“Are you official or one of us,” Mrs. Smith asked pointedly.1 They were upright and honest people in Colville County, and they didn’t think people ought to “get above themselves.” They also had a tradition of holding their elected officials to strict account, especially where money was concerned. Rumor had gotten around that last year one of their county commissioners had claimed commission expenses for attending the county Fourth of July parade. It felt to the plain people of Colville that not only had the commissioner gotten “above himself,” but that he had wrongly taken county funds. Now the organizer of the parade wasn’t particularly politically astute. He was about to shake the commissioner’s hand at this year’s Fourth of July parade, when a group began to gather around the commissioner. Mrs. Smith, a well-known leader of the local senior citizens, asked, “Are you here on official business?” “I’m here for the parade,” the commissioner answered. “Oh right, we’re all here for the parade. But are you official or one of us?” “I represent the Board of Commissioners,” the bewildered commissioner answered. “Of course you do. But are you getting paid to be here, like you were last year?” The commissioner began to perspire. “Well, yes,” he said, “but it’s the system.” As the people around Mrs. Smith began to murmur, the commissioner imagined the headlines in the next day’s newspapers: “Riot at Fourth Parade,” “Senior Citizen Arrested for Assaulting Commissioner.” But the commissioner was a wily politician. How else would he have gotten elected? So he played his trump card. ‘But, you see, this year I’m giving my expenses for today to the VFW – and last year’s expenses as well. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?” So far, so good. “To the VFW,” Mrs. Smith asked. “Yes, to the VFW, if that’s best, if they can use the funds,” the commissioner replied. The people around him nodded to each other and began to disperse. The relieved commissioner was led to the parade viewing stand. A few weeks later, the local VFW leader got a check in the mail from the commissioner. Whether it was the full amount of the commissioner’s expenses for the two years he didn’t know, but he did make sure that Mrs. Smith was the first to hear about it.
A wily politician nimbly eluding a trap. Perhaps the Colville County commissioner had read his Bible. He certainly could have taken a lesson from Jesus. In both today’s Gospel reading and the reading for next week, the Pharisees plainly wanted to trap Jesus into incriminating himself. They posed the question about paying an especially onerous tax that went straight to the emperor. Clearly, neither obvious answer to their question was acceptable. It wasn’t that the people didn’t already pay many taxes – in the currency of their Roman occupiers. But this one was particularly hated. If Jesus had answered directly that it was O.K. to pay the tax he would have alienated his own followers. And if he had answered that it was not lawful for observant Jews to pay the tax, he would have risked reprisal from the Roman authorities. So like our wily county commissioner, he first flung a question back at his questioners: “Why are you putting me to the test?” Then making them produce the Roman coin and observe its face, he gave the most enigmatic answer possible to their question: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
His answer has haunted us ever since. What is Caesar’s? What is God’s? If we give to Caesar what has Caesar’s image on it, and we give to God what has God’s image on it, then what belongs to God? Everything! We are made in God’s image, and, ultimately everything we are, and everything we have belongs to God: all our resources, all our time, all our personal talents and gifts. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.” How, when, and what to give back to God is a question that every serious Christian must answer.
Yet this reading poses to us an even more difficult and ultimately more important question: how are we like the religious leaders who have been questioning Jesus’ identity and authority. Their questioning of Jesus, their disbelief, and their attempts to entrap Jesus have been running motifs throughout the entire latter part of Matthew’s Gospel, so that at the end the Cross seems inevitable. Ironically, the challenges to Jesus’ identity and authority did not stop with the Cross or the Resurrection. In its earliest centuries, the church was beset by heresies in which various thinkers tried to deny in different ways that Jesus was the Word made flesh. Indeed, the Nicene Creed is a distillation of the responses to those heresies and was composed with the hope that the question of Jesus’ identity would be settled for good. The medieval church, with its idolization of the Latin language, controlled people’s access to Scripture, almost usurping the authority of Jesus himself. In our own era, many modern thinkers have dismissed Scripture, God, and Jesus as irrelevant and unnecessary, hypotheses of which we have no need.
Are we anything like the religious leaders in the Gospel reading who challenge Jesus’ identity and authority? Perhaps we identify Jesus with a particular social position. “What would Jesus do?” was a popular question a few years back. Perhaps you are certain of what Jesus’ views would be on abortion, sexuality, divorce, market capitalism, the United Nations, Medicaid, or a host of other social issues. Conversely, perhaps you believe that Jesus has no authority over your social and political choices. We believe in the separation of religious institutions and government: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." But does that separation mean that our faith has no impact on how we carry out our lives in society? Does it mean that Jesus has no authority over us?
Ultimately, the question we are dealing with here is how do we obey God? What does God expect from us? And the answer is simple: God expects of us nothing less than obedience to God’s Word. Eight centuries before Jesus the prophet Micah suggested an answer to that question: “Listen here, mortal: God has already made abundantly clear … what God needs from you: simply do justice, love kindness, and humbly walk with your God.” Jesus knew the prophetic writings well, and in his own life he fulfilled their message. In his self-giving and his self-sacrifice, in his death on the Cross, Jesus models for us the complete obedience, the giving of all we are, that God expects of us as well. And more to the point, just as Jesus challenged the religious leaders who questioned his identity and authority, so he challenges us: to examine our lives and to frame them according to God’s expectations. Can we look at our spiritual lives? Is there more to our relationship with Jesus than Sunday worship, nourishing as that might be? How about our use of our resources? Are we returning to God anything of what God has given us? Is our giving of our resources of treasure, time, and talent intentional and proportional to what we have? How about our action on social issues? Do we pray about our choices both in and out of the voting booth? Do we ignore the needs of those around us or elsewhere in the world, or do we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us into the causes where our prayerful participation might help to further God’s kingdom? And is our obedience to God grudging or grateful? Do we lovingly present to God “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice” to God?
Obeying God, measuring up to God’s expectations, modeling ourselves on Jesus, giving ourselves to God, all of this is difficult, so difficult that we all fail. Limited human beings, sinners, that we all are, all of us challenge Jesus’ authority over us, and none of us can give to God all that is God’s. All of us are disobedient, idolatrous, and weak. Yet, my sisters and brothers, the good news is that even when we are disobedient, even when we give God less than God’s due, even when we are unsure of who Jesus is and how our faith in him should make a difference in our lives, God still loves us. All of today’s texts remind us that God remains good, and gracious to us, and ever present. God is the one who never forgets our names, our addresses, or our needs. God is the one who is always ready to answer our call. When we ask that those who seek God or a deeper knowledge of God will find and be found by God, we can be sure that that prayer will be answered. Thanks be to God, always!
1. The following story is adapted from “Reds Under the Beds,” by Tom Gordon, in Welcoming Each Wonder (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2010), 270-73.
No comments:
Post a Comment