Whose World?
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
October 19, 2008
Karen Armstrong, in her book The Great Transformation, tells this story about how Siddhatta Gotama became the Buddha, the enlightened one:
When he was born, [Siddhatta Gotama’s] father invited some Brahmins to examine the baby and tell his fortune. One of them predicted that Gotama would see four disturbing sights that would convince him to become a renouncer and discover a new spiritual truth. Gotama’s father had more worldly ambitions for his son [– he wished him to become the next king of his realm –] so to shield him from these painful spectacles he posted guards around the palace to keep all distressing reality at bay. Thus, even though he lived in carefree luxury, the boy was a virtual prisoner. Gotama’s pleasure palace is a striking image of a mind in denial. As long as we persist in closing our hearts to the sorrow that surrounds us on all sides, we remain incapable of growth and insight. But when Gotama was twenty-nine years old, the gods, who needed the Buddha’s dhamma [or teachings] as much as human beings, decided to intervene. They sent four of their number past the guards, disguised as an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a renouncer. Gotama was so shocked by these images of pain that he put on his yellow robe and left home that very night. Once the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition has broken through the cautionary barricades that we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again. Gotama had allowed the knowledge of duddka [or suffering] to invade his life, and his quest could begin.[1]
We see from this story how Gotama, the Buddha, came to understand that “We Are All One,” as the story in our Time for All Ages taught. It was from seeing contradictions to his protected life in his father’s palace – sickness, poverty and death invading a place of privilege, pleasure and power – that the Buddha came to ask his questions: Why is there suffering in the world? And How may it be cured?
The Jesus story from our reading this morning raises what seems at first glance to be a very different sort of question. Jesus is nearing the end of his life on his visit to Jerusalem, and this incident of the coin is one of a number of challenges that his religious and political opponents throw at him. The question about whether people in occupied Jerusalem should pay taxes to Caesar is not the real inquiry of curious minds. On the contrary, it is a trick question whose purpose is to get Jesus to commit himself to one side or another of one of the most controversial political and religious questions of the day.
If you have ever been a teacher of children in any context, if you have been a parent or grandparent or been around kids at all, you’ve almost certainly had questions like this. A child tells you that so and so has said such and such and you obviously must agree with them. Or another teacher or the principle agrees with them that your policy of correcting spelling on history papers is unjust because it is not, after all, English class. And why must they add and subtract in Social Studies? That’s what is done in another class. And “Haven’t you ever?” and “Why can’t we?” and on and on and on. Or you may be familiar with questions raised on the campaign trail, sometimes in ads and sometimes in person: Why do you want to raise my taxes? Why can’t we all have good health care? Why do we have to pay income taxes in this state?
The question asked of Jesus on this occasion has a special bite, because Jerusalem and all of Judea were under the heel of the Roman Empire. As the reading we did earlier from William Herzog put it,
The conquered domains of agrarian empires belong to the rulers who can dispose of them as they choose. The payment of tribute is the basic recognition of this right…. [T]he questions of tