Proper 24 Year A 2026: Matthew 22:15-22

 When I was in college, I read a book written by former Attorney General John Ashcroft right after he left office. It’s a rite of passage for elected officials and cabinet members to write a book as soon as they leave. If you don’t remember John Ashcroft (or are too young to know who he is), he was the attorney general during the first George W Bush administration, which included 9/11. So his book was marketed as being about preventing another 9/11 - which I’m sure it was. It was called Never Again. This was not an assigned book. I didn’t read it for class, even though I was studying political science. I was just a nerd. So my takeaway wasn’t any paper I wrote or deep class discussion. It wasn’t anything about national security or 9/11 at all. I don’t remember what point Ashcroft was trying to make, but the one takeaway I have from reading that book was a theological point. At one point, he used today’s gospel text as a proof text for why we, in 21st century America, are supposed to pay our taxes. It wasn’t quite this simple, but it wasn’t much more complicated. He essentially said, “Jesus says to pay your taxes”.

Now, John Ashcroft is a smart man. And I do believe we should pay our taxes. But I think he completely missed the mark with his exegesis of this passage. Jesus was not saying, “pay your taxes, 21st century Americans”. Not only because those taxes about which Jesus is being asked are completely different from what we think of as modern taxes, that’s why the question is a trap, but also because taxes aren’t even the point of the conversation.

Nobody in the conversation in today's gospel is acting in good faith. Every word spoken, both by the Pharisees and by Jesus, has ulterior motives. Jesus at least articulates his distrust in his sparring partners. The Pharisees’ question is dripping with insincerity. No matter how much buttering up they do, I would imagine Jesus would be on his guard from the flowery beginning of their trap.

Taxes were demanded by the occupying Romans and despised by the Israelites. In Jesus’ day, the Roman Empire subjugated the nation of Israel as a foreign, imperial power. Consequently, the Romans extracted taxes from the Jewish people. In their historical context, these taxes weren’t similar to modern day taxes, which pay for education, roads, and other public services. These taxes went directly to Rome—the occupying empire dominating Israel. In other words, the Jewish people were paying their oppressors to oppress them. The single denarius, the amount of the poll tax, was not the full amount of taxes levied, it was just one of many. A denarius was a large amount of money - a full day’s wage for a laborer. It’s like saying Jesus asked for a hundred dollar bill and someone happened to have one on them. But Matthew, which was probably written around the year 80-90CE, had the historical reference of the Israeli revolt in the year 66CE surrounding the poll tax. So the coin he chose was a purposeful reference that his audience would have understood.

So the trap wasn’t a poorly formed trap. “Yes” would be a wrong answer to the Israelites and “no” would be a treasonous statement to the Romans. It seems they’ve caught Jesus between a rock and a hard place.

Jesus’ question about the coin itself is rhetorical. He knew who he was going to find on the coin. It would be like me asking for a quarter and then asking you whose picture is on it - but even easier, because the emperor’s picture was on all coinage that could be used to pay imperial tax. I wonder what they were thinking as Jesus asked the question and they were answering it. I know how many things can run through my head in the amount of time it takes a cup of water to tip over. Were they curious? Were they panicking? Were they regretting their line of questioning, wishing they could be anywhere else? It takes them three more sets of questioning before the end of this chapter, where it ends, “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

Jesus’ answer here is really quite brilliant. He appears to support the state, but he could be saying to give Caesar nothing. It depends on how you do the math. He could be saying you take these coins, officially minted by Rome and with the emperor’s face on them, and you give them to the emperor. But he invites us to go deeper than living as though we have divided our lives into two piles, one of which belongs to Caesar, or to the world, and one of which belongs to God. Even what ostensibly belongs to us is a loaner. There is a beautiful prayer for the dead I read somewhere that echoes that sentiment, which reads in part, “We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet as thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also if we are thine.”

There’s an episode of Gilmore Girls where Lorelei’s mother gives her a pack of sticky notes and tells her to go through the house and put a sticky note on anything she’d like to be left with when her parents die, as her parents are re-working their wills. No matter what Lorelei sticky notes her name to, it doesn’t make it hers. Those things, although they are marked for Lorelei, remain her parents’. In the same way as Caesar’s face being stamped on the coins doesn’t make their value belong to Caesar. No matter what Caesar claims, it’s all simply on loan from God, and what doesn’t belong to God?

For all Jesus’ lip service to the state, his lifestyle and the political implications of his teachings in the Gospel were revolutionary and he was crucified by the Romans as a political insurgent. Jesus was already in a precarious position as a Jew in the first place. Jews were exempt, sometimes, depending on who the emperor was and how he was feeling, from emperor worship. But sedition was a quick way to die, no matter your religious identity, so Jesus was walking a fine line. There was no concept of separation of church and state. That wouldn’t appear for another 1700 years. The civic and religious life were inseparable.

We are called to a greater way of assessing our lives than to sort out which things belong to the emperor and which things belong to God. All belongs to God. All is owed to God. It is part of the theology of political engagement: if the money we are paying in our taxes, above and beyond who currently possesses it, belongs to God, then we should care about how that money is being spent. While first century Roman taxes and 21st century American taxes are not exactly comparing apples to apples, we can ask similar values questions about those taxes. Jesus’ taxes were going to the oppression of his own people. Who are our tax dollars being used to oppress? Who are our tax dollars being used to care for? What would it look like if we used those dollars like they were God’s? Because what is there in creation that doesn’t belong to God? Amen.