On Tuesday evening the CBC Radio show “As It
Happens” reported that the Canadian mint had decided to introduce a new $3
coin. I know this because I happened to be listening to the radio in the car on
Wednesday evening as they played back some of the responses that were phoned
in. A lot of people were really upset at this new coinage. One of my favourites
was the person who said that the people at the mint wouldn’t be happy until
Canadians’ pockets jingled like the spurs on gunfighters in old movies as they
walked down the street. But lots of people complained that our money was heavy
enough already, and how come the mint had decided to do this without any consultation
at all with the public?
One listener wrote in suggesting that since the
one dollar coin had a loon on it, and the two dollar coin had a polar bear,
perhaps it would be appropriate to celebrate our coastal provinces and have a
salmon or a cod on the three dollar coin. And, keeping in mind the month in
which it was announced, we could call it “poisson d’Avril”… which, I
discovered, is the French equivalent of “April Fools.” He got the joke, but I
guess a lot of people ended up quite embarrassed, because at the end of the
segment they revealed that since Tuesday was April 1 the programme had played
an April Fool’s Day joke on their listeners. There are no plans to release a $3
coin.
People can get quite emotional about money; how much they have, or don’t have; what it’s used for; and, especially at this time of year, how much the government takes in taxes. (Has everybody done their taxes?)
Well, you know what? That’s nothing new. In 1 Samuel 17.25
(that’s about 1000BC, or 3000 years ago) King Saul offers a life long tax
exemption to whoever can kill Goliath. Jesus was born in
If you ever watch investigative journalism on television, you’ll know that one of the things that aggressive reporters do, is try to get people to reveal something they’d rather not say, to catch them with their own words.
That too is nothing new, in Mark 12.13 it says…
13
Later they sent some of the Pharisees and
Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words.
Now, you might think from this that the Pharisees and the Herodians were allies, but that’s really unlikely, a bit like the Conservatives and NDP agreeing with each other. Mark probably means that a group of Pharisees and a group of Herodians approached Jesus at the same time to ask his opinion on taxation. If you’re into conspiracy theories you might want to consider that the ruling priests, that we heard about last week, pulled strings to have both the Pharisees and the Herodians turn up at the same time with the same question. That way, they probably figured, Jesus would be caught between a rock and a hard place.
That’s because the Pharisees and the Herodians would have had very
different opinions on taxes. The Herodians took their name from the Herod
family. Those were the local kings, but they only stayed in power because they
had the backing of the Roman Emperor, and so their supporters had no problem
with Jews paying taxes to
The Pharisees, on the other hand, may have paid the tax but they
would have resented it; seeing it as a form of idolatry, or at least the
unwelcome imposition of a foreign government. And it was foreign. Even the word
for it was foreign. It was the “census” tax. Census is a Latin word. The name
of the tax came from
So, on the one side you have the supporters of the current power
structure which is propped up by a foreign power (think the interim government
in
14 They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know you are a
man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who
they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.
There’s so much honey on this verse, you could get tooth decay just reading it.
Talk about flattery! These guys say that they “know” that Jesus is “a man of integrity,” and that he truly teaches “the way of God.” But back in 11.33, the priests that sent them didn’t appear to “know” where Jesus’ authority (or John’s for that matter) came from. Apparently they know things when it is suits them to know it, and conveniently forget when it doesn’t suit them.
So, when they figure they’ve buttered Jesus up well enough, they throw out the question that’s their real reason for being there.
Is it
right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? 15 Should we pay or shouldn’t
we?”
It’s like one of those questions that reporters ask, “Mr Prime
Minister, when did you know that the
But …the text says …Jesus knew their hypocrisy.
“Hypocrisy,” “hypocrite,” it’s one of those words you hope no-one ever uses about you. It’s a word that is often thrown at Christians, which is ironic since it was Jesus who made its current meaning popular. In classical Greek, a “hypocrite” is simply an actor, someone who plays a part on the stage. It’s only in first-century Judaism, and especially with Jesus, that it takes on the negative meaning of someone who pretends to be or believe something when in fact they believe te exact opposite.
That’s how these guys are approaching Jesus. They come with flattering words and appear to respect him as a teacher, but really, they just want to find a way to trap him.
Jesus’ response is, to borrow a phrase
from “Jerry Maguire,” “Show me the money!” Or in the NIV version, “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.”
And this is what they would have shown him… [slide]
This is a denarius from the first century. A denarius was a Roman coin, and it was about a day’s wage for a labourer. If you went down to the town square and hired someone as casual labour for the day, you would be expected to pay them about a denarius. It probably didn’t take too long to find one. For sure some of the crowd would have had one in their pocket.
When they find a denarius and bring
it to Jesus, he asks a question of his own. “Whose
portrait is this? And whose inscription?” Well,
let’s have a look.
The picture is of Tiberius Caesar, who was the ruling Roman Emperor at the time. And the inscription is a bit cryptic, even in Latin, but it gets easier when you realise that in Latin U’s and V’s both look the same. So the portrait is of Caesar and the inscription says, “Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Son of Divine Augustus.”
