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.
