Caesar and God

It just so happens that my small group is looking at Matthew 22:15 - 22 next week. Here is the handout I sent them this morning. 

Good morning brothers,

Perhaps it is an accident that we have this passage next week...but maybe not.

I don't cry often, but I cried yesterday...not just for our nation, but for the abdication of a distinct witness by much of the church in this land - when Christians are politicized all hell breaks loose. 

Matthew 22:15 – 22.

 

This is the first of four questions in Matthew Chapter 22:

 

1.    Matthew 22:15 – 22, a sociopolitical question about taxes; how much should we give ourselves to our country?

2.    Matthew 22:23 – 33, a supernatural question about Resurrection.

3.    Matthew 22:34 – 40, a Scriptural question about the Greatest Commandment.

4.    Matthew 22:41 – 46, a Sonship question about the Lordship of Christ.

 

Pharisees = think religious group

 

Herodians = think political group

 

Isn’t it nice when both groups combine?

 

They both have an interest in killing Jesus.

 

If Jesus says that the tax shouldn’t be paid then He can be accused of violating Roman law and siding with those against Rome – inciting the Herodians. If Jesus says that it should be paid then He can be accused of endorsing Roman occupation and inciting the Pharisees, and more radical Jews.

 

Jesus literally asks, “Show me the coin of the tax.” The silver denarius was a coin minted for this tax, with the head of Tiberius Caesar on one side and the head of his mother, Livia, on the other. On one side of the coin was printed, “Ti[berius] Caesar, worshipful son of the divine Augustus.” You might call this a “portable idol.”

 

When Jesus asks whose image and inscription is on the coin, He forces them to say “Caesar’s”, to acknowledge the image on the coin and who the ownership of the coin belongs to.

 

Bruner writes, “Their reply half answers their own question: they possess in the coin the possession of another. Is it ever wrong to return property to its owner? Jesus could have stopped there. But he adds one more stroke, his great principle, to teach with all possible clarity the truth of loyal but limited responsibility to political power.”

 

When Jesus says, “Render” the Greek word means to “give back” – since it belongs to Caesar give it back to Caesar.

 

Here are some other passages regarding Christians and government:

 

1 Timothy 2:1 – 2 (many Christians seem to only pray for those they agree with); Romans 13:1 – 7 (note context); Titus 3:1 – 3 (many Christians ignore this, “Christian” vitriol and sarcasm is sickening); 1 Peter 2:13 – 20 (the context of this is suffering, Peter expects his readers to respect the state even if the state persecutes them).

 

I’m going to close this handout with an extensive quote from Frederick Dale Bruner’s commentary on Matthew, Bruner is a Presbyterian, but what he has to say is not unusual historically, nor among those who struggle with the implications of the Bible’s teaching (the Barman Declaration that Bruner mentions was a document of the faithful German church (a minority) drawn up during Nazism when most of the church was being politicized for nationalist and political ends – of course that would never happen here, thank goodness). The underlining is mine:

 

“But if the first half of Jesus’ answer means the honor of the state, the last half means the limitation of the state. “But [you give back] to God the things that belong to God!” As Caesar’s coin bears Caesar’s image and belongs to Caesar, so God’s human beings bear God’s image and belong to God. God provides humanity with all kinds of services through the state, and so now God mandates through his Son that humans honor God’s servant state, with a due reciprocity – with a due, not a deified, reciprocity. The “total” in the word totalitarian signifies undue respect for the state. “My country, right or wrong” is a totalitarian statement. The only reality with a total claim on conscience is God. Jesus’ Caesar – God formula means that we are to give Caesar a great deal, but not an allegiance that knows no bounds. God is the boundary of the state.

 

“The state is God’s servant, and the preponderance of NT witnesses to the state lays emphasis on this dignifying fact. But the state can become demonic, and it is one ministry of the book of Revelation to paint this fact colorfully (esp. Rev. 13 and 18). The state becomes demonic in the measure that it asks for itself “the things of God,” such as total commitment, unconditional obedience, or uncriticizing allegiance (e.g. “America, Love It or Leave it”). Some governments play God or the special friend of God. In such cases, the warning of the Presbyterianism’s Confession of 1967 is salutary: “Although nations may serve God’s purposes in history, the church which identifies the sovereignty of any one nation or any one way of life with the cause of God denies the Lordship of Christ and betrays its calling” (see the fifth thesis of The Theological Declaration of Barmen for similar limitations).

 

“Implicit then, in Jesus’s imperial answer is a twofold critique: (1) of those who give the (even usurper) state too little, such as the anticolonial revolutionaries and later the Zealots, and (2) of those who give the state an almost divine too much, like the Herodians and all later hyperpatriots. Jesus’s command frees the secular – political realm from ultimacy and makes it penultimate. Every attempt to make our politics God’s, or to make the political divine or ultimate, as the Far Right and the Far Left are always inclined to do (“Far” usually means the divinization of a cause), must shatter on this Word of Stone. Fundamentalisms of all kinds illustrate this evil dramatically.”

 

Much love,

 

Bob