Sometimes what you hear people saying that what they really need more of in life, is that they looking for balance. And it’s true that when we’re overwhelmed by all the things we feel pulling at us, that’s a very appealing concept. It’s great to think that we can get to a point of serenity, or at least sanity, by fine-tuning our commitments and interests so that no one of them takes over too much. We like to think there’s an art to dividing up our priorities and our time and the things we value, in a way that causes us as little internal conflict and discomfort as possible.
I don’t think that the people who were interrogating Jesus in today’s gospel were really asking questions about life balance – they probably didn’t even have a word for that in any of the languages they spoke in first-century Palestine. But they were asking a tricky question about how you live life in the real world, a place where every day there are forces competing for our attention and energy, and really, whether we realize it or not, they are forces fighting for our lives.
The question these Jewish leaders are asking Jesus in this story involves Roman coins that many Jewish people felt were unclean and shouldn’t even be touched, and it involves taxes that were a symbol of political oppression. Of course, it turns out the people who are asking Jesus this question happen to have one of these unclean coins easily available, which tells you everything you need to know about them, and it’s also a trick question, of course, since they’re trying to get Jesus to give one of two answers that will get him in trouble. If Jesus says yes, use the money, then he has taken the Romans’ side against Israel. If he says no, don’t pay the tax, he’s a revolutionary, and they can turn him in to the Roman authorities.
His clever answer about giving Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s has occasionally 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 requirements of God can be separated and finessed.
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 and balancing different spheres of life. What he is saying here is really the exact opposite: There’s no way to divide our lives into neat compartments 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 their own rules and territories. 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 doing here with Caesar’s coin is challenging us, kind of sarcastically, to just go ahead and try 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, two places with different laws and codes of behavior, a Sunday world where we think about how the gospel applies and a weekday world where we kind of shrug and think it’s unrealistic to think that it really can. He’s really saying, if we give God what is God’s, then what is it exactly we would hold back?
To think about giving God everything, that’s an intimidating thought, and to be honest maybe even an unpleasant one. It’s just the kind of crazy extreme talk that gets people discouraged about being Christian in the first place. We think that allowing God to take over everything is mostly a painful process of taking our identity and possessions away from us, leaving us with a pretty austere life, losing things, when actually the real result of this takeover is that there would be a rushing feeling of relief and freedom. Imagine not having to worry about serving anyone else’s expectations, imagine not putting our hopes in people and things and pursuits and careers that will never love us back and never satisfy us. And yet we all have those things, we all have rooms inside us where we have the door shut, places where we don’t let God in. Maybe they are habits and ways of thinking we aren’t ready to have overcome by God, or they are things that we are ashamed of and don’t think can be forgiven, or they are projects where we are still hoping for a reward they can’t ever give us. It’s hard to trust that God can fill up all those rooms in a way that will give us joy, we think God might change us and that it might be hard, and that’s very true. God may not always make our lives easier, but God will make them whole and complete and undivided and filled with love.
When we go out from this church we don’t need to feel as if we are going into a place where we need to live a different life in order to survive. It’s not easy to let God take over, to give up the idea that there are two worlds out there. If we gave that idea up, the world would be a very different place. Suddenly we would find that the rules we use to treat or evaluate people at work, classifying people as losers and winners, we’d notice that those rules run according to a different scheme than we hear about in here on Sunday, since in here God seems to have a special inclination toward the losers. Or, we would stop making life decisions or giving advice to people based on money or success. rather than on finding what expresses our true identity in God’s eyes. Or we would end up feeling that what ought to happen to foreigners and prisoners is not like the way we usually hear people talk, but more the way the gospel talks about foreigners and prisoners. If we give God what was God’s, we’d stop having two worlds like this, since we’d realize that God’s world 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 any place that’s walled off from God taking it over. 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. But we have God’s image stamped on us. That makes us a little unbalanced, maybe, but unbalanced in the direction of a God who desperately wants us closer.