Caesar's Coin (Proper 24A)

  

A Denarius of Tiberius 

Caesar’s Coin

Proper 24A

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

10:30 a.m. Sung Mass

18 October 2026

Mission Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Crescent City CA

Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

A lot of us have been thinking, recently, about the words of someone who learned too late to oppose the horrors of the Nazis: 

 

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." 

 

What most of us don’t know is that these words were written by a Lutheran pastor who had initially supported Hitler because he thought the New Testament taught him to respect the authority of the state above all.  And he did that in part because of his misunderstanding of today’s Gospel.

 

We live in a divided, messed up world, with plenty of tyrants leading different countries.  It is a world rife with horror and good reason to fear and hate. We tend to tolerate the brutality of political leaders as long as they have money and can put out propaganda convincing us that they are on the side of the right, the good, and the greatness of our own people.       

 

But none of this is new to the world.  Jesus lived in a Roman Empire led by Tiberius Caesar, who regularly committed military and police-state atrocities to maintain what he called the “Roman Peace” paid for by oppressive taxes on the very peoples subjugated by Rome. Tiberius was the supreme high priest of Roman old-time religion and morality.  But read the Roman historians:  everybody knew but dared not say he was an abusive old pervert holed up in his pleasure palace on the island of Capri, where he regularly raped and killed children for sexual gratification.  In Galilee and Judea, Jesus’s co-religionists had real problems of conscience about being part of such a morally compromised system.  It wasn’t their own country, after all.  Should they be “good subjects of the Empire” and go along to get along?  Or should they violently revolt, or just refuse to pay those taxes? 

 

In today’s Gospel reading, people ask Jesus whether he endorses a tax revolt.  Both the Pharisees and the Herodians who ask support the tax in their own ways.  The Pharisees use careful legal casuistry to argue you could pay Roman taxes and still keep God’s Law. The Herodians, allied client kings the Romans had installed and the Sadducees who ran the Temple, are totally in bed with Romans and themselves benefit from the taxes.

 

They had good cause to tell people to pay their taxes.  Resentment over them had led to anti-tax riots in the past and ultimately would lead to general insurrection and the destruction of the Jewish homeland by Vespasian and Titus in 70 CE.   The tributum capitis was applied throughout the Empire on every non-citizen living under Roman control.  Everyone was required to pay the sum each year simply for the privilege of living and breathing under the protection of the Pax Romana.  Protection money indeed.  

The Roman Procurator Quirinius had provoked a district wide revolt just 25 years or so before just by conducting a census to establish base lines for the tax. It had ended with the Romans’ crucifying en masse several thousand captured tax rebels, and was the origin of the guerilla fighters who throughout the New Testament are called lestes (bandits) or zealots.  

 

A Second Temple Shekel 

The scene in today’s Gospel takes place in one of the outer courtyards of the Jerusalem Temple (Matt 21:23).  It is Passover week; the city is crowded with masses of the devout commemorating God’s delivery of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  Political tensions are high and the risk of sudden outbreak of mob violence is great. The previous day, Jesus had conducted a demonstration in the Temple courtyard by driving out moneychangers (Matt 21:12).

 

The money changers, you will recall, were there to “assist” the devout by taking their unclean Roman coins and exchanging them—at a small commission, of course—for kosher Temple currency that worshippers could use to buy the animals queued up for fully assembly-line slaughter at the altar.  Jesus’ public act of driving out this commerce, needed to allow the sacrificial rites to proceed within the context of larger economy run by non-Jews, has led people to think that Jesus is a closet tax resister, come to Jerusalem on a donkey to the adulation of crowds.  Later in the week, at his hearing before Pontius Pilate, they will charge him with this very crime—promoting tax resistance against the Romans—to argue for his execution (Luke 23:1-4).  And he will die on a cross between two of those anti-tax bandits. 

 

It is in this tense scene that the Pharisees and Herodians innocently ask Jesus, “Is it permitted to pay taxes to the Emperor?”  

If Jesus says “yes,” he marks himself as an Imperial tool, a quisling, and a disloyal Jew, fair game for the rage of the mob.  If he answers “no,” he commits treason and marks himself for Roman crucifixion.  Malice indeed. 

Jesus says, “In what coin is the tax paid?  Can you show me one?” 

They don’t produce a Temple shekel, because for the Romans, it was “funny money” not recognized as valid currency.  They produce a Roman denarius, the coin for a common laborer’s wage for a day.  It is common enough in archeological digs from the period, bearing an image of Tiberius Caesar on its front, with the inscription, “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the God Augustus.”  On its back is a picture of Tiberius’ mother Livia, wife of Augustus, seated in the posture of the Goddess Pax, or Peace:  good propaganda for Tiberius.

Jesus asks, as innocently as they had, “Whose image is that?  And whose inscription?” 

Jesus has thus caught those who had been setting a trap for him. 

By producing a Roman coin here the Pharisees and Herodians show to all that whatever their political and religious differences, they both use the idolatrous coinage of the age, and have brought it into the sacred precincts. 

Their sheepish reply as they produce the coin shows they know they have been had, “It bears the Emperor’s image and his inscription.” 

