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Oct 17, 1999
By the time comes round which finds Jesus in the temple in the episode which Richard is about to read, it's clear that there are many folks who just don't like Jesus. To his enemies among the high priests, scribes and Pharisees, a new group now is added - THE HERODIANS. We know that the Herodians were Jews, highly Hellenized Jews, who supported the rule of the Tetrarch Herod who ruled over most of Palestine at the pleasure of the Romans with his brother Philip governing, also on behalf of the Romans, the lands east of the River Jordan. Normally the scribes and Pharisees despised the Herodians for they saw them as secularized Jews who were turncoats. That these opposite parties can come together to try to trap Jesus indicates the high degree to which Jesus is now perceived by all the status quo powers as a common threat. Richard Lee reads: Matthew 22:l5-22 - the parable of the coin with Caesar's image on one side and an inscription to the Divine One on the other side. The question was, of course, a trap. "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" If Jesus argues against paying the tax, they will be able to accuse him of anti-Roman activities. If he supports the tax, he will lose some of the popular support he has been gathering. For the tax was seen an economic burden imposed by a distant imperial power upon a poor people. The question is political in nature but phrased as a religious question to the troublesome rabbi, Jesus. "Is it lawful…?" Does paying taxes accord with the word of God?" The trap is laid. Here is where we can be proud of Jesus' wit and clever rhetorical skills. Instead of being hauled into the heart of a dilemma, he resets the trap for his questioners. He also raises issues which will forever confound all who seek the meaning of his teaching. He forces the issue of Caesar and God…of the proper authority of the political order versus the divine order…into our very hearts and consciences. Last week visiting in Sichuan Province I rediscovered that coins have practically ceased to circulate in modern China. Everything is done with paper money down to one yuan. But in Jesus' time only coins circulated and when Jesus asks his questioners to draw a coin out from their pockets, he is quickly handed a denarius. The denarius was at this time a Roman silver coin. Like all Roman coins, this one, if recently minted, would would show the profile of the reigning Emperor Tiberius Caesar; if an older one of the first divine Caesar, the Emperor Augustus And on the reverse side would have been the imperial inscription: "Caesar, the Divine One, the Pontifex Maximus." Pontifex Maximus meant the Ultimate Ruler; the title was retained later by the popes and interpreted as Supreme Priest. All present knew that Exodus 20:4 prohibits "graven images" of any kind. Yet here, in the holy land of the Mosaic law, the religious leaders pull from their own pockets coins which violates the law of their own religion for they show a human image which is proclaimed as the divine one and the Ultimate Ruler of the Universe. As the questioners are quite happy to do their worldly business with coins which violate the graven images prohibition, Jesus has placed back upon the questioners the burden of a correct answer. But to defend himself from their malice which sought to portray him as a political rebel, a charge which in fact would be made against him a few days later, Jesus continues: "GIVE TO CAESAR THE THINGS THAT ARE CAESAR'S." But then he adds the force of his own personal view: AND TO GOD THE THINGS THAT ARE GOD'S.
Many readers of the text believe that Jesus was simply saying there are two realms: one is political, material, and in Jesus' day was ultimately defined by Roman imperial rule. The other real is spiritual and divine and must be guided by loyalty to God. The sincerely religious person should balance and accommodate these two realms, being a law abiding, tax paying, loyal subject of the government, which controlled the political realm, and, at the same time, a faithful, dedicated and generous person of faith. In my opinion this is not what Jesus is saying to us. The real burden of Jesus' thinking is conveyed in his phrase: GIVE TO GOD THE THINGS THAT ARE OF GOD. This thought cancels out the first phrase about the things that are of Caesar. Later when Jesus is being interrogated by the highest Roman authority in Palestine, Pontius Pilate, Jesus tells Pilate that any power that comes to human rulers comes from God. His point to Pilate is not that political power is thereby given a divine nature, but that all earthly power is tentative, conditional, and limited by divine power. Because earthly power is ultimately from God, and ultimately accountable to God, Jesus probably would have accepted that laws and taxes, even when originating with an alien and heinous political source like Rome, were rightly to be obeyed. But ultimately God is a God of liberation who seeks justice for his people and who places standards of the highest conduct and service upon all political authorities that all such earthly powers must be condemned as beneath the divine purpose and glory of God. Those earthly powers be they Caesar, Pilate, Herod and every other ruler will eventually be power-less because God will reclaim the secular system and conform it to his Kingdom of God. Jesus' rhetorical tactics were successful for the moment because we are told that his critics were amazed and, at least for the while, shut up and went away. Their temporary truce is all the more amazing considering that Jesus has just called the group: YOU HYPOCRITES. This hour it is us whom Jesus addresses as hypocrites. Or would you deny that there are any coins of hypocrisy in your pockets! Have not we all put our energy, our hope, our trust in the coins of Caesar, of this materialistic realm which we honor, celebrate, and which we try at our darndest to keep separated from our faith? Surely most people, including most Christians, in Hong Kong, try to encapsulate life into monetary and other measures of worldly success and earthly aspirations; and most people in Hong Kong, like everywhere, begrudgingly pay their taxes. More to our consciences are those spiritual hypocrisies we hold in order to put God in our pockets. We are forever laying upon God our human expectations, definitions, needs, doctrines, trying to cut God down to our size and our expectations. We really like a small God whom we can manipulate to give us the assurances and answers which make us feel comfortable. Puny humans like small gods. And when we reach into our own pockets to inventory the good things we've put in there, we may come up empty handed. But don't despair. Unlike the Pharisees and Herodians, we need not go away for just a while and then start plotting for the kill. We are here in the presence of the unseen divine God to ponder his guidance for us. We know that God has inventoried our pockets, as our lives, long before we get around to the uncomfortable truth of self-awareness. And we are standing in the presence of the Divine One who is interested, not in entrapping us, but in liberating us. We are in the presence of the God who knows all about empty pockets, broken human vessels, wayward sons and daughters, and works to transform all those disabilities into his purpose and to be his beloved children.
