Twenty-first Sunday of Pentecost, Proper 24, October 22, 2023: Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22
Today’s gospel provides a line that is often cited out of context: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”.
This seemingly simple answer is a way of deflecting a trick question from the Pharisees. This is always a sign with Jesus that the answer will not be as simple as it seems. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor” seems to demand a yes or no answer. But Jesus asks first to see the coin which would pay the tax.
This may mean that he did not carry money: just as he instructed his followers to “take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts” in Matthew 10, he traveled without money and lived outside the normal exchange economy.
Whether Jesus did not carry money, or asked for it for dramatic effect, he uses the coin to answer the question. The coin has the emperor’s head on it. So that is his. What Jesus did not say, but his listeners would have known, was that we were made in the image of God.
In life, answering the question of what we owe to God and to the state can sometimes be complicated: should we pay taxes to support policies we think are unjust? What is it that belongs properly to God? How can we be faithful to God and faithful to a government that will, almost inevitably, in one way or another act counter to God’s will as we discern it? Numerous protest movements in the U.S.–abolition, Civil Rights, anti-war, pro-birth–have, after all, based their resistance on their understanding of their moral obligations.
There is no simple answer to the question of what belongs to God and what belongs to the political power under which we live. It is, instead, a question we will answer in different ways at different times. But we need to remember it is a question.