THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD VERSE IN ALL OF SCRIPTURE

By L. Scott Smith, Ph.D., J.D.

Then the Pharisees went and took counsel how to entangle him in his talk.  And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are true, and teach the way of God truthfully, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men.  Tell us, then, what you think.  Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?"  But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why put me to the test, you hypocrites?  Show me the money for the tax."  And they brought him a coin.  And Jesus said to them, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?"  They said "Caesar's."  Then he said to them, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."  When they heard it, they marveled; and they left him and went away.  Matthew 22: 15-22

A mother was once attempting to teach her five-year old daughter the Lord's Prayer.  The little girl got most of it right.  But when she came to the part about temptation, in childlike fashion, with all the confidence in the world, she intoned, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some email." We might refer to this as a new twist on an ancient prayer.

This morning I also would like to seize upon the opportunity to offer a new interpretation of some old words, spoken by Jesus over 2000 years ago.  He stated, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."  These words comprise, in my opinion, the most misunderstood verse in all of Scripture.  I cannot think of a more appropriate time than the present – July 4, 2010 – for us to take a moment to consider them.

The Pharisees and Herodians formed a powerful contingent of the Jewish establishment in Jesus's time.  His teachings attacking the moral misguidedness and corruption of that establishment did not sit well with these sects.  So they set out to entrap him.  Few liked taxes then, just like few, if any of us, like them now.  The ancient Jews also loathed tax collectors, whom they regarded as extortionists.  We tend to regard IRS agents the same way.  So the Pharisees and Herodians colluded with each other to ask Jesus a trick question:  "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?"  To their thinking, Jesus would be doomed either way he answered.  If he responded "No, it is not lawful to pay taxes," he would instantly pose a threat to the Roman empire, would be branded a subversive and punished or even executed.  But, if he responded "Yes, it is lawful," he would, in the blink of an eye, lose credibility with the people he had been teaching.  He was, as one popular television pundit might say, between "Barack and a Hard Place." So Jesus asked to see a Roman coin, on which the likeness of Caesar (either Augustus or Tiberius) appeared.  Jesus asked, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?"  They of course responded "Caesar's."  Jesus then replied, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

There is no question that, in this encounter, Jesus escaped the horns of a threatening dilemma.  His reply was brilliant.  His adversaries backed off, because the burden of their question was thrust back upon their own shoulders.  Think about it:  if they argued with Jesus's answer, they would be the ones on the wrong side of either the emperor or the people. So they thought better of it and retreated.  Jesus's words amount to what  I call "forensic mastery" over perverse opponents. They wanted to create problems for him by throwing a sharp sickle in his direction, but he artfully dodged it, and it boomeranged with a fury in their own direction.  It served them right too.

There's a problem though.  When we closely scrutinize the content of Jesus's words, they turn out not to tell us much.  They are not substantive.  Perhaps there should have been a follow-up question: "What specifically belongs to Caesar, and what specifically belongs to God?"  Many scholars, you'd better believe, would like to know how Jesus would have fielded that one.  It is the same question, which in various forms, many of us Christians are asking ourselves today.  What is the government's authority, and what is God's?  Unless we know how to respond to this issue, Jesus's words simply beg the question he was asked, do they not?  Who knows, perhaps there are times when paying taxes to Caesar is wrong, like when they support the killing of innocent people.  Yet we all know how this verse is most often interpreted, do we not?  Religion and politics are supposed to be separated and boldly set apart from each other.  Right?

But, now, let me ask you:  Does the air that we breathe belong to the government or to God?  When that air is polluted or contaminated, is it only the government's concern?  The same is true of our national seashores.  When there is a catastrophic oil spill, which threatens the ecological balances of nature, and we strenuously attempt to mitigate the damages, are we doing the government's work or God's?

And what about the moral environment in which we live?  When a small child sees and hears things on prime-time television which, a generation ago, would have been labelled "pornographic," who's concern is that?  When a person can open his laptop computer and, in seconds, descend into the darkest, most vermin-infested corner of hell, is that a government concern, or a moral and theological one?

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg produced a miniseries about World War II in the Pacific islands.  It is entitled simply "The Pacific."  Maybe you've seen it.  The series piqued my interest, so I read the book on which it was largely based, Dr. Eugene B. Sledge's With the Old Breed.  It is a memoir of the author's heart-stopping experiences as a young Marine enlistee on Peliliu and Okinawa.  What Dr. Sledge describes is too ghastly to recount in a sermon, or perhaps anywhere else in polite company.  He underscores the way in which the war pushed good men to the depths of barbarism.  He describes how he saw many men break under the unrelenting pressure of combat.  The concussion of bomb blasts caused a significant number of men to detach mentally and emotionally from reality and never again return.  After reading his book, I began asking myself all over again, "Were the horrors of this war, (which is generally regarded by historians as a life and death struggle for Western civilization), approved by God, or condemned by Him?  When our very way of life as a people is at stake, when tyranny threatens the entire world, is that an issue for Caesar, or one for God?

I remember, as a boy, listening to two men discuss war.  One was a conscientious objector.  He had refused to take up arms against the Axis powers.  The man with whom he was speaking had been a Marine, and he believed conscientious objection was and is a cop out.  His words were, "Oh, I see, you did not fire a bullet to kill the enemy, but you helped to manufacture it so that I could kill him."  I saw, even as a child, that sometimes God's and Caesar's respective domains overlap into nasty conflict.

