September 26, 2008
Bailout
“Show me the money… ” (Mt 22.19a)
Money’s in the news. Nobody knows what to do about it. We done spent it all on dodging taxes and phony wars and fat cats and being generally irresponsible and now suddenly realize somebody’s got to divvy up and bail us out before we sink. And guess who it’ll be?
The Pharisees tried money to stump Jesus. 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 him. “Show me the money,” he replied. Voltaire took a few centuries to discover what Jesus already knew when he said: “When it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”
Maybe we’d rather think 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 not only the bind, but the binder. However sacred or secular one’s religion, it is always the ligament — note the “lig” in the two words — that holds spirit together, that by and to which one is most firmly and unswervingly bound and tied.
The Pharisees may have thought they were testing Jesus’s 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 rose-colored glasses, the same sacrament, the outward and visible sign of whatever inward and spiritual reality that we all have in common — whether it’s greed or lust or only security. So Jesus flipped a coin, 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.”
We 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, it’s more often the royalty, the artists, the poets. It always tells a lot about us.
The Industrial Revolution was once the great sacrament of western civilization. That was before Silicon Valley and the internet. Technology in whatever form either trumps our religion or becomes it 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 even on our money, but we pay more attention to the checkbook and the Gross Domestic Product. And like Michael Douglas said in the movie, Greed. “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 “voodoo economics” that don’t shake down at all. Hear George Bernard Shaw: “What’s the matter with the poor is poverty; what’s the matter with the rich is uselessness.” Jesus’s story about the rich guy and the camel and the eye of the needle is not about money, it’s about the saddle, how we use it.
One of the least popular suggestions among many that I ever made to a vestry in my salad days was that our parish either become more charitable or else pay taxes like every other institution, even maybe setting an 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, how do we follow 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 in disgust and disgrace. We know how it was the cause of one of the earliest schisms in the church between Peter and Paul. It’s there to see, like biblical scholars tell us. If you want to know about that church’s early missionary zeal, don’t worry so much about the content and direction 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 as a community organizer for Jesus. Jesus just turned the symbol around on those who got in his way.
When he took the coin, Jesus asked, “Whose likeness?” “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 belonged to God. Like us. For whose inscription and image is ultimately on “our” money in one way or another?
Yours. Mine. That’s who.
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