Saint Matthew 22:18-15
I’ve got good news and bad news for you.
First the good news. There are only seventeen days left until the election. Now the bad news. There are still seventeen days left until the election.
Depending on how you look at it there are only seventeen more days or there are seventeen more long days of almost constant campaign ads on our televisions and radios. Ads that extol the virtues of their candidate as if they were a saint complete with lighting and shadows worthy of a Holy Card. Or the grainy black and white ads that demonize their opponents making them look as if they were the spawn of Satan.
Seventeen more days of nonstop political punitory, talking heads who parse every word a candidate speaks as if it were holy writ that will last through the ages. Everyone but these sages knows that the word of a candidate only lasts about as long as it take him or her to hang their sign on their office door.
Seventeen more days before we can move on to other things, important things, like what we are doing with our lives and how we can make life in the small section of the world we inhabit better.
To make matters worse, I’ll bet you didn’t fire up your computer this morning or take the time and brave a virus to come to church to hear a sermon about politics yet this morning’s gospel in a hit you over the head way speaks to both and it speaks to our time.
According to the Pew Research Centre for Religion, when “asked about what kinds of things are important for a successful marriage, 44% of adults say shared religious beliefs are “very important.”1
In a recent survey 55% said that shared political party affiliation was very important. So, the author of an article on the study concluded: So don't be surprised if you hear someone say, “No child of mine will marry a Democrat!” Or a Republican, depending on party affiliation. Political gridlock, it seems, has moved out of the voting booth and into the wedding chapel.”2
Whether political or religious the exchange about Caesar’s coin raises questions about obedience, loyality, and authority that faith has an inescapable political dimension, but not a partisan one.3
In fact it is a decidedly non-partisan crowd that tires to entrap Jesus that day.
Getting the Pharisees and the Herodians to form a coalition on anything would have been unthinkable. It would be like getting the Democrats and Republicans to sit in a circle and sing “Bum By Ya.”
The Herodians would have been supporters of paying the taxes because they supported the Roman regime.
To the Pharisees the coin was a reminder that their God-given homeland was under foreign occupation and “payment of the tax meant the humiliation of Israel at the hands of Rome.”4
The coins used to play the tax were “a painful reminder of being in lands occupied by foreign powers who worshipped false gods. The tax could only be paid with Roman coins which were not just legal tender but also pieces of propaganda. Most of the coins contained an image of the Caesar with inscriptions proclaiming him to be divine or the son of a god. One common phrase on coins during the time of Jesus was: "Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest."5
’ll miss the whole point if we don’t see the base instinct that brought these two groups together. It was power! They may not have had much power but whatever power they had they wanted to hang onto at an cost.
Eons ago, when I was an undergraduate, my Political Science professor invited Alderman Vito Marzullo “who ruled the West Side 25th Ward virtually unchallenged from 1953 to 1985.”6 He was a Chicago politician of the first order who personified the old-style machine politics of the day.
I have never forgotten what he told us as he summed up what politics was all about. He said we could read all the books in world on the subject or study under the most learned professors but that we should never forget that politics is about “Who gets what, where, and when.”
That’s what brought the Herodians and the Pharisees together to entrap Jesus, they wanted to hang on to their power. Jesus had a different vision for the people than the “who, what, where, and when” of the politics of their day and of ours.
It is not my job to tell you what to think but it is my job to tell you what it is important to think about. And in the next two weeks it is important for you to think about that axiom of “who gets what, where, and when” and see how diametrically opposed it is to the teaching of Jesus who was always on the side of the last, the lost, and the lonely. It is important for all of us to remember that our ultimate allegiance is not to a politician or party but it is to Christ. Politicians offer simple solutions and pat answers Christ offers us a different way of being.
The question, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”7 is a bogus one and Jesus sees right through it.
If Jesus says, “Do not pay taxes to the emperor,” the Romans will get him for treason. If he says, “Yes, we should pay taxes to the emperor, his own followers in that occupied country will call him a traitor."8
“Here, show me a coin.”9 he says and I like to think that he took it, examined it, and then flipped it back in their direction with a question of his own.
“Whose picture is stamped on it?” he asked them. “And whose name is this beneath the picture?” “Caesar’s,” they replied.“Well, then,” he said, “give it to Caesar if it is his, and give God everything that belongs to God.”10
Jesus response is so simple that we can miss it. Don’t you see it? Give God everything that belongs to God. Everything belongs to God! That coin! Those two diverse political parties! Rome! Even the emperor! They all belong to God. That is the profound testimony that is at the heart of our faith: we belong to God.
We belong not to the partisan claims we make in election seasons, but to God. We belong not to the charms of our secular world, we belong to God.
The reality is that everything belongs to God. Of each person who has ever walked on this earth, male and female God has said, “This one. This one. This one is mine.” Of every plant and animal of every species and subspecies God has said, “This is mine, too.” Everything belongs to God.
Your lunch break at work. Your shopping this afternoon. Your conversation with a neighbor. The stuff in your closet. Your anxieties in the night.
Your portfolio, or your debt, or your fantasies. Your time, your energy, your brokenness. It’s all God’s.11
And what does God ask of us in return? It is something that no person who subscribes to the who gets what, where and when vision of life will ever understand.
For some reason stories about the great saints of the faith always strike me as too fanciful, too far-fetched. But this one from the life of one of my favourite saints, because he is the patron saint of animals, is one that if it isn’t true it should be.
Every day Saint Francis would go off to pray all by himself. Sometimes he went into the woods, sometimes he went into the chapel, some days he even went into a cave.
When he would come out Brother Leo would invariably ask him, “Did God say anything?” and Francis would say, “No.” Day after day Francis went off to pray and always when Brother Leo asked the answer was the same, nothing.
Finally, one day Leo asked and Francis surprised him. “Yes,” he said, “God did say one word to me.” “What was it,” Leo asked excitedly! And Francis replied, “God said, ‘More.’”
I love that! In return for giving us everything all God asks of us in return is, “More.” More of Saint Francis. More of You. More of Me.
God doesn’t ask for what is in our pockets God asks for our hearts. God asks for us!
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1. “Religion in Marriages and Families,” Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project, May 30, 2020, https://www.pewforum.org/2016/10/26/religion-in-marriages-and-families/.
2. Kevin Enochs, “In US, 'Interpolitical' Marriage Increasingly Frowned Upon,” Voice of America, February 3, 2017, https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-interpolitical-marriage-increasingly-frowned-upon.
3. Lee, Michael L. “Matthew 22:15-22. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture.” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Teaching, Year A, 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): 403–5.
4. ibid.
5. Brian Stoffregen, “Matthew 22:15-22 Proper 24 A - Year A,” Matthew 22.15-22, accessed October 17, 2020, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt22x15.htm.
6. “Vito Marzullo and the Chicago Democratic Political Machine,” Media Burn Archive, August 25, 2020, https://mediaburn.org/lesson-plans/vito-marzullo-and-the-chicago-democratic-political-machine/.
7. St. Matthew 22:17b. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
8. Theodore J. Wardlaw, “Matthew 22:15-22. Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Teaching 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 405-406.
9. Saint Matthew 22:19. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]
10. Saint Matthew 22:20-21. (TLB)
11. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say October 18? 20th after Pentecost,” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions (Myers Park United Methodist Church, January 1, 1970), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
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