To get both an intellectual and an emotional grasp on what Jesus is saying to us in today's text I invite you to join in a little meditation adventure with me. We'll listen to some of "Cantate Domino", composed by Enrico Bossi, to help us on our journey. .(Readers of this sermon on the Web might enjoy the meditation more to put on this composition or similarly heavenly music of Handel or Mozart or Gustav Holtz!) My idea for this meditative journey originated as I waited before the great portal door of St. John's Cathedral last Sunday night for our confirmation students to join me for a tour of the sanctuary and then Evensong; and from an idea for travel in space meditation from the Rev. Todd Townsend of Canada. Please place yourself with me at the cathedral door of St. John's. It is evening. Far, far down the nave the candles have been lit on the high altar for the evening service. As we enter the great door we see persons sitting quietly in expectaton, and some kneeling in prayer. The organ is playing prelude. Immediately as we enter is a large, a modern mosaic on the floor. It shows symbols of the Divine One: the eagle of truth, the flames of the Spirit, the crown of majesty. We walk then across it and see other Christians icons here and there. At the far end in the great east window is a cross with Christ upon it; as evening has fallen we can make out only the outline of the cross. The rich colors are fast fading into grey. Now let us take a seat near the front. Are you comfortable. Close your eyes and let your mind and imagination begin to float with the music. I invite you to see yourselves seated there in the cathedral. Now let yourself float and rise with the music around the cathedral; you might recall the symbols of cross, and fire, and majesty we have seen and imagine other symbols placed here and there, the sun, the moon, stars, blue for the firmament skies. Now as you are floating outside the cathedral, rising above it. Open your eyes! Everything in Hong Kong, begins to look smaller and smaller as we rise higher and higher. Even the great towers of the Hong Kong Bank and this very tower grow tiny as we ascend into the sky. Then all of Hong Kong starts to fade and is a grey blur with yellow luminosity. We rise to the 30 miles or so of the orbital astronauts and see the outline of east Asia and the darkness of the pacific Ocean and the dim outlines of the American continents to the east and just the hint of Africa on the west. Now we are high enough to see the entire planet earth grow smaller and small as we shuttle into the infinitude of space. Earth looks like a marble. We see the other planets and the sun. Zooming backwards or outwards at a speed beyond light we can see the whole solar system and how God makes it balance and relate and move. Now the Galaxy comes into view and soon it fades, also, to the size of a marble, really a mere coin. You can see that one coin but then you see hundreds, even thousands of other galaxies, glittering as a myriad of gold and silver coins. The immense elements of the universe are reduced, as it were. To heavenly pocket change. So can you start to think as Jesus was thinking when he said: "RENDER UNTO CAESAR THE THINGS THAT BELONG TO CAESAR BUT GIVE TO GOD THE THINGS THAT ARE OF GOD." Nothing at the beginning or finally at the end belongs to Caesar; nothing belongs to any of us. God has done it all; everything belongs to God; how childish to think we can play games with God's providence deciding that this belongs to the political realm, this belongs, to us, and this, this little bit of change and paper is worthy to be tossed at God so as in our human accounting to square and balance our account with the divine one! We may want to go even further out hoping finally to see God. But we can't see God , not in outer space nor here. As the reading from Exodus warns us: God says to Moses: I shall show you my glory, but you shall not see my face. We can see God's masterpiece - the universe - as the back of God but we can't see God. In fact, to see something more more of God, we must hasten back through the galaxies, through our solar system, to this earth which we now know so very well, to our city, to the place of worship where we began our meditation. We come back to the place where our meditation began and looking up see again the cross of Jesus hanging before us at the far end of the nave. His teaching for us today is not that there are two, more or less equal and balanced realms, to which we owe proportional loyalties. Jesus' perspective is that everything comes from God and everything returns to God and we are privileged, if we have imagination to go on a faith journey in this life and on this earth, much like our meditation adventure, to enjoy the marvellous provisions God has given us. The emperor no matter what uniform or crown or constitution he uses to legitimize his authority is just one among us. We all have jobs to tend the earth and the riches of life on behalf of someone else. It's all God's. And when we stop entrapping ourselves, truer answers will come to us. We belong to God and God has chosen to give us the sign of his ultimate blessing. It is a costly blessing to God and it may be a costly blessing for us to receive. In the cross of Jesus blessing and sacrifice are linked. The designers of St. John's got it right….at the end of the nave like at the end of our journeys in life there will be finally the cross of blessing and of God's sacrifice.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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