Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went and
plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to
him, along with the Herodians, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that you are
sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show
deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell
us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or
not?’ But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why are you putting
me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.’
And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is
this, and whose title?’ They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’ Then he
said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the
emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ When they heard
this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
Sermon
WHAT
DO WE REALLY OWE GOD?
“We give thee but thine own, whate’er the gift may be.
All that we have is thine alone, a trust, O Lord, from thee.”
These are the words we sing every Sunday, and yet, if we think
about what we’re singing, I think all of us realize, it’s a little
more complicated than that. There’s
a certain, obvious truth that everything we have comes from God.
We acknowledge that the good things in our lives might not have
come about if they hadn’t been caused by circumstances that we
didn’t have control over. Perhaps
we had really good parents. We
didn’t choose our parents; they brought us into the world without our
being a part of that decision making.
Perhaps we had a really good education. We
didn’t provide our own education for ourselves; we had gifted teachers
who brought us along by their care and their professionalism and their
willingness to share their gifts.
Perhaps we were brought up in a church home and it instilled in
us a deep spirituality. Once
again, they were put in place by other people; we ourselves did not
create that church, it was created for us.
And as we go through all the smaller details in your lives, point
by point, you’ll find that there’s almost nothing in your life, even
when you move to your actual accomplishments that would be on your résumé
or your C.V.; even at that point there’s almost nothing in your life
that comes purely from yourself.
Just about everything comes directly as a result of things that
are beyond our control, things that were good circumstances in our
lives. And as people who try
to be wise and fair-minded, we can actually think of these things as
being under God’s control. And
in our faith we are taught, and I believe taught rightly, to thank God
for guarding all these things so that we can receive them and thus have
the life that we have and realize the future that God has in store for
us. All of this is from God,
and not from us. Therefore,
anything we do in God whether from our time, or our talents, or our
treasures, everything that we give to God is something that we first
have from God. And so, “we
give thee but thine own.”
And yet, it feels more complicated than that, and in a temporary
and provisional way, it is more complicated than that.
Just think about the many different ways we use the word
“owe”. We owe things to
others than God. Yes, we may
owe everything to God, and yet at the same time – children owe
something to their parents; parents owe something to their children;
brothers and sisters owe something to each other; friendship causes
obligations, we owe things to our friends by virtue of the relationship
we have with them. We owe
things to our community, that’s why there’s so much talk about
giving back to the community. We
owe things to our country. What
we owe our community might be a caring type of involvement, what we owe
to our country might be something as mundane as paying our taxes; or it
might be something as profound as and drastic as giving our lives.
But in all of these ways we can talk meaningfully about the
things that we owe. To
others, who might be connected with God and yet they are not actually
God. So, if we owe
everything to God, what complicates that is that we actually owe a lot
of things to other people; including banks and credit card companies and
other lenders. We owe, we
owe, so off to work we go.
This is the complicated, real life situation we find ourselves
in. This is the
complicated, real life situation we find ourselves in.
Yes, we owe everything to God; and yet we owe things to other
people as well. And the
situation that we face is not that different from the situation that
existed in the time of Jesus. He
was asked a question about all these matters; and in his answer, I think
we can begin to see an answer that helps us as we try to wrestle with
that question – what do we really owe to God? Jesus was facing some
questioners who wanted to trap him.
They wanted him to compromise himself.
The Pharisees wanted him to say something incriminating;
something that would make other Pharisees not like Jesus.
Jesus and the Pharisees actually came from the same social
background. Joseph and
Mary actually were of the Pharisee party.
A Pharisee is simply a Jew who practiced the law in an every day
way and worshipped at the synagogue and reads the scriptures; and Jesus
had that kind of upbringing. It
was a sort of good middle-class Jewish upbringing in Jesus’ day.
Joseph and Mary were observant Jews; therefore Jesus was raised,
in a sense, as a Pharisee; they were his own people.
And yet, as an adult, he began teaching his teachings, he
began to say new things and different things about the law that were
outside the Pharisees traditions. And
some of them gladly heard him, they thought he was a bold and wise
interpreter; but others turned against him.
