"Whose Is This?" - Pentecost 21A

 Saint Matthew 22:15–22

“Whose Is This?”

At this moment in history, it might be well for us to revisit the 1960 film by Otto Preminger which told the tumultuous story of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 called “Exodus.”  

If you don’t have the three-and-a-half-hours it would take to watch the entire movie pay particular attention to the words of its theme song written by Ernest Gold:

This land is mine god gave this land to me / This brave this golden land to me /And when the morning sun reveals her hills and plain / I see a land where children can run free / So, take my hand and walk this land with me / And walk this lovely (golden) land with me...

It all sounds so beautiful, placid, almost idyllic, until it’s closing lines when the lyrics take an ominous, almost prophetic tone: With (by) god’s own hand I know I can be strong If I must fight / I'll fight to make this land our own /Until I die this land is mine.

This land is mine!  What we have witnessed these past couple of weeks is two peoples singing the same song: “This land is mine, god gave this land to me.”  That is a recipe for more than disaster, it is a recipe for war.  It is a recipe for terrorism and retaliation that saddens our hearts and confuses our minds.  

Pick a side?  It’s hard to amid the bloodshed, and carnage, and inhumanity.

If we had the power, we would be like the furious but fair parent who breaks up a schoolyard battle that is leaving both combatants bruised and bloodied by grabbing them by the scruff of their necks and scolding: “Stop it! Stop it right now!”

It is an indisputable fact that humans have this propensity to squabble, to pick fights, to quarrel, and when the minor becomes the major, to start wars.  Most of those wars, whether they between neighbours arguing over property lines, or nations battling over boarders, are based on the mistaken notion that “this land is mine.”

Few people believed this more than the guy whose image was on the coin at the centre of this morning’s dangerous dust-up between Jesus and two groups of guys who couldn’t agree on anything except that Jesus was a threat to what they believed to be theirs.  

The other threat to their existence was Caesar who not only firmly believed that the land was his but had the power to make it so.

Caesar made sure everybody knew this every time they reached into their pocket for a coin. “In Jesus’ time, the most common denarius was stamped with the image of the emperor Tiberius, and its inscription read, “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, high priest.”1 No god gave the land to him he ruled it by his own divine right.  In fact, he kind of thought of himself as a god.

To make matters worse the people often had to reach into their pockets to pay taxes to the occupiers of the land they believed to be theirs and who worshipped false gods. “Thus paying taxes with Roman coins raised both political and religious issues.”2

And this brought together two very diverse political groups – the Pharisees who saw Rome as an occupying force in their God-given land and the Herodians, whose name implies, were just a political shills for a government that was a puppet of the Roman Empire.  They both saw Jesus as a threat, one as a threat to their religious way of life and the other as a threat to their political stability.  Who knows?  If this Jesus guy kept up his message and movement maybe this land wouldn’t be theirs anymore.

So, they ask him this politically and religious charged question under the guise of “We were just wondering.”  No harm, good sir, we are only asking questions.”  And the loaded question they ask is: “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”3

“The trap set by the Pharisees and Herodians is twofold: they not only hope to get him in trouble with the Roman authorities, but also get him in trouble with the popular people.” Nobody I know loves paying taxes and what is true in our day was certainly true in Jesus’ day. “They were not as concerned about his potential violation of the religious codes as his going against the popular sentiment."4

Jesus is on to their malicious schemes right away and asks: “‘Why ae you playing these games with me? Why are you trying to trap me? Do you have a coin? Let me see it.’ They handed him a silver piece.”5

In his commentary on the text Dr. Thomas G. Long points out something many miss. 

When [Jesus] asks them for the tax coin, they unsuspectingly reach into their purses and withdraw the evidence that exposes them -- not him -- as deceptive and hypocritical compromisers. They are the ones carrying around Caesar's money, not Jesus; they are the ones who have the emperor's image in their pocketbooks; they are the ones who have already bought into the pagan system.6

 So, here is what I like to think happened.  I’d like to think that Jesus took a long look at the coin, turned it over a few times just to be sure, and then tossed it back at them 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.”7

Jesus knew more about the kingdoms of this world that these “tossers” ever would.

Remember the the time “the old satanic foe” led Jesus up to a high mountain “and spread out all the kingdoms of the earth on display at once. “Then the Devil said, ‘They’re yours in all their splendor to serve your pleasure. I’m in charge of them all and can turn them over to whomever I wish. Worship me and they’re yours, the whole works.’”8

You can almost hear the tempter singing a Siren’s song: “This land can be yours. I’ll give this land to you.  This brave and golden land to you.”  

Jesus response to the diabolical one is simple: You can’t give me anything because all these lands belong to God.   

The same is true with the coin and if we don’t get this it will only become just another in a long line of confrontation stories between Jesus and his adversaries.

Jesus response is so simple that we can miss it.  Don’t you see it? “Give God everything that belongs to God.”  

Do you see it now?  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 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.9

To those who are blowing each other up in the vain notion that the land belongs to them. Nope.  It belongs to God.

To those who made their way across our nation and displaced native tribes and First Nations’ people in the name of manifest destiny thinking that the land belonged to them. Nope.  It belonged to God.

To those who invade other countries thinking that the land belonged to them because once upon a time in a land far away it was a part of the empire that they wished now to restore so they were going to take it back at all costs?  They thought that land belonged to them. Nope.  That land belongs to God.

It’s all God’s. We all belong to God, to Christ.

That, I believe, is what Jesus envisions as I see him flipping that coin back into the hands of the Pharisees. He isn’t all that impressed with the power of cash or currency, or who is laying claim to what but rather the beauty of our understanding that this land, this life, our loves and dreams belong to him.

While we may want to be content to go around singing about how “this land is mine, god gave this land to me” and killing each other for a broken-down piece of it, Jesus wants us to see each other and the world we have be have given differently.  

See it the way Christ sees it. See it where it really is a place “where when the morning sun reveals her hills and plain [it can be] a land where all of God’s children can run free.” 

Really free, because we have heard Jesus say: “These. These beauties, all of them, every single one, are mine.”

________________

1.  Michael E Lee, “Matthew 22:15-22. Connecting the Reading With Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Leading Worship, Year A, 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): 403–5.

2. Brian Stoffregen, “Matthew 22:15-22 Proper 24 A - Year a,” Exegetical Notes, accessed October 20, 2023, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt22x15.htm.

3. St. Matthew 22:17. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

4. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 556.

5. St. Matthew 22:18-19 (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The New Testament Palms and Proverbs [Colorado Springs,, CO: NavPress, 1998]]

6. Thomas G. Long,  Matthew (Louisville , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 251.

7. St. Matthew 22:20-21. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible.  (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, Publishers, 1971)]

8. St. Luke 4:5-7. (MESSAGE)

9. 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/