Everything. Belongs. To God.

Matthew 22:15-22

October 22, 2017

I.

Nearly every Sunday I read to you a particular extremely important verse of the Bible.  It is the opening of Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein.”  It is a verse I hope you all memorize and embed deep in your consciousness.  This verse needs to inform everything about our life and how we live in the world.  The whole creation belongs exclusively to the One who made it.  Our only job here is to participate in it according to the Creator’s will.

When the Lord Jesus here flatly states, “Give to God what belongs to God,” he means everything.  For there is nothing that does not belong to God.  There is nothing concerning which God does not have the fundamental and ultimate claim.  Nothing exists outside of God’s exclusive and absolute ownership.  That includes ourselves, and everything else: life, air, water, minerals, space, energy.  If it is, it’s God’s.

And if everything belongs to God, then what belongs to the emperor?  Nothing.  What then are we required to give to the emperor?  Nothing.

Nevertheless the emperor claims that some things belong to him.  Like a dog marking his territory, the emperor also asserts authority over some things.  And just to confuse the matter, the emperor claims that God, or in Caesar’s case, the Roman gods, gave it to him.

When I served at the Woodbridge church the session sold a piece of property.  Now the Woodbridge church is very old.  The original deed for the property was from the King of England.  The King claimed it belonged to him, by virtue of the infamous Doctrine of Discovery, a declaration in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI that said that the territories and inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere belonged to whichever European State conquered them.

If Alexander VI understood that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” he also imagined that he, as God’s official regent and vicar, had the right to give God’s things to the State, thus making the State God’s steward and agent.  One of the reasons we had the Reformation is so we didn’t have some guy pretending to give God’s stuff away to the highest bidder.  Unfortunately, the Protestant countries didi not reject the Doctrine of Discovery.  They still acted like God gave the earth to them.  And we do to this day.

In fact, in our secular society we have pretty much decided that just about everything belongs to the State.  Everything is subject to civil law, everything is part of the economy; nothing is off-limits unless the State deigns to declare it so for its own reasons.  Nothing, as we say, is sacred, except of course the State’s symbols, creeds, songs, martyrs, flags, laws, and traditions.  We recognize nothing as inherently belonging to God.  Many Christians still think that when they are worshiping the State they are worshiping God.

Jesus says, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  And immediately people miss the point by setting out to determine what belongs to the emperor.  That is, what belongs to the secular authorities who rule human societies by force?  What belongs to the State?  And if we are members and especially beneficiaries of those authorities, we tend to imagine, unsurprisingly, that, actually, quite a lot belongs to the the emperor.  And that’s just fine with us.

II.  

  

So even though nothing belongs to the emperor, he still manages to wield power, mainly because we give it to him.  He can rip open the earth, extract metal, refine it and melt it down, and stamp an image of his own face on it, and demand that we buy it from him.  He can demand that we use these pieces of metal to buy goods from each other, and that we give some of them back to him on demand.  So the emperor claims that these pieces of metal, and everyone who uses them, belong to him.  He uses them to pay police, judges, and armies to enforce — by violence, torture, and murder — his will that we belong to him.

There are not two real kingdoms!  There is the true Kingdom in which everything belongs to God.  And there is the emperor’s false kingdom in which he thinks everything belongs to him.  We can choose which one we will live in.  If we participate in the emperor’s system with the emperor’s money and the emperor’s laws, then we are acting as if there are things that belong to the emperor, and among those things that belong to the emperor are… us.  And if enough people act this way then it might as well be true, no matter how false it is in reality.

So Jesus is emphatically not saying here that in the world there are some things that belong to the emperor and some things that belong to God and we have to decide which are which and who gets what.  We know how that works out: the emperor gets everything.  

The Lord is saying that it all belongs to God.  Our choice is not how to divide up ourselves between these two rightful authorities, God and the State.  Our choice is only about to which of them we are going to give our whole selves.  Jesus is famously not about dividing yourself between different allegiances.  You can’t serve God and wealth; a house divided against itself cannot stand; love God with all your heart….  For Jesus, we have to choose all one or all the other. 

