For the past
several weeks we have been listening to stories of Jesus teaching the crowds
and generally taking the Jewish authorities of the time to task for their focus
on life on earth as opposed to life with God in the kingdom to come. Today we see that the authorities are not
taking this lying down and are striking back.
In fact, Jesus has so rattled the authorities that they are desperate to
discredit him and generally shut him up.
The Pharisees, as we know were the Jewish authorities of the time. They were the temple priests, the keepers of
the faith, the representatives of God to his chosen people; the Jews. The Pharisees greatly resented the presence
of the Romans, who had taken much of their power and authority away as they
occupied the land and imposed the will of the Emperor; even over the will of
God.
The
Herodians on the other hand, were Jews as well, but they were loyal to King
Herod. Herod was the King of Galilee,
who the Romans had installed as a puppet ruler in an effort to appease the Jews
and provide the polite fiction that they had some aspects of self-rule over
their lives. The real power of course
lie with Rome, but Herod was someone to be feared nonetheless.
As you might
expect, there was no love lost between the Pharisees and the Herodians. The Pharisees hated all that Rome was and
wanted them gone, while the Herodians owed their power and status to the
Romans. For the two groups to unite on
any issue should give you an indication of just how much they feared Jesus.
They come
together in an effort to trap Jesus into giving an answer to a seemingly
innocent question. Is it lawful to pay
taxes to the Emperor? But this was not
such a simple question. If Jesus
answered that it was not lawful, that God, not Caesar was the true ruler, he
would have angered the herodians who would have turned him in to the Roman
authorities for preaching against the emperor.
If he answered that it was lawful to pay taxes, he would be legitimizing
the authority of Rome and recognizing their claim that the Emperor was the
lawful ruler and should be worshipped as the God he claimed to be. To do this would anger the Pharisees and
their followers who worshipped no ruler but God.
It was a
clever conundrum and they must have felt quite proud of themselves for coming
up with such a fool-proof scheme.
Whichever way he went, Jesus was sure to anger one side or the other
and, in so doing, dilute his standing as a teacher and Wiseman. Jesus of course saw the trap right away. And, as is typical for Jesus, he does
something completely unexpected and chooses a third path.
We all know
this story of course. The King James
version says “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and
unto God the things that are God’s.”
Jesus frustrates the efforts of both the Pharisees and the herodians by
telling them that it is not about the money but rather about God. Money is an earthly thing. It is a creation of men and though it holds a
huge place in our hearts, it should not be the focus of our lives. We should focus less on earthly things and
more on divine.
The job of a
preacher is to open the scriptures to us; to interpret the words of the
earliest times to our life today. 20th
century theologian Karl Barth said that we should read scripture with Bible in
one hand and today’s newspaper in the other.
So my task today is to find some current relevance for this gospel story
and help us all to see the teaching for us in 2014.
As I read
this passage, I think of the relationship we have with money. Money was very important to people in Jesus
time and is has not become any less important throughout the centuries. I don’t know about you, but I find myself
thinking a great deal about money. What
I have, what I don’t have, what I can do with it and how I can get more. And as I reflect on this passage, I am
reminded that I spend more time thinking about money than I do about God.
I find that
troubling. Jesus’ message to the crowds
to focus more on God than on money was true then and is true now. It is a reminder that we place too much
emphasis on money and have let it become a substitute for God in some ways. This is not healthy.
It is also a
reminder that no matter how much we feel we have earned it, the money is not
ours, but comes to us from God. We work,
using our gifts and talents to earn a living and feel that we are entitled to
the fruits of our labors. But we fail to
recognize that our gifts, our skills, our very lives are gifts from God. Without God we would not have the ability to
earn this money.
This of
course leads to the concept of stewardship.
If we accept that all of what we have is ours, not because of ourselves
but because of God, we have an obligation to give back to God in proportion to
our gifts. We are called to give of our
time, of our talents, and yes, of our money.
Each is a gift we have received and each is important for us to give
back to God. We tend to think that we
can be good stewards by offering one of these to God but that would be to
diminish the gifts we have been given.
We need to give each to God, our time, our talent and yes, our
money. For each is a gift given to us by
God and we must give back in thanks for the abundance of blessings we have
received. For as Jesus tells us “Give to
God the things that are God’s”.
