October 13, 2005
Money
Pentecost 22/24A
“Show me the money… ” (Mt 22.19a)
The Pharisees played the angles, always looking for ways to stump Jesus and generally never coming off all that well in the balance. This time, they go after his allegiance, his patriotism, although why they’d expect a citizen living in poverty in an enslaved country to be all that patriotic is beyond me.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” they asked. “Show me the money,” he replied. Jesus must have known what Voltaire found out a few centuries later: “When it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”
Maybe that seems sacrilegious. Maybe we’d rather think — and rightly — with Robert Frost, that religions, like poems, start with a lump in the throat. But we’d not want to forget that religions, unlike poems, inevitably end up becoming institutions, and money, for whatever the cause, is always the common tie that binds. However sacred or secular, one’s religion is the ligament — note the similarity of the words — that holds spirit together, that by which one is most firmly and unswervingly bound and tied.
The Pharisees may have thought they were testing Jesus’ loyalty when, in fact, they once again, walked into a trap. When it is a question of money, everybody is working with the same symbols, the same pair of glasses, the same sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality that we all have in common — whether it’s greed or lust or only security. So Jesus flipped a coin a couple of times, then noted the likeness and inscription and said pointedly, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Interesting, is it not, how nations presume it is of the highest honor to place an image of our heroes on our currency. For us, it’s the politicians and the warriors. For the Brits, we noticed last spring, it’s more often the royalty, the artists, the poets. Whatever it is, it speaks loudly about us.
The Industrial Revolution for example was once considered the great sacrament of western civilization. That was before Silicon Valley and the internet. Nevertheless, technology in whatever form takes its place and holds it and remains the common thread, the outward and visible sign of where it’s at. We believe in God, say a large majority of us, but we pay more attention to the checkbook and the Gross Domestic Product. “The poor remain poor on account of they don’t try,” some say proudly. The rich get richer, and the richer they get… well, you know how that shakes down politically and how it results in a “voodoo economics” that doesn’t shake down at all. Like George Bernard Shaw said, “What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.” Jesus’ story about the rich guy and the camel and the eye of the needle is not about money, it’s about how we use it.
We churchers are a part of a community that takes money seriously, but, I think, in quite a different way. Here, in this church family, we care enough to pray about it and offer it at the table along with the bread and wine every time we offer our praise and our thanksgiving to God. We’re generally pretty good about how we use it, and we know full well that it’s only part of, indeed, a small part of our stewardship because if life is about anything, it’s all about stewardship, and money is only one of its symbols.
One of the least popular suggestions among many that I ever made to a vestry in my salad days was that we either become more charitable or else pay taxes like every other institution and maybe set a good example for our fellow tax-dodgers the universities. “Is it lawful … ?” asked the Pharisees.
In fact and intentionally or not, that’s their question — How do we use the money? And that’s the question Jesus answered. We know how he felt about the sacrilege of offerings in the Temple and the tables of the moneychangers. We know what it meant to Judas who was paid off for betrayal and hanged himself when he realized what he had done. We know how it was the cause of one of the earliest schisms in the church between Peter and Paul, how biblical scholars say that if you want to know about that church’s early missionary zeal, don’t worry so much about the content of the preaching, just “follow the money.” And we all know today how tempting it must be to fall for the ruse to assume ourselves so faith-based as to become a part of the national debt, ourselves.
But after all, it was still the taxes that prompted the Pharisees’ question. Are they lawful? The average Israelite probably benefitted very little from paying them. Matthew probably benefitted very much from collecting them until he stopped being a hit man for the Romans and went to work for a nonprofit service organization. Jesus obviously had very little use for them, save to turn the symbol around on those who would thwart his purposes.
When he took the coin, he asked, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” “Caesar’s,” they said. Then “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” knowing all along that nothing belonged to Caesar, whatever the image, but that all, including Caesar — and the Pharisees, themselves, if they only knew it — belonged to God.
As, of course, do we. For whose inscription and image is ultimately — of not graphically — on “our” money? Yours and mine, that’s whose.
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