The confrontation in today's Gospel reading has high stakes - indeed, life and death. The religious leaders are seeking to destroy Jesus with a single question. To understand their trap, we need to recall the political situation at the time of Jesus. The people of Israel had been under foreign occupation for the better part of six hundred years. The Assyrians, the Babylonian, the Persians, and the Greeks had all controlled the land to various degrees, for various lengths of time. During the earthly life of Jesus, the Roman Empire was in charge.
The Romans ruled a vast territory and were ruthless in extracting resources from the many nations they had conquered. The taxes they raised were taken to their centers of power, where the Roman aristocracy burned through the wealth with their ostentatious, profligate, and debauched lifestyle. For the Israelites, who yearned for deliverance from foreign oppression, the Roman taxes were an ongoing reminder of their subjugation.
Just like last Sunday's passage, the confrontation about taxes is also a part of a larger narrative arc in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus has entered Jerusalem in triumph. He has cleansed the Temple, and now he is teaching before the Temple, instructing the crowds who have gathered in the city for the Passover celebration.
The atmosphere is tense and highly charged, because the Passover was the commemoration of the liberation of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, but now the feast has to be held while under Roman occupation. What is more, Old Testament prophecies were pointing toward the time period we now know as the first century AD as the era of the coming of the Messiah. As a result, a sense of eager expectation for the imminent arrival of the liberator was in the air. The Roman authorities were well aware of these sentiments. For the most part, the Roman soldiers did not know Aramaic, the common language of the Israelites at the time, but they knew one word for sure, the Aramaic for Messiah.
Knowing that the city might go up like a tinderbox during the Passover celebrations, the Romans reinforced their garrison with sufficient numbers to subdue any unrest or uprising. As a participant in a class I taught some years ago put it, the Roman idea of crowd control was to eliminate the crowd. Modern riot police tend to use water cannon and tear gas. The Romans, by contrast, simply slaughtered everyone.
All this formed the backdrop to the scene in the Gospel passage for this Sunday. As Jesus is teaching in the Temple area, the religious leaders, most of whom oppose his message, take turns at challenging him. In this passage, the Pharisees have designed an ingenious trap. They ask him if it is lawful, according to the Mosaic Law, to pay taxes to the Roman Emperor. The question is insidious, because no matter what Jesus answers, he will be defeated - or so the Pharisees think.
If Jesus were to say that the Israelites may not pay taxes to Rome, his opponents can immediately report him to the soldiers standing guard throughout the city. He will be arrested, tried as a rebel, and executed. But if he were to say that the Israelites may pay the Roman taxes, then the crowds will be immediately convinced that he is not the Messiah, since instead of liberating the people, he would be endorsing their bondage. At best, the crowds would just reject him and chase him away. But more likely, the angry crowds would stone him to death.
Jesus seems to be in an impossible situation. But instead of answering directly, he asks his opponents to show him one of the Roman coins. By doing so, he turns the tables in the interaction. The Roman coins bore images of pagan religious figures revered or worshipped by the Romans. Therefore, even possessing such an image meant cooperating, at least to some extent, with the false religion of the oppressive Roman Empire. Thus the Pharisees, who prided themselves on the strictest observance of the Mosaic Law, show their hypocrisy by having such coins on their person. When Jesus tells them to give to Caesar what is Caesar's, they cannot argue with him. They cannot defend holding on to such blasphemous coins. The Pharisees have to retreat from the exchange humiliated.
But the question arises as to how the passage applies to our lives today. What does it mean that we are to "repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar" (Matthew 22:21)? The teaching of the Catholic Church regarding three concepts is especially relevant here. One is the question of patriotism. The Church has always held that patriotism is a virtue. We are to love, respect, and honor our country, whether the country of our birth or a new home. People like myself who have moved from the land of their birth to a new country have an obligation to be patriotic toward their new home. This concept was especially brought home to me this past 4th of July. My wife and I had taken the light rail in to Seattle for the day. On our way back, we were in the train just as the 4th of July celebrations in Downtown Bellevue had ended. Suddenly, the train was full of people coming back from the event. Given the languages spoken, most of the people on the train were probably not born in the US, yet they had just spent the evening celebrating our country's 250th anniversary. That is consistent with the vision of the Church.
The second concept is obedience to legitimate laws. Catholic scholars, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, have written long treatises on what makes laws legitimate, but we have no room for an exhaustive exploration of the subject here. Suffice it to say that for laws to be legitimate, they need to be grounded in God's divine law and need to be promulgated by a legitimate political authority. As Catholics, we are to be law-abiding citizens, obeying all the laws pertaining to us, except for cases when human law contradicts divine law.
Which brings us to the third concept, the social kingship of Christ. Historically, the Church has taught that Christ is not just King of the world to come, but he is to be King of society here and now. As Catholics, it is our task to bring society into harmony with the kingship of Christ, whether it comes to laws, business practices, cultural achievements, entertainment, or anything else. We cannot be privately Catholic, while conforming to structures and practices contrary to Christ in our public life. If anything in society contradicts Christ, we must resist.
For example, when the State of Washington wanted to pass a law to force priests to violate the seal of the Confessional, the Catholic Church opposed the bill in no uncertain terms. The priests of Washington State were ready to go to jail rather than comply with this law. We too might be faced with similar choices. In all cases, Christ comes before everything, before every other love, allegiance, or obligations.
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The readings for Twenty-nineth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A are:
Isaiah 45:1, 4-6
Psalm 96:1, 3, 4-5, 7-8, 9-10
1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b
Matthew 22:15-21
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Image Credit: Roman bronze coins found in Novae, Bulgaria, from Wikimedia Commons.
