Today's gospel story is one of the better known among Christians, the encounter between Jesus and his detractors, Pharisees and Herodians. Jesus accuses them, quite rightly, of hypocrisy. That term comes from the Greek for wearing a mask. A hypocrite is a person who masks the true self in favour of an illusion one wants to project. What you see is not what you get. The Pharisees and the fellow-travellers in that time played the role of men who learned from God, but in reality they pushed a rigid puritanical view of God and Scripture, not unlike today's fundamentalist Christians. They talked a lot but they did not learn; they heard a lot but they didn't listen. Jesus attacks their fundamentalism and easy answers, and they hate him for it.
In today's scene (found in Matthew 22: 15-22) they first highly compliment Jesus for his commitment to truth and impartiality, as if they were fans, then they hit him with another one of those catch-22 questions that are impossible to answer. The question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor? If Jesus says yes, he sides with the hostile occupier of Jewish land and will lose his audience. If he says no, the Pharisees will whistle for a cop, Jesus will get cuffed and stuffed, and he won't be out loose preaching anymore.
Before going on with the story, let me insert one relevant fact. There were two kinds of money then in circulation in Palestine: the regular coins bearing the effigy and title of Caesar, as well as special coins for observant Jews, coins which did not bear any graven image of a person, let alone Caesar Tiberias who claimed to be God. For an observant Jew to touch or spend a regular Roman coin would be a fundamental violation of Judaism by using of a graven image.
In reply to the question from the religious establishment, Jesus tells them to give him a coin. The coin he is given is the regular Roman coin. Bingo: Jesus' enemies have just demonstrated that they are not observant Jews, they use the profane money! And we should not be surprised, because everything that coin stands for -- imperialism, militarism, wealth, power and influence -- are values the Pharisees and cronies accomodate, but they are not God's values -- equality, peace, justice, fair sharing, and service. Jesus calls us to action in building the Kingdom of God. The detractors are all about promoting false values.
Jesus looks at the hated coin, asks whose image it is, and is told it is the image of the Emperor. Then, Jesus wins the day, saying this thing must belong to the Emperor, so give it back to him!
There are lessons here for us. Mostly simply, it is ok to pay taxes. Abraham Lincoln said that government is needed to do for the People what they cannot do for themselves, or not so well. Examples would be social security and medicare, which are now being threatened. The more important lesson can be derived from the Pharisees' slip-up with the coin. The values of the Roman Empire are stamped on the hearts of the collaborators as surely as the image of the Emperor is stamped on the coin they use. We might ask ourselves today whether those same false values are stamped into our hearts as citizens of the American Empire when instead our task as Christians is not to "go along to get along" like Pharisees but to be more and more conformed to the image of Jesus who show us the human face of God and refuses to compromise with the world's false values.
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