You can probably, by now, see where I am going with this.  Questions, such as those pertaining to the welfare of our culture, the survival of our civilization, the healthfulness of our physical environment, and the moral character of our society, invariably concern Caesar, but they also concern God.  The two realms do not exist in watertight compartments.

It is not unusual at this point for someone to ask me, "But don't you believe in the separation of church and state?  You don't think that religion and politics should be entangled, do you?  I mean the last time that we mixed religion and politics in this country, someone was burned at the stake, right?"

There is no doubt that religion and politics are both dangerous, and they can be incendiary, especially when brought into close proximity with each other.  For that reason, few of us want to see the church controlled by the state or the state controlled by the church.  But that's not really the issue here, is it?  The issue is whether our culture should be totally secular (or godless).  After all, didn't the great G. K. Chesterton once opine, "America is a nation with the soul of a church"?  I love that, but whatever happened to it?  Is it now passé?

Any absolute disconnection between religion and politics in this country is a recent phenomenon.  The so-called "wall of separation" between church and state is a metaphor that Thomas Jefferson made famous in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, soon after he assumed the United States presidency.  When the letter is closely examined, it appears that Jefferson never intended to bifurcate church and state at all.  He was using the "wall of separation" metaphor to assure the Baptists of Connecticut that the Constitution prohibited a national church, such as the one in England.  Jefferson was also taking a swipe at many New England clergymen, who he thought favored religious authoritarianism and had opposed him in the 1800 Presidential election.  Yet it is of interest that, only two days after he wrote the letter, Jefferson went to the House of Representatives to hear the Rev. John Leland, a Baptist clergy friend of his, preach. The third president participated in worship services on government property many times thereafter too.  Jefferson, in his Second Inaugural, even asked the American people to pray for him.  In addition, he believed that each of the individual states, if they desired, had a constitutional right to "establish" one or more religions at taxpayers' expense. Does any of this sound to you as if Thomas Jefferson favored a radical separation between religion and politics?  Not hardly.

Every President, from George Washington to the current occupant of the office, has publicly invoked God.  Abraham Lincoln once stated that every single political idea or thought he ever had was ultimately attributable to the Declaration of Independence, which refers to the Supreme Being four different times.  Theodore Roosevelt's campaign theme song was "Onward Christian Soldiers."  Franklin Roosevelt led the American people in a prayer on D-Day, a prayer which he himself composed.

Here's the point:  The idea that religious faith has been separate and distinct from American politics through the centuries is an outrageous lie.  The idea that religious belief should be separate and distinct from American politics is nothing but an attempt by those who despise traditional American culture to re-invent it.  Furthermore, the idea that religious belief can be separate and distinct from any nation's politics is naïve.  All nations are rooted in one or another faith.  Students of religion have often spoken, for example, of the religious fervor in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.  That is because faith is invariably interwoven into the fabric of a nation.  The question is never "whether faith?" but "which one?"

As Christians, our first priority in this country is to God.But God, let us remember, gave us liberty.  He gave us society with one another.  He gave us principles by which to govern our behavior.  The idea of God intersects with those of freedom, morality, and civil society, and they in turn connect with it.  Politics touches them all.  We Christians ignore political realities at the expense of turning our backs on God's will and purposes.  We have no choice but to be politically knowledgeable, responsible, and active.

Many people continue to make the argument that being a Christian has nothing to do with the political world around us.  Politics, for them, is irrelevant to Christendom.  Please don't look at me with a straight face and tell me that God does not care

·whether we expand the definition of marriage in American culture,

·whether we regard abortion as a means of birth control, even during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy,

·whether we sell marijuana over the counter,

·whether we pollute the physical environment in which we live,

·whether pornography pervades cyberspace and airwaves,

·whether the media are corrupt and untrustworthy,

·whether this country fights unjust and improvident wars, or

·whether we adopt an evenhanded policy in mitigating tensions in the volatile Middle East.

Of course God cares!  How could God love us and not care about what we do to His world and to others who occupy it with us?  Rendering to God means being accountable to Him in what and how we render to Caesar. 

It has never been acceptable for us Christians to commit wrongful acts simply because our government endorses them. Those whose profiles continue to loom larger than life in our minds are men who stood up against the political powers of their time, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Mohandas Gandhi.  And isn't it interesting that Socrates was executed as an enemy of the state?  So were Peter and Paul.  So were Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch.

The message this morning may shock you and make you uneasy.  "Politics and religion informing each other and walking hand in hand?" you ask.  Well, they do, and they always have.  This country's relationship with England in colonial times, the slavery controversy, the two world wars, the great depression, and the civil rights movement were all political fodder for Christian interpretation and action.  Now perhaps, more than ever before in our history as a people, we Christians must face up to our grave political responsibilities.

Like those who preceded us in other ages and generations, we too must stand up and walk courageously, listening for God's voice to lead us as His soldiers through the troubling times in which we live.  There is a King above Caesar to whom we owe ultimate allegiance, and He is the One in whom we live, move, and have our being.  It is wrong to render to Caesar at God's expense.  May God's name be forever praised and glorified!  Amen.