The emperor — the State — claims that it all belongs to him, but that is a lie.  Unfortunately, we all go along with his lies, giving up our own freedom in the process.  If we have decided by our participation in the emperor’s economy and political system that we belong to the emperor, then that is what we should give ourselves to.  And we are.  

So as far as the original question of taxes is concerned, Jesus says, in effect, if you’re going to play the emperor’s game and participate in his system, then how can you complain when you are required to pay his fee?  It’s part of the deal. 

And the church goes along with this because we have convinced ourselves that Jesus is allowing here for something — anything — to belong to the emperor.  He’s not.  He doesn’t even suggest here that “money is just a tool we can use for good or bad.”  He says, no, just give it back to the emperor; that’s all it’s good for.  Indeed, a coin is a graven image that would have been a sin for a Jew even to touch.

III.

And yet, Jesus does use money; Judas keeps a box of coins for group expenses.  In chapter 17 Jesus even pays some taxes, even if it is by a somewhat unusual method.  He does participate in the economy… but he does it in a light and detached, even ironic, manner.  Indeed, his participation could be construed as a kind of subversive anti-participation, working actively against the accepted and mandated principles, values, rules, and expectations.  

We simply cannot avoid all interaction with the emperor’s regime.  We are still in this world, even if we strive not to be of it.  Jesus teaches us not to belong to the false world of the State, the emperor, an economy based on greed, extraction, exploitation, conquest, and inequality, or the politics of fear, anger, hatred, and division.

Matthew reminds us that when the Pharisees asked Jesus their question, they were plotting to entrap him.  They wanted to force him into a bind where no matter what he says he would get in trouble with someone.  If he says, “no, we don’t have to pay Caesar’s taxes,” then the government could arrest him.  If he says, “yes, we should pay Caesar’s taxes,” then he will alienate the people.  But Jesus doesn’t accept this binary choice of whom to offend.  

His answer, while it gets him out of their lame little trap, actually offends everyone.  If the people wanted a clear anti-tax, anti-Roman statement, they don’t get it from Jesus.  If the State wanted him to support the tax system, they don’t get that either.

Jesus shifts the focus to what God wants.  Instead of living according to the lie that it all — or even anything — belongs to the emperor, he teaches us to live according to the truth that it all belongs to God.  Therefore, whatever we do, even in this world dominated by these other self-centered, self-righteous, self-justifying, self-aggrandizing ideologies, we must have only one question in our hearts: What does God want?  How, in this situation, do I give to God what belongs to God, starting with myself?  How do I witness in my daily life to the truth that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein”?

IV.

Giving to God the things that are God’s is necessarily going to mean giving to God some things that the emperor thinks are his, which is not going to go over very well with the emperor and his people.  We are called to witness always and in everything to another Way of life, an alternative lifestyle and set of values and practices that fundamentally undermines and undercuts those of the State.  We use the things that are emperor’s against the emperor.  Giving the emperor the things that are the emperor’s is really just a matter of giving the emperor enough rope to condemn himself.

Where the emperor’s economy demands and justifies maintaining and increasing a yawning gap between rich and poor, where we admire the former and vilify the latter, Jesus teaches radical hospitality and generosity.  He identifies himself with the people at the bottom and says serving them is serving God.  He heals and liberates people in need.  

Where the State demands that we stand in allegiance to its symbols, laws, and leaders, Jesus has us kneeling to the God of justice and shalom.      

Where the emperor’s regime props itself up by giving privileges to some and forcing handicaps on others, Jesus teaches reversal which lifts up the underprivileged and brings down the advantaged.  We have to live that reversal every day, consciously and intentionally recognizing and rising against the oppressive biases that strangle our hearts and our communities.  We have to actively put ourselves in the place of the abused, misused, excluded, marginalized, and disenfranchised, and use any privilege we have to advocate for them. 

Where the emperor is all about placing some in positions of domination over others, Jesus says we have no leaders but God; we are all called to repentance and humble discipleship that discerns God’s will together.  

For in the end, what really belongs to the emperor is God’s wrath.  And if we follow Jesus that’s what the emperor will receive from us.  For everything opposed to God eventually crumbles into the nothing it always really was.

But if we give to God the things that are God’s we participate in the flow of God’s grace, love, justice, and peace into the whole creation.

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