All Saints’, Dorval
October 18, 2020
A denarius of the Emperor Tiberius Caesar
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Or, in the old translation that became an aphorism independent of its context, “Render unto Caesar …”
Jesus, in his ongoing war of words with the religious authorities, neatly evades a trick question here. The Pharisees and Herodians, in their attempts to “entrap” him, knew that the question about taxes was the one that really mattered. If he answered “yes”, he would be viewed by the Pharisees (and most Jews) as a collaborator; if he answered “no”, he would be seen by the Herodians (who were, in fact, collaborators) and by their Roman masters, as a traitor. There was no good option.
But Jesus not only finds a good option, he calls out the questioners on their “malice,” making it clear that he knows exactly what game they’re playing.
It’s a game with multiple levels, rooted in the intersection of religion and power politics in the eastern Mediterranean of the first century. Under the umbrella of occupying Roman rule, multiple cultures, languages, classes, and schools of thought jostled together in a geographically tiny space, clashing with each other and with the overarching Roman hegemony. The Pharisees and Herodians, though both Jewish, were bitterly opposed on many issues. The fact that they were willing to work together to trip Jesus up shows just how dangerous he was to the fragile balance of power.
When Jesus asks for the denarius, he is revealing his questioners’ hypocrisy. If the location of his teaching in this passage is the temple, as seems likely, then no faithful Jew should have a Roman coin on his person in the first place; it should all have been changed into “temple money” when they came into the building. (It was the extortionate rates charged by those money-changers that Jesus had objected to when he cleansed the temple, just the previous day, according to Matthew).
And part of the reason that Roman coins were unacceptable in the Jewish temple was that they bore the likeness of the Roman emperor, who was worshiped as a god by his subjects. This was a requirement that conflicted with the first of the Ten Commandments, in which God decreed that God’s people should have no other deity before him.
The deification of the Roman rulers was a relatively new thing, which had evolved in the half-century or so before Jesus’ time, as the Roman Republic fell apart and the first emperors – Augustus and his successor, Tiberius, who was ruling at the time of the gospels – assumed ever more autocratic powers and interpreted this to mean that they were akin to gods. The Roman world in the time of Jesus was still adjusting to what it meant to add their earthly rulers to the pantheon of deities that most of them worshipped.
But for most of them, it was a fairly mild adjustment; they simply offered incense or other sacrifices at the altar of the emperor along with all the other altars where they were already offering it. It was only the stubbornly monotheistic Jewish people for whom this requirement presented an existential crisis. To them, a demand to worship the Roman emperor was a demand to contravene their most basic markers of identity; in effect, to stop being who they were. A generation earlier, around the time of Jesus’ birth, there had nearly been a revolt when Herod the Great tried to mount a sculpture of a Roman eagle above the gate of the Temple; this, too, was seen as an unacceptable incursion of idolatry into the sacred Jewish precinct.
Jewish faith and Roman authority managed to maintain a fragile détente until about forty years after Jesus’ death; the Jews refused to sacrifice to the emperor, but agreed to offer prayers for him, and the Romans left them alone. But eventually the pressure became too much, and the emperor Titus savagely suppressed another revolt in Jerusalem, scattering its inhabitants as refugees throughout the Empire and destroying the Temple, which has remained so until the present day.
In other words, the question, “whose head is this, and whose title?” was not just an idle way of carrying on the debate. It was a question loaded with political and theological bombs, any of which could go off in Jesus’ face at any moment.
But why – other than historical interest – should we care about this today? We live in a democracy, with separation of church and state. Our leaders are not demanding to be sacrificed to, as gods. There are no statues of the Greco-Roman pantheon in the public squares. We pay our taxes in return for “peace, order and good government” (and universal health care and subsidized childcare) and we go to church as private citizens, free to believe as we choose. Idolatry doesn’t seem to be much of a problem in Canada in 2020 – though goodness knows we have plenty of other problems!
But that depends on how you define idolatry. We tend to have a mental image of it as the Israelites worshiping the golden calf – an incident which, it just so happens, is the prelude to our reading from Exodus this morning. Such blatant displays – people bowing down to a gold idol of their own creation – are rare in the 21st century.
But if you define “worship” as “give your ultimate allegiance to” there are lots of things that enlightened 21st century people worship that aren’t God. Fame, sex, nationalism, white supremacy – and any number of other things, on a continuum from “otherwise harmless” to “actively vicious”. Foremost among them is “The Economy”; the coronavirus pandemic has horrifyingly revealed how easy it is for contemporary leaders to rationalize literally killing people in the name of “keeping the economy going”. If that kind of forced sacrifice doesn’t constitute idolatry, I don’t know what does.
Aaron and the Israelites make the golden calf because Moses has been up the mountain for too long and they don’t know what’s happened to him; they don’t feel like they can trust God anymore, and so they create their own god to try to regain some semblance of control over what is happening to them. The same impulse prompts Moses in our actual reading from today, to try to pin God down and insist that he commit to coming with the people on the journey into the promised land, and to make the remarkably audacious request to be allowed to see God’s face.
But God refuses to be pinned down. “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,” God says, “and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” And Moses may not see God’s face, for no one can do so and live.
Idolatry is about the attempt at control. The Roman emperors claimed divine status as part of their overall program of control over their subjects. The Israelites created the golden calf when they felt that they had lost control over their situation and, as a result, lost their trust in the one true God.
But the essence of belief in that one true God, the God who created the universe and formed us in God’s image, is that we will never have control. We will never fully understand – not this side of eternity, anyway. To see God’s face is too much for us; and yet we know we are made in God’s image, and that when Jesus tells us to render unto God that which is marked with God’s image, he means our whole selves as well as all the other gifts God has given us.
And so, perhaps that is the question these texts are asking us today: where are we clinging to control? Where are we creating things to worship – things to which we have the impulse to give our ultimate allegiance – that are not God? How can we embrace God’s mystery, God’s unknowable-ness, the partiality of our own knowledge? And how, nevertheless, can we give God what is God’s, including our whole selves, marked with God’s image?
Amen.
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