And this group was trying to trap him into saying something that
would go against the grain of the Pharisees interpretation of the law;
and so they asked him a question about taxes.
So they brought along others with them, people who were Herodians.
The word “Herodians” relates to the word “Herod”, and
Herod was the king. Not
really the Jews choice for who should be king, he was the Romans choice.
He wasn’t really even Jewish; I mean he wasn’t Jewish in the
legal sense of having been born to a Jewish mother.
Herod was an Arab, a Bedouin.
Herod was put on the throne to be the king over the Jews; and
Herod who considered himself observant of the Jewish law, and he tried
to secure the loyalty of the Jews by upholding their law in various
ways, even while he was ruthless in holding on to his power; but
that’s another story and another sermon – the wickedness of Herod.
But still, the basic fact of Herod is he was a non-Jew who was
considered king of the Jews. And
he was in league with the Romans who were all, of course, not Jewish;
and therefore suspect like Herod.
The Pharisees didn’t like King Herod; therefore they didn’t
like the Herodians. But if
Jesus answered their question in a way that the Pharisees would like, he
would probably make the Herodians mad.
And If Jesus were to answer the question in a way that the
Herodians would like, then he would make the Pharisees mad.
So you can see the kind of trap there was; the Herodians would
want Jesus to say yes, you should pay taxes to Caesar; the Pharisees
would want Jesus to say no, we owe everything to God, so we shouldn’t
pay taxes to Caesar.
What Jesus did was closer to the Pharisees’ view, but in a
unique way. What Jesus
did was… First of all, he said it dramatically; he made it an object
lesson. He had that
particular flair for unfolding a teaching that makes it stick in our
memories…So he said, “Show me a coin.”
Someone brought a coin. “Whose
picture is on the coin?” was Jesus next question.
“Caesar’s” they said. I
don’t like this translation that I used today which says “the
emperor”, of course “Caesar” is the word they used, it’s a
familiar enough word. Of
course Caesar was the title for the emperor starting from Julius Caesar,
and from that point on all the emperors were called Caesar; this one
happened to be Tiberius, but that’s beside the point.
Whose picture is on the coin?
It’s the emperor’s, Caesar’s picture.
And Jesus said, “Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar; and give
to God what belongs to God.” In this way, Jesus was saying that there
is something that we do owe to the emperor.
The emperor has a claim on us and that claim can be found in the
currency we use to trade with each other.
The currency has the emperor’s image on it; and the image
belongs to the original, the coin belongs to Caesar; give the coin to
Caesar. Pay it back to him,
in other words.
Actually the Roman emperors, even though many of them were
against the Jews, against the Christians, even though many of them were
not good people themselves, the Roman emperors did a service for the
world at that time, they preserved a general peace called a Pax Romana.
It helped to make a stable, structured society.
It allowed commerce to flourish so that people didn’t starve to
death; it allowed the peace to be preserved so that there weren’t
continuous rebellions and civil war involving the whole empire.
It did various other things to make life livable for ordinary
people on an everyday basis. And
so it’s fitting that the subject people of
Rome
should pay something for
their upkeep in this way. They
should pay for their overhead; they should pay something back to Caesar.
And that was part of what Jesus said.
But then he said, “Give to God what is God’s”.
And the Pharisees were amazed, amazed at the answer, amazed at
the way that Jesus was able to step around their trap.
Why? I think we are
so familiar with this teaching that we don’t really get it in the way
the Pharisees did. We
have our own interpretation of it; that the Pharisees didn’t have.
Our interpretation is…the national government and the state
government, the structure of our society; deserve a part of our
allegiance; that God deserves a part of our allegiance; and so we put
the two parts together and make the whole.
We give to the government what the government deserves from us
and we give to God what God deserves from us.
That’s our interpretation, we try to divide the pie; part of
the pie goes to Caesar, part of the pie goes to God.
And then, the image of dividing the pie doesn’t work
completely, because we also talk about different kinds of things that we
owe to the government and to God. We
owe taxes to the government, we owe money to the government, we owe
portions of our income to the government.
