We live in a very questioning culture; a culture in which the wrong kind of questioning is becoming more and more common. You’ll have heard examples of the wrong kind of questioning on Radio & TV news and current affairs programmes, from journalists whose aim is to catch politicians out by, for example, repeatedly asking them for some statistical detail which they haven’t committed to memory.
The wrong kind of questioning is the kind that we find in today’s Gospel – a trick question designed to catch Jesus out.
Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not?
If Jesus replied that it wasn’t lawful to pay Roman taxes, he would be in serious trouble with the Roman authorities. If he said that it was lawful to pay the taxes, then he would disappoint a lot of people who thought that he was the Messiah and hoped that the Messiah would liberate them from Roman rule.
The trick question misfired badly. Jesus asked them to produce a Roman coin, a coin which they shouldn’t have brought into the Temple. The coin had images of the Emperor Tiberius on one side and of his mother Livia on the other, and graven images are forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Jesus then asked them about the inscription, knowing perfectly well that for him and for them, the inscription was blasphemous. On the coin Tiberius was described as “Son of the Divine Augustus” – in other words, the son of a god. And the first of the Ten Commandments says:
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
Having sidestepped the trap and embarrassed those who had posed the question, Jesus then said something important.
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Or, in the well-known words of the King James Bible
“Render unto Caesar…”
And down the centuries, Christians had wrestled with what that means. What is the right relationship between a Christian and a government which may be very far from Christian in its principles and policies? This was a problem with which Jewish believers had faced when they were forced into exile in Babylon, and Jesus would have been very familiar with the advice that the prophet Jeremiah gave them:
“…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
That advice was not uncritical endorsement of the government of Babylon, any more than Jesus was offering an uncritical endorsement of the emperor Tiberius. And if you watched the recent repeat of the BBC series I Claudius you will know what a brutal and immoral man he was. Rather Jesus was pointing to the possibility of seeking the common good.
In a democracy that is easy. We enjoy extensive freedoms including regular opportunities to choose who governs us, but that places us in a privileged minority. For some Christians in Hitler’s Germany or in Stalin’s Russia, seeking the common good involved opposition to the government leading to imprisonment or death. Today many people live in oppressive regimes, where voting can change little and minorities face persecution. Think of Muslims in India or Christians in Iran and Pakistan. In situations such as those, seeking the welfare of the city may well involve risky and sacrificial opposition. A Chinese citizen who questioned his government’s human rights record would place himself or herself in jeopardy.
What we are called to render to Caesar isn’t unquestioning obedience. Today’s Gospel challenges us to think about how the freedom to question which we enjoy, and which many do not, should best be used in our political life. It shouldn’t be about entrapment or humiliation.
The great 20th century spiritual writer Thomas Merton wrote that:
“Love knows no question. It is the ground of all, and questions arise only insofar as we are divided, absent, estranged, alienated from that ground.”
In a fallen and divided world, it remains both possible and necessary to question in a constructive way. Our questioning should be sincere, arising from a genuine desire for truth and not from the wish to score a point. The best questioning is a prelude to listening; listening to those whose views and policies we find uncongenial or challenging; listening not only to the powerful but to those whose voices are drowned out by the powerful. That kind of questioning, that kind of listening, acknowledges our common humanity as children of God and acknowledges the call to love our neighbour which arises from that. By questioning in that way, we can both render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.