There are certain public figures who, from time to time, I give a lot of my attention to. Their actions stir my rage. They have caused so much suffering and death it knocks the wind out of me to consider it. So, I consider it a lot. I indulge my rage. I’m grateful for the Psalmist with whom I can pray, God, I hate them with a perfect hatred (Psalm 139:22). And sometimes I will leave it there (and not go with the Psalmist to "Search me O God, and know my heart, see if there is any wickedness in me"), because I am not ready to move on with the Psalmist from the hating. When I feed that hate, when I pamper my anger, something starts to happen to me. Despair rises up and washes over me, bitterness takes hold. I begin to lose perspective. These individuals become more than human; they become an idol, an object to fear and despise, which is its own form of worship. Then meanness can set in, and I find it feels good to laugh at their misfortune and root for their demise, and it is these moments that I reach for social media, because there I can gorge myself on a feast of spite, offered up across the board, by people with whom I agree or disagree, it doesn’t matter, as long as we are hating or mocking the same thing.
Our scripture today, begins with two groups who barely tolerate each other, but who share a platform of mutual hate: the Pharisees, and Herodians. The Pharisees are religious scholars concerned about Israel living faithfully as the people of God, and the Herodians have cozied up to Rome to build wealth and maintain stability. Together they agree on little, but they are allied in their mutual alarm over Jesus. His words and actions jeopardize both their worlds equally. He is clearly a threat to be dealt with.
According to Matthew, this encounter with Jesus happens just a day or two after Jesus’s big Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem, where people hailed him as a king. Then he stormed through the temple turning over tables brazenly claiming that “his father’s house” was being desecrated, turned into a marketplace of predatory corruption forcing people to buy access to God. He takes a break to sleep and curse a fig tree, then he returns today to the temple for round two.
In the morning, he’s confronted by the chief priests, who demand to know his authority to say and do the things he’s saying and doing, and he asks them a question they can’t answer. They withdraw, humiliated, long enough for Jesus to drop several intense parables, one of which the leaders suspect is about them but are too afraid to ask, and ending on the winner we read last week about the wedding feast with the murdering and gnashing of teeth. That one felt especially dangerous, even if people couldn’t immediately figure out quite what it meant or who exactly it was threatening. Which brings us to this moment.
The Pharisees and Herodians are pros; they get how politics and power and influence work. Riled up and ready, they’ve conspired together to come up with the perfect catch-22 question to trap Jesus, a real lose-lose that cannot be answered without getting into trouble. Instead of his veiled criticism, calm confidence, and weird stories, Jesus will be forced into the fray. Once he picks a side, his credibility will be destroyed, his mystique undermined, and order will be restored back to how things are supposed to be around here.
The game is set. He’s in the crosshairs. So, they begin. First, they pour on the compliments – Jesus, you are so sincere, and so truthful, and you treat everyone the same, so how would you advise us in this terribly difficult question? Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?
But Jesus, seeing their malice… refuses to play along.
Give back to the empire the things that are the empire's – give back to God the things that are God's.
I want to pause here. It doesn’t say Jesus sees the high level gameplay, though surely, he does, or that Jesus sees their trap and gets ready to expertly sidestep it. It doesn’t say he sees the way to beat them and win. It says he sees their malice. He recognizes in them the burning desire to hurt someone, to tear someone down, to cause pain, injury or distress to another person. Jesus sees this, in their hearts, in their faces. Jesus sees right through them.
Malice is corrosive. Malice means I can make enemies out of people, turn them into objects of my scorn. I can overlook our shared humanity, cease to wonder what pain they bear, what fears they fight off, what in them is open or closed to love, cease to want the best for them and want only the worst. When fear curdles into hate, it becomes malice. When despair rots into disgust, and self-protection layers over vulnerability a callousness so thick that it blocks our humanity from others, and makes us not only uncaring, but cruel, that’s malice.
So, then, aware of their malice, Jesus calls them out and exposes the game. Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin you use to pay taxes. And then, right there in the temple, where they are not supposed to even have empire money but only temple coins, they hand to Jesus a coin stamped with the image of the emperor and words, son of a god. (specifically, "Tiberius, son of the divine Agustus").
Whose image is shown there? he asks them. That’s who this belongs to.
The image of the empire is stamped on nearly everything we touch. Indeed, there is no way to escape it – we are empire people, born into empire, and shaped by empire, our imaginations formed for empire pursuits and empire values, we’re fluent in empire language, and quite comfortable using the currency of the empire.
Empire is money, and economic systems of inequality that create obscene wealth and widespread poverty. But empire is also all the other more subtle ways we acquire, bestow, or take away people’s worth, relevance, or meaning. It is the cultural currency that compares and ranks us. Empire centers power instead of shared vulnerability. It prizes conquering instead of coming alongside. Empire determines how we live in time, hurried and anxious, and directs our attention and focus on consuming instead of sharing, it distracts us away from our neighbor and points us toward our own selves. It severs our ties to the earth and disregards our responsibility to the whole human community.