So, Jesus holds this coin up and asks, “Whose
portrait is this? And whose inscription?” And the crowd
replies, “Duh! Caesar’s!” (I know there isn’t any “Duh!” there in the text, but
if you listen closely you can hear it.)
Then
Jesus catches them all off guard by saying, “Give
to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
We know it caught them off guard because Mark says, “they were amazed at him.” They weren’t amazed at him because he showed them it was Caesar’s picture. (“You know, I never realised that was Caesar. I always thought it looked a bit like my Uncle George!”) No, they knew it was Caesar. But they were amazed because Jesus’ response actually went way beyond the question they had asked. In fact it had at least three meanings.
At one level Jesus is saying, “I’m not playing your silly political games. I’m not going to declare for either side in this debate.”
Over the three years of his public
ministry Jesus had built up a significant following. That was clear when he
rode into
At a deeper level, when Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is
God’s” he was making a statement on how believers
live in society. After all, the coin did, in fact, belong to Caesar. The
strange thing about money is that we use it all the time as a way to buy and
sell things, but the money itself is next to worthless. It is basically nothing
more than a promise to pay and it actually belongs to the government that
produces it. So the coin did actually belong to Caesar and by using the Roman
currency people in
For us, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” means recognising that the state does have some authority in our lives. It makes rules about all kinds of things. From what side of the street we drive on, to who can and can’t practise as a doctor in a hospital. In Romans 13 Paul takes this idea and develops it further.
But Jesus also said, “Give to…God what is God’s.” There are limits to what the government can ask of us as Christians. We don’t just blindly follow the rules because they’re there. Sometimes we have to disobey the government in order to obey God.
I just received a prayer letter this week from an Afghan I used to work with…
Small groups of believers meet for fellowship and worship in almost all 34 provinces of our country; but they must do it underground for fear of their lives… Because of the growing awareness of Christian activity in different areas, there is a growing negative sentiment among opponents, and these cell groups must struggle to find a safe place to meet. This makes it very difficult for believers and this, in turn, leads many to feel isolated and lonely. They need your prayers.
When there were only a handful of
Christians in
The early church experienced the same thing. When the church was small they attracted little attention. But eventually that claim on the coin, “Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Son of Divine Augustus” where Tiberius is claiming to be the son of a god, would come into conflict with Jesus’ claim to be the son of the One God. At that point they would have to obey God and disobey the emperor, often paying with their lives.
And that leads us to the final level of meaning in Jesus’ answer.
In older versions of the Bible Jesus’ question is
translated, “Whose image is this, and whose inscription?” At the very
beginning of the Bible, in Gen 1.26-27, it says, 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our
likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air,
over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move
along the ground." 27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
One of the most basic ideas in the Bible is that all human beings are made in the image of God. Just as that coin had Tiberius Caesar’s image stamped on it, each one of us has God’s image stamped on us. That means that all human beings are equally valuable, irrespective of race, gender, class, colour, ethnicity, ability or disability. That belief brought conflict for the first Christians.
Under Roman law the father had total authority in the home, even the power of life and death over his children. When a child was born it would be laid at the feet of the father. If he picked it up, it was accepted into the family. If he turned away, it was left there on the doorstep to die, or, if it was lucky, to be picked up and raised as a slave or prostitute. Because Christians believed that all human beings carried the stamp of God’s image, they went around picking up these babies and raising them as their own, and in the process they undermined the law.
It was the same thing when William
Wilberforce fought slavery; or when missionaries in
That coin had Caesar’s image on it, but it
also had his inscription on it, saying it belonged to Caesar. Listen to the
words of Isaiah 44, 5 One will say, ‘I belong to the Lord’; another will call himself by the
name of Jacob; still another will write on his hand, ‘The Lord’s,’ and will take the name
All human beings bear the stamp of God’s
image, but those who have put their faith in him are also called by his name,
they are his people. 1 Peter 2.9 says that we are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a
people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you
out of darkness into his wonderful light 10 Once you were not a
people, but now you are the people of God.”
A few weeks ago we talked about how God made us and then, after we rebelled, he bought us back. This is the same idea. We carry his image on us, but he has also called us his own, so we are doubly his.
Which means that if we are to, “give to God what is God’s” it means giving our whole selves to him. Everything we are and have belongs to him. Sure the state has some say in what we can and can’t do, but we, ourselves, do not belong to the state. We don’t belong to our families or even to ourselves. We belong to Christ. We’re stamped with his image and called by his name, “Christian,” and so to, “give to God what is God’s” means to give him our whole lives.
What does that mean practically?
- seeking God’s direction in decisions (work, relationships, etc.) because you are not your own
- living in a way that honours his image (he is loving, gracious, faithful, compassionate, holy, and righteous)
- not hiding the fact that you carry his name on you (being ready to give a reason for your hope)