have a corner or a place or a moment where the Christian life isn’t our life. Integrity really means oneness. People with integrity are not divided. They are the same everywhere.
Jesus said that the coin in this gospel was Caesar’s because it had Caesar’s image stamped on it, an emperor who thought he was a god. We, somehow, have the real God’s image stamped on us. That means we have no room for anyone else’s image, and that we carry that image stamped on us everywhere.