We even bring the empire, here, into the temple, which is to say, into the sacred space where God meets human beings as we are with and for each other in God’s presence. We let these moments of encounter be invaded by the empire whenever the empire mindset and methods creep in - comparing and condemning, deciding who is more less deserving of love or forgiveness, more or less worthy of God’s grace. When we paint people in power serving only themselves as irredeemable, or slander other Christians for their harmful words and actions, when we sit here thinking we are the exception to the belonging of God, If people really knew me, they would not love me. God is disappointed in me, we’ve let the empire into the temple. And when we let our deep longing for goodness, our God-shared sorrow about the evil and brokenness in the world fester, our heartbreak, anger and blame builds into malice, and we can stand in the presence of God incarnate and try to pull him into our game with a token of the empire in our outstretched hand.
Malice is a terrible thing. It corrodes our souls and societies.
What Jesus’s questioners do not understand when they try to trap Jesus is that Jesus was never playing their game. He was always exposing it. The loving, Almighty, I-am-with-you God came into death’s destructive game to break it open and free us for deeper, truer life with and for each other, claimed for life in God. Jesus is always peeling off the false to reveal the real.
Empires fall. Their monuments crumble and their coins become relics in the dust, excavated and displayed in museums for those who have the time and interest to look for a few moments before moving on with their lives. Houses built on sand wash away, the grass withers and the flower fades, the lies are lies, secrets and greed and fear-mongering and smokescreens cannot hold, all that is in the darkness will be exposed by the light, and nothing that seems strong and sure will survive. Give back to the empire what is the empire’s.
But we can’t get ourselves there. It’s hard to let it go. We’re too fluent in empire gameplay, too immersed to pull ourselves out. The Herodians cared about stability and order, maintaining a good society. The Pharisees cared about obedience to God, upholding the faith, maintaining a good soul. Yet, wanting a good society or a good soul apparently can’t save us from malice. When our projects or people feel threatened, even our highest longing for goodness can turn evil and we can wish harm on others and takes pleasure in their demise.
When I get caught in malice, what really happens to me is that I forget ‘the livingness of God.’ Without meaning to, I make God a background painting on the wall of the world’s drama, Inert, powerless, flat, like an etching stamped with a title that I can pull out and use when it suits me, or drop in my pocket and forget about. And I become trapped in something ugly and false, unable to see beauty, inaccessible to goodness, out of touch with truth.
I need saving. I need my wayward heart exposed by the light of the world; I need to be brought back from death into God’s love.
Jesus is aware of this. He sees our hearts. So, he teaches us to pray, as we do every week, Lead us not into temptation, butdeliver us from malice. This is the same word, ‘evil’, and ‘malice’. And if we’re going to get into it, the word deliver, means something like, free us for yourself, rescue us to and for you, God, out of evil, away from the temptation to wish harm upon one another, back to and for You. Pull us out of malice and claim us for yourself. Deliver us God and bring us into you.
Jesus is the light of the world – his very presence exposes love and illumines malice and burns away evil to fill us with love. The Eastern church teaches that heaven and hell are the same thing: God’s direct presence encountering us, as if bright, unwavering, all-exposing light. We may experience this as either all-encompassing love, infinite joy and permanent peace, or our hardened, protective hearts may thrash and wither in the intensity and brightness of God’s full presence, like a terrifying, tormenting fire.
Give back to God what is already God’s, Jesus says, standing before his questioners, shining his light into their darkness, seeing their hearts, and inviting them out of death’s game into freedom and life.
God is God, there is no one and nothing in all existence that is not subject to this God, that does not belong already to God. In Jesus Christ God inhabits the fullness of our humanity and brings us into the fullness of belonging to God and all others. The divine presence is here, in love, claiming all.
And when we gather together in worship, by God’s grace, we give back to God what is God’s. We confess we’ve brought the empire into the temple when we put away our cell phones; turning them off is temporarily giving back empire things to the empire. Then, turning our battered hearts toward our source, in vulnerability and honesty, we let the light of Christ illumine us. We sing praises to God who is God, we pray for this beloved world, asking for hope, and seeking healing, and expecting redemption, we bear each other’s burdens and share each other’s joy and as we worship alongside our siblings, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we give to God what is God’s.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can never extinguish it. Jesus sees into our hearts and calls us out, thanks be to God, and God doesn't leave us stranded there. The Spirit prays with and for us, so we can simply say, Lord, have mercy on us, have mercy on this world. And so with confidence and trust, we will pray again, Heavenly parent and creator of all, deliver us out of malice back to yourself. Amen.
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