And to God we owe spiritual things; we owe our feelings; we owe
our good desires, our good decisions, we owe our disciplines, we owe all
kinds of intangible things to God. So
in our way of breaking up Caesar and God, we tend to think of it as the
Caesar part is all the financial part; all that material everyday income
and money part. And then the
God part is the pious part, the spirit and prayer, all of the things we
think of as our spirituality. And
in this way, we can think that we are dividing things up rightly, when
we give part to Caesar and part to God.
But what the Pharisees noticed was the way Jesus was teaching;
his teaching was different. They
noticed that word image. Whose
image is on the coin? Whose
icon is on the coin? That’s
really the word “image” in Greek…
icon. Whose image
is on the coin? Caesar’s.
He didn’t ask the second question; it was implied in Jesus’
answer, and that question is…where is God’s image?
And the answer is… in us. The
Pharisees knew that, and we know it, too.
But perhaps because we are too familiar with this teaching we may
not realize all the things that come along with realizing that we are
God’s image. That God’s
image is stamped in each of us just as Caesar’s image is stamped on
the coin. And so what we owe
Caesar, something from our material well being; what we owe the U.S.
Treasury, something from our income – which includes not just our
wages, but also property income, and interest income, that sort of thing
– we owe a part of that to our federal government and part to other
subsidiary governments; so to them we owe that part that which is
symbolized by the financial image.
The image of God is stamped on us in a way that we cannot
separate from any other part of ourselves.
What we owe God is our whole being, what we owe God is us.
What we bear in lives, what we bear in ourselves, in our souls
and in our bodies is some how a reflection of the very nature of God.
We are unique among God’s creatures, all of them have an image
of God’s glory, we alone are an image of God himself.
And therefore, if we are going to render Caesar’s image back to
Caesar; then we need at the same time to remember that we are to render
God’s image back to God. In
other words, we owe God everything that we are.
Another way of putting this, I think, is what we owe God is a
relationship. Not just a
formal relationship, like when we write our income tax statements and
checks to send to the U.S. Treasury; that’s a relationship. Not
a very warm and friendly relationship, at least on the day we send the
money off; but still, it’s a relationship.
But the relationship with God is a relationship that has all the
dimensions of God’s own image, God’s own personality, God’s own
self. It’s a
multi-dimensional relationship, and it’s a relationship characterized
by love. God’s image has
come into us through creation in the form of love.
The Pharisees didn’t know this part of it yet, that God’s
image was restored in us; to
the complete self-image of God, that the eternal Son of God gave up his
life for us on the cross, making it possible for us to reclaim the image
that we lost through our own negligence, through our own sin.
So God’s image is an important part of all that God has
invested in us. In creating
us and redeeming us, God’s image is in us and all of that comes from
God’s love. And so
that’s what we owe back to God… love in the form of a relationship.
Now if you’re following my meandering logic here, you might be
thinking that I still haven’t dealt with that issue of how I said it
was wrong to say that we owe money to Caesar, we owe spiritual things to
God. I seem to be saying
though, that we owe relationship to God, we owe our complete selves to
God, we owe our love to God, while we owe our money to Caesar.
But, money does come into things; because money is not just the
currency we spend. Money is
what lies behind the coin and folding money, and the statements from our
banks and our stock portfolios that come to us on a regular basis.
What lies behind that is our lives; our work, maybe a
relationship, like the inheritances people receive when a family member
passes on that is a symbol of the relationship that existed before the
person died. So that becomes
money but the money symbolizes something beyond itself.
It symbolizes a life’s work, it symbolizes investment, it
symbolizes relationships, it symbolizes a big chunk of our lives, it
might symbolize gifts that people gave us.
There’s something behind money, something intangible behind
money, and therefore it’s not simply a material thing that we spend
for material things. It’s
a part of somebody else’s life that is connected with our life; and
when we engage in the exchanging of money we are spending a part of our
lives.
So money itself is not an unworthy physical thing that
shouldn’t be brought into spirituality.
But how do we bring it into our relationship with God?
We can’t buy God’s love with our money.
But, we can, in the way we use our money, make our relationship
with God serious. I think
God is more concerned with that, with the way we spend our money than he
is with the righteousness and the causes we spend it on.
