Taxes, devotion and an alternative vision for life
Mark 12:13-17
Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words.They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial taxto Caesar or not Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”
But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
And they were amazed at him.
This story in the Gospel of Mark is a classic entrapment attempt. Powerful people are trying to trick Jesus into saying something that will get him into trouble with one of two differing sides. In the first century there were anti-empire revolutionaries who said that the Jewish people should refuse to pay taxes to a pagan Emperor. If Jesus says “pay your taxes”, this could be seen as siding with the violent, oppressive and pagan empire over and above his own people. On the other hand, if he says they should refuse to pay taxes, he will be seen as an enemy of Rome who is setting himself up against Caesar.
He answers by getting them to name whose image is on the coin, and then saying “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, give to God what is God’s.” Instead of letting his opponents set the agenda and falling into their binary way of seeing the world, he essentially says “yes, sure, go ahead and pay your tax. But give to God what it is that bears God’s image; it is humans who bear the divine image so give to God your whole self.”
For those ruled over by the Roman Empire, your participation in the empire was about more than paying tax. The empire and the Emperor wanted your devotion, your allegiance, wanted your whole life to be defined by the empire’s way of seeing things. And yet here Jesus says sure, pay your taxes, but your devotion and allegiance lie elsewhere, they lie with God, and with God’s way of being, God’s vision of life, God’s desire for human flourishing and wholeness.
To give devotion and love to God and God’s way of being is not simply about passionate prayer or expressive worship (although they may be a part of how people express it). And to give ourselves fully to God is not to lose ourselves in some kind of emaciating self-sacrifice. Instead, it means to give our love, our loves, to those things that God loves. It is to embrace a way of life that is given fully over to kindness, love, grace, hospitality and all of the other virtues that lie at the heart of God’s kingdom.
In 2020 we don’t live ruled over by the Roman empire, and our circumstances are in stark contrast to the Jewish people of the first century. Yet there are still demands made of us by our contemporary society, stories of meaning that compete for our attention, visions of life that prioritise competition, division, jealousy, or self-centredness. We are constantly being asked, albeit subtly, to give our devotion, our love, our allegiance, to the economic and social priorities of the contemporary Western world. And yet here, in this short story of Jesus, we are given the chance to embrace a different story. Not one that negates everything about our contemporary world, but invites us to shape our lives by embracing God and all that God loves.
And when we embrace God, we come to embrace all of those who bear the image of God… including ourselves. To give ourselves fully to God isn’t to lose ourselves, but to resist the versions of life that are thrust upon us that say, “every person for themselves, climb the ladder, accumulate the stuff”… all the offers that are laid before us about what to pursue and what to love. And to embrace God in such a way that we actually embrace ourselves, one another, and all things in which God is present.
Michael Frost