This Week: Proper 24A
Gospel: Matthew 22:15-22
I’ve always bristled at the popular reading of this passage. I’ve seen it referenced everywhere, from churches to congress, as a way of describing the necessary separation of church and state. Even as a teenager, this response seemed too easy.
Perhaps what disturbed me most was just how synchronous people make this with the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That a Palestinian Jew in First Century Jerusalem would be creating an eternal human ideal…of the separation of church and state…
Doesn’t that sound a bit off to everyone?
Way to make it about us.
Here they are, in Jerusalem, and the Temple leaders and Pharisees are getting some disciples to try and trick Jesus so they can literally kill him for heresy. And we’re like “See! Keep ‘em separate!”
Um…no. Let’s all call BS on that one right out of the gate.
Because I think this is the fatal flaw that leads to a gross misrepresentation of the story. And worse, reduces Jesus’s work toward what really sounds more like a post-statist world to a patriotic zeal for our particular nationstate.
This rendering of Jesus’s teaching at the Temple is a complete distortion. Even if it is one that seems so potentially true.
Context, as always, is king.
The story (which is clearly not an attempt to separate church from state) is a story of entrapment. Precisely the leaders’ desire to entrap Jesus. This is no small part of the story. Nor is it window-dressing.
It’s the central element.
Just as much as Jesus’s attempt to encourage the leaders to see how their governance of the Temple isn’t faithful to God. If anything, they are faithful to the nation over God.
Much like modern stories which paint one group as aggressor and another as aggrieved, the simple act of flipping the story reveals much that we too wish to obscure.
In short, the critique Jesus offers could be precisely the way religious people don’t follow God in the Halls of Power. Which renders the popular reading as the opposite of one of Jesus’s possible intentions.
When church and state align…
Make no mistake, however, that Jesus is not endorsing a theocracy. In a certain way of reading it, they already had one and he didn’t like it.
But let us instead recognize the fundamental problem with the whole language of church and state — separate and united. As always, created as binaries and extremes. And also, not respectful of actual history or the purpose Jesus is speaking to.
Rather than hear what Jesus is actually talking about: that the Kin-dom of Heaven is to be the way of things—a vision anathema to the kingdoms of earth: we shove it all into the buckets that make sense to us.
Jesus is talking about an entirely other way of being. He’s not talking about religion. Or the church. This isn’t about institutions or holy orders or sacraments. This isn’t “church”.
And when Jesus critiques the kingdoms of earth, he is critiquing our priorities, practices, way of ordering ourselves. Everything! This isn’t just nation states (though I think he’s not keen on the idea in the end). Abuse, power, ownership, control. Imperialism. Warmaking. Border protection. Everything we seem to care about.
Jesus isn’t talking about putting priests in charge of our world — to do the same thing kings do.
He’s talking about a love revolution.
This is way more than taxes.
Sorry, Libertarians, billionaires, and real estate developers. This isn’t an excuse to avoid paying taxes.
And also…
Sorry, neoconservatives and evangelicals. This isn’t a justification for paying taxes as a limited responsibility to the state so that the real work can be done by churches.
The love revolution requires a supremacy of God that renders the question of taxes moot. Not because churches are better at distributing resources than governments (they aren’t, actually—and definitely not at scale).
Because Jesus isn’t talking about churches or nations. He isn’t talking about federal taxes to a democratic republic. And he certainly isn’t talking about any ordering of the world which allows a single person to starve to death.
We are allowing ourselves to be trapped by the material of our world. When Jesus is showing how the leaders in 30 CE were trapped in the exact same way.
This isn’t really about taxes. It’s about the Kin-dom. And making that real.
And when we start addressing that reality, how often do we become like the Temple leaders? Stuck in our own box and condemning all attempts to tear those walls down?