Today’s gospel: Matthew 22:15-22

This is one of my favorite moments for Jesus. He has just been hammering at the Jewish leadership and attacking the relationship between the religious leaders and the empire. He chased the moneychangers and now they have all had enough. They’re coming to get him. So they bring a trap. A trap that seems to be about how we accommodate empire.

We shouldn’t blame them, really. Jesus seems to be on his way to screw this whole thing up for everybody. His prophetic voice could make the emperor angry, enough to put the whole lot in trouble.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe this passage in their book The Last Week (actually the parallel text in Mark) as depicting something much more profound. Jesus tells a visual parable by inviting that very leadership that seems intent on trapping him to demonstrate their hypocrisy visually by revealing a coin they should not have on them.

I wonder if it is our own linguistic bias, our own preference for theological adherence to words used in precise patterns we name as orthodoxy, and our own reference to Christ as The Word that makes us so entranced with what Jesus says and so indifferent to His actions. It clearly reveals our intellectual bias as well as our educational bias–obsessed as we are with words and speech and definitions and memorization. And yet, Jesus, in a short exchange shows us

You try to trap me with deference to human authority, but you yourself have no standing!

Of course, his argument points out that it is all about authority and that God is the authority; that we own nothing while God owns everything. And that is what is hard for us to deal with in this gospel: that our stuff isn’t really ours and the powers of the world really have no power. Therefore we have compromised ourselves, not through sin or compromise to culture in the abstract, but to humans that claim power over us. We allow the wealthy to rule and determine what is good.

Question
As we ask ourselves how best to balance our faithfulness with culture, doesn’t Jesus remind us that we are making the same mistake as the Pharisees? So how can we make the world around us more reflect that faithfulness?