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Moses’s Intercession
12 Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ 13 Now if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that this nation is your people.” 14 He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” 15 And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.”
17 The Lord said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” 18 Moses[a] said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord,’[b] and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” 21 And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”
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The Question about Paying Taxes
15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. 16 So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality. 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” 21 They answered, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” 22 When they heard this, they were amazed, and they left him and went away.
You can probably picture this scene pretty easily, especially if you’ve been following the midterm elections. Jesus is telling stories, trying to explain to people what the Beloved Community of God is—and isn’t—like. He’s sharing his ideas about what the world might look like, how things could change, what a radically different socio-economic system could look like. Then, along come these staffers from other campaigns, posing as constituents. They even come from multiple competing campaigns. There were the Herodians, who supported the Roman- approved client king of the region, and there were the disciples of the Pharisees, who supported the religious establishment and generally weren’t happy being occupied by Rome. These two parties came together over a single issue: they wanted Jesus out of the picture. And so they asked him a question that could only result in an answer that would upset either the Pharisees, the Herodians, or both. Should we, as Jews living under Roman occupation, pay the taxes demanded of us by the emperor? It’s the perfect setup, a real catch-22, if you’re into that kind of thing. But there goes Jesus, once again stunning the opponents with an answer that doesn’t really seem like an answer, and is jam-packed with sub-text. It’s not exactly the kind of non-answer that you might expect from a swing state candidate trying to court a wide audience. As it turns out, it’s a pretty big can of theological worms that Jesus’ challengers don’t seem to want to get into. But that’s ok, we’ll get into it.
The question of whether it is lawful, or moral, for followers of Jesus to pay taxes has been asked in Christian communities since there have been Christian communities. There is debate in scripture about whether to pay taxes or how much to pay. Just as many early Christians refused to serve in the Roman military, the payment of taxes was seen as an acknowledgement of the power of the emperor and a submission to that early power rather than to God. Not all communities saw eye to eye on these issues and, especially once Christianity became the state religion across much of Europe, it absolutely became the norm for Christians to pay taxes to the authorities. After all, if the king was crowned by God, how could paying taxes be seen as an embrace of Caesar instead of God? There were, of course, Christian communities that continued to reject the idea of paying tribute to earthly rulers, especially when they were over-taxed. But being a tax-paying Christian became the mainstream, and has remained that way in most of the world ever since. Much more recently, this debate over taxes was hashed out in the “Peace Churches,” a group of churches including the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren, and the Mennonites, who are staunch pacifists and have long rejected military service in combat roles. During the Vietnam War, the Mennonites were particularly vocal about their objections to supporting the war. Halfway through the war, the Mennonites calculated that taxes from their members had contributed over $111 million to the Vietnam War alone. Today, about thirteen percent of the federal government’s $7.4 trillion budget goes to defense spending.
Should this still be a question today? After all, Jesus seems to settle the debate by creating two distinct categories of possession and obligation—give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s. But, this response doesn’t really settle the debate, because it forces us to ask “what is Caesar’s” and “what is God’s?” I would argue that Jesus doesn’t settle anything, but invites us to consider these questions. As biblical scholars Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler put it, “if one believes Caesar is due taxes, then pay; if one believes everything belongs to God, then do not pay.” This is the dichotomy that Jesus sets up for those asking the question. Perhaps it is less of a directive and more of a metric for where our money should go. It’s less of a doctrinal statement and more of a reflection on how we live out the values we profess. Who does our money belong to? Are we responsible for the ways in which our money is spent? These were certainly important questions to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. He was always talking about money! How we earn it, how we spend it, the obligations of those who have money to those who don’t have money. We had our inaugural meeting of the newly-formed Class Meeting up in Webster this week. As I was going over some of the materials that were used in Class Meetings back in Wesley’s day, I found a list of questions that members were supposed to ask one another, one of which was “do you pray before spending money?” It shouldn’t be groundbreaking to say that we ought to be intentional about how we spend money. At the center of that intention, though, has to be this question: who, ultimately, does my money belong to?
Throughout this season in particular, the Church tends to throw the word “stewardship” around quite a bit. We’ve been doing this for so long that we often only use the word “stewardship” when discussing pledging and the sharing of financial gifts. “Stewardship,” though, is not simply a euphemism for fundraising. Rather, it’s a theological argument that the resources we have—inclduing our skills, our knowledge, our time, our money, and our bodies—are ultimately God’s. To refer to ourselves as stewards is to claim that we are simply shepherding the gifts that God has given to us for a time. When we live out this stewardship, our very lives become offerings, not only to God but to one another. When we covenant to share the gifts that God has given to us, we are sharing the task of stewardship with one another. We are discerning, together, where our resources ought to go. We are being called to consider where our gifts can do the most good and the least harm. If we take the example of the first church in Acts 2, where all things are held in common and everyone receives what they need, that can be our model of stewardship, of acknowledging that all that we have comes from God.
I’m not telling you all to not pay your taxes. I am saying that how we spend our money—as individuals, as a community, as a nation—matters. Are we praying before we spend money? Are we asking ourselves who our resources belong to? Are we treating our resources of all kinds as though they are, ultimately, God’s? Budgets are moral documents, whether they be household budgets, church budgets, or government budgets. Where our money goes matters. So pray. Ask questions of yourself and others. Advocate for better ways to spend money at an institutional level. Our gifts ought to serve God, not we our gifts. This is the call of the Beloved Community: to build a world in which gifts are shared so freely that all things are held in common. May we live into this sharing, however we can. May we remember that we are stewards, not owners. And may we remember that God’s face, the imago dei, is borne in each of us. So, may we offer our very lives to the one who created and creates us anew. Amen.