Jesus replies, “Well then, if this coin belongs to Caesar, then give it back to him!”  And then he adds, slyly, “And what belongs to God, give to God.” 

Christians over the centuries have understood this saying in a variety of ways. They usually combine Jesus’ reply to Pontius Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world” (John18:36) with Paul’s urging his readers in Rome to “be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom 13:1) and argued that there are two separate realms, two separate spheres: God’s workings versus earthly political activity, the Church versus the State. This view became almost universal within Christianity after the Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion supported by force of law and arms.  Many argued that the state is an empire operating within a greater empire, God’s kingdom, and that Christian rulers gained their legitimacy from Church consecration.  They said this with straight faces, unwilling to notice the unedifying fact that it was the earthly rulers who usually dictated terms to the Church under the arrangement.

Look at the results of such an interpretation. The cross, previously a sign of Jesus’ passion, became fused in people’s minds with the Sword of Constantine, wielded under the phrase In Hoc Signo Vincis, “With this sign, conquer!”  IHS for "IHSUS, Jesus," became IHS "In hoc signo." Christians murdered Christians in riots and even wars over exquisitely fine points of Christology, and exiled whole communities to maintain doctrinal purity and unchallenged political power. In the East the leading churchmen became creatures controlled by a corrupt and oppressive Byzantine court.  In the West, The See of Rome, claiming an increasingly powerful role as monarchial ruler of the Western Church even as the power of the West’s earthly rulers declined, eventually became such a symbol for corruption, abuse of power, and oppression that some, like Henry VIII and Martin Luther, actively embraced the idea of the Church subservient to earthly leaders.   The low point was the prostitution of the Church in Germany—both Protestant and Roman—in support of the Third Reich.  The guy who wrote those words at the start of my homily initially supported Hitler because he was, after all the God-appointed leader of the nation, and because he persecuted people whom he had been taught to see as enemies of God.  But he soon found himself arrested when he put took issue with the Nazis turning the whole church into its own hateful creature.  The kingdom within a kingdom of the Constantinian settlement has become a Reich within a Reich! We see the same prostitution of the church today in our country in Christian Nationalism, held by some evangelicals as a biblical teaching (!) and the ideology behind the current administration’s “Project 2025.”

But this idea of two spheres is not what is intended in Jesus’ “render unto Caesar” saying. 

Pre-Constantinian Father Tertullian, in De Idololatria, points out that when Jesus says to give the coin with Caesar’s image back to Caesar, he adds “give back to God what is God’s.”  Tertullian asks, “What is it that has God’s image? Why, human beings, of course, since ‘God created human beings in his own image.’” 

 

In other words, it is not a question of two spheres, but one alone: God’s.  We—all that we are, all that we will become—are the coin that bears God’s image and which we must give back to God.  Caesar’s coin with its image, because it distracts from this real issue, is thus labeled idolatry. 

When Jesus says “What belongs to God” he probably has in mind a lot more than just us.  As Psalm 24:1 puts it: “The earth is the Lord's, and all that it in it; the world, and everything that lives.” The whole natural world belongs to God as well.   Jesus here rejects the idea of two spheres: for him, there’s only one.   
 
“Go ahead and give Tiberius that coin, since it plainly belongs to him. But there are bigger fish to fry—like how we pay back to God what is God’s!”  Don’t get worked up over paying taxes, whether out of an outraged sense of political insult (a loss of “liberty”) or morality (not committing “idolatry.”)   If you are already up to your neck deep in sewage, don’t suddenly get all sentimental about keeping your face clean.

 

Jesus knows that we are living in occupied territory.  Not just Romans occupying Palestine. The demonic Powers and Dominions, the evil systems that reign here, are what truly occupy God's good creation. And he says, do what you need to do to get by under such an occupation.  But don't let it fool you one bit. Use the coin, but don’t believe the propaganda on it.  

The problem is that money stands in for so many other things for us.  It objectifies value and worth, work, and honor.  “How much is that person worth?” we ask, oblivious to how we have reduced the person to mere possession of pieces of the economic pie.   “I have done right by her,” says the man about to be divorced for emotional abandonment, thinking only of the money he has sent her way over the years.   “Oh, he doesn’t work, then?” we ask about a stay-at-home father, just because his work isn’t quantified by measurable currency units.  The proverb says it all, "Money is Power." 

Jesus will have none of this.  

Talking about money and devotion to God elsewhere, Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters.  Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” (Matt 6:23-25).  

 
Money is not the only idol out there.  Political programs promising greatness or redemption, whether from the Right or the Left, have a way of standing in for other issues, just like money. And they can be as corrupted as money can be. What matters for Jesus is an open-hearted trust and devotion to God, and the acts of mercy and social justice that result from this.  Look at the person in front of you and treat them with respect, if not kindness. 

  
The world we live in is occupied territory.  That’s why it is so messed up.  We are all in Caesar’s game, and have to pay in Caesar's coin, play by Caesar's rules.  But as Jesus said after his arrest, "those who live by the sword die by it."  There is so much more at stake, a much more important game afoot. 

Give back to Caesar what is already his.  But give to God everything. 
 
In the name of Christ, Amen.