Of course, we need to do the best we can, if we’re giving our
money away, to give it to worthy things.
We need to spend our money on appropriate things. Even
if we’re not giving it away, be sure that we’re not bathing
ourselves in unworthy or spiritually dangerous kinds of luxuries.
We need to spend our money worthily.
But God isn’t so much judging each act of spending for whether
it’s worthy or unworthy – if it’s worthy we get a good mark and if
it’s unworthy we get a bad mark. Sometimes
we might give money in a worthy intention and then it goes astray
instead of getting the actual final result.
God doesn’t really care as much about results as he does about
that act of giving itself; because when we give, we give up.
When we give, we give up. The
money we give in church is money that flies away.
We aren’t going to see it again, except in the form of the
viable church. Though we
aren’t going to have it under our own personal control anymore, it’s
going to be a part of a life that’s going to be bigger than ourselves;
we’ve given it up. But by
giving it up we are changing our own lives so that they are more
strongly connected with God. We’re
making a limit on the part of our lives that we personally control; and
giving part of it up to God’s control.
That is how the more we give, the closer our relationship with
God can become. Giving has
that potential of changing the life of the giver; that potential is
built in to the fact that when we give away money we’re giving up
chunks of our time, chunks of our lives, and then it’s not under our
control anymore. And
therefore we are doing something that negates our own personal goals,
perhaps, but it also puts us in line with what God’s goal for our
lives might be. That’s
what it means to deepen a relationship with God – to let go of your
own will, to allow God’s will to work it’s way into the arena you
exist in, and the way that you structure your life.
So each time we give, and the more we give, the more we have to
make changes that are in accordance with the fact that we’ve given up
a part of what was under our control.
People who give generously to the church, might find that they no
longer have money to build an in-ground swimming pool that was part of
their plan for what they would spend next year.
They’ve given up that option, but what they’ve gotten in
return is a life that’s been changed by what they’ve given up.
What they’ve gotten in return is therefore a stronger
relationship with God. That
doesn’t automatically mean that we’re saying that you’re closer to
God or more spiritual than someone who gives less; it just means that
God has a chance to work with you through that letting go of control;
and allowing God take more control.
And that’s why ministers often say, and I often say, that when
you consider what you’re giving to the church next year, the smallest
increase is still significant. You
might think “What difference does it make if I change my pledge by one
dollar a month?” It makes
a difference to God, because you’re giving a little piece of yourself.
More to God than you gave last year.
You’re working on that, you’re working on the relationship,
you’re letting go of what your own will controls and allowing God to
step in and let his will work in your life as it’s taken out of your
purview and into God’s.
That’s what I think Jesus was talking about when he said
“give to God the things that are God’s”.
That includes giving money because money represents a part of our
lives; thus what we are doing when we give our money is giving it up out
of our own control. And
what we do when we do that is allow God to take over the balance; God is
the one who has more control at that point.
That’s why giving to the church works.
It’s not because we judge that it’s a worthy cause; that the
way we spend is out of a desire to keep a worthy cause going; it’s
because we know that we need to give, because God wants us to know that
we need that relationship with him.
And to further that relationship, we give of ourselves, and
financial giving is part of that. I’m
not saying that I want everybody to pledge 100% of their wealth to God
next year.
That might be what the hymn “I Give Thee But Thine Own” seems
to be suggesting, but that’s not what I’m saying.
God has given us a large portion of what comes our way so that we
can live and have the good things that we tend to need to have in order
to fulfill the kind of person that God created us to be, that’s all
alright. All that I’m
saying is that when you do make a decision to give, it’s a spiritual
decision; it’s a “relationship with God” decision.
And the more we give, the more chance we are giving God, (by more
I mean proportionally), the more we give the greater chance we are
giving God to work on that relationship with us.
And that’s why it’s a worthy thing to be talked about in a
sermon, to be discussed in the life of the church, and to make it a part
of your spiritual life. Give
Caesar’s things to Caesar, and give to God everything; and give it in
the form of a relationship. That’s
what we owe him. Amen.
^ top of page
