Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?

“No one,” wrote Raj Nadella, “would have expected the Pharisees and the Herodians to come together on the issue of taxation.”1 The Pharisaic movement strongly opposed the Roman empire whereas the Herodians benefitted from their active association with it.

This strange alliance sought to entrap Jesus by devious questioning, a characteristic of the so called “controversy stories” in Matthew. The Greek word Matthew used,2 connotes ensnaring someone in their own words; and we can note in passing that the question is framed as a closed question requiring a yes or no answer, something contemporary QCs are very good at. Any direct answer like “yes” or “no” to the question would either defy Caesar, or offend those who were resisting Rome. Either way, Jesus would appear to foot-fault himself.

The Pharisees were well versed in negotiating with the Roman Empire even as they opposed its rule; whilst the Herodians were often in bed with Rome in order to further their political and economic interests. So, to imply in their question that Jesus was either collaborating with or defying the empire was blatant hypocrisy.

Jesus knew their game from many similar encounters in the past. And he asked them to show him a coin of the realm. The image and inscription thereon identified who controlled the economy. Everyone, even the temple, traded in that economy because they had no other choice. Consequently, they were legally obliged to pay tax. And Jesus certainly did not intend to encourage those at the margins to defy the empire and jeopardize their lives.

You may recall that, prior to this, Matthew tells us that the collectors of the temple tax ask Peter if his teacher pays the temple tax. Peter replies that Jesus did indeed pay the temple tax.3 However, this particular tax, the fiscus Judaicus, was imposed on all Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, 40 or 50 years after Jesus’ lifetime. This tax was a punishment of all Jews for the Jewish Rebellion, and was used to rebuild and maintain the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome, thus asserting that Jupiter claimed power superior to the Jewish God; a somewhat studied insult. So, this particular vignette of Matthew’s was directed at his post 70 CE audience.

Peter, too, was liable to pay the tax, and at the conclusion of the story Jesus says to Peter, “… so that we do not give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook; catch the first fish that comes up ; and when you open its mouth, you will find a coin; take that and give it to them for you and me.” In turn, Jesus has claimed that God will pay their taxes – a sideways swipe at the rich and powerful who could easily afford it, and at the Roman God Jupiter, who seemed to need a cash boost from a Jewish God.

That story is echoed in today’s gospel. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor … ?” Significantly, Jesus’ reply highlights the other, theological, dimension of this question. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”.4

So, this little drama to do with the payment of taxes poses yet further questions to God’s followers. “What are the mechanisms—the coinage—we need to put in place in order to transform the current reality and bring about a different reality that would be more acceptable to God?”5

Perforce, we have to pay taxes, and in a true democracy, if there be such a thing, one would do so willingly for the good of the community. Warren Carter6 noted that an imperial tax can be paid without the payment being a vote of support for Rome or its ethos. And, the coinage of God’s realm is not the same as Caesar’s. God’s realm is one of love, not coercion; it is a realm of community and all that implies. Grace, sharing, care for others, negotiation, consensus, solidarity, willingness. These are the currencies of God’s realm.

As Desiree pointed out last week, this currency is given full expression in the Beatitudes, which value wholeness, transformation and healing for Godly communities. Raj Nadella suggests that these values are also the means to challenge oppression, including the oppression arising from unfair and biased taxation.

Jesus’ social programme was, in Richard Rohr’s words, “a quiet refusal to participate in almost all external power structures or domination systems”, 7 and he avoided the monetary system as much as possible by using a common purse.8 His three-year ministry offered free healing and health care for all. He treated women with a dignity and equality that was almost unknown in an entirely patriarchal culture. He welcomed the alien, the refugee and the enslaved as legitimate members of the human race.

Now; I am indebted to Robyn Hannah, firstly for a most illuminating conversation last week, about simplicity, and secondly for drawing my attention to Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations last week.

Rohr has been discussing the question “What do we do with evil?”,9 focussing on what Paul called powers, principalities and thrones, 10 what we call corporations, institutions, nation-states, and what Walter Wink called “the domination system”; AKA the meritocracy, people and organisations that have a stranglehold on power and wealth11 -summed up by Rohr as … corporate evils … [that] … have risen to sanctified, romanticized, and idealized necessities that are saluted, glorified, and celebrated in big pay checks, golden parachutes, parades, songs, rewards for loyalty, flags, marches, medals, and monuments.

When the systems of “the world” are able to operate as denied and disguised evil, says Rohr, they do immense damage for which they are not held accountable.

And herein lies a stark and scary contrast between corporate sin and individual sin. Rohr’s thesis is that we should pursue, and convict, evil in its organizational form – not in its adherents.

Jesus always forgave individual sin, whereas, in contrast, he is not once recorded as forgiving the sin of systems, institutions and empires. What he did was to make them show themselves and name themselves,12 lamenting over city states like Bethsaida, Chorazin and Jerusalem, which harboured such systems of control and oppression.13 Matthew records that it was Capernaum that would be “cast into hell”.14 These represented the powers and principalities of which Paul wrote.

So, I return to God’s currency.  Love, as Don Black and Charles Hart

wrote, can sometimes be a most unwelcome guest. Jesus, during his ministry, challenged much wrongdoing with impunity, but within a week of taking on the principalities and powers, he was killed. Empire and religion conspired, in a social contract, to murder him. He is finally a full victim of the systems he refused to worship.

We, my friends, are gripped by a similar and evil social contract with those principalities of which we are barely aware, and which we seem powerless to oppose. The evidence of their destructive nature is all around us. There is not one single facet of our lives that is untouched. And, as we sleep and dream of good things, the juggernaut of big business, corrupted government practices, off shore trading and the like, continues along its path toward global destruction, literally.

Richard Flanagan’s new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, has been described as a “wrenching response to a devastated world”.15 This “tale of ecological anguish … understands the textures of silence: what is unsaid, unsayable and unheard.” It bespeaks “a fearful evasion of love’s most intimate and painful obligations.”

Let us pray that we can cease that evasion in our own lives.

Footnotes:      1 Raj Nadella, Samuel A. Cartledge Associate Professor of New Testament; Director of MA(TS) Program Columbia Theological Seminary Columbia, Ga. See https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4624 2 Greek pagideusosin – παγιδεύσωσιν; 3 Matthew 17.24-27 ; 4 Matthew 22.21 ; 5 Op cit Raj Nadella 6 2.Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Socio-Political Reading, (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY 2000) 439.; 7 Jesus’ Social Programme, Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Thursday 15 October 2020 8 See John 12:6; 13:29; 9 Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, 11-17 October 2020; 10 See Colossians 1:16; 11 Walter Wink Engaging Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a world of Domination (Augsberg Fortress: 1992); 12 As did Desmond Tutu in South Africa and Martin Luther King in the United States of America; 13 Matthew 11.21, Luke 13.34, 35; 14 Matthew 11:23; 15 Beejay Silcox, The Guardian, Fri 16 Oct 2020 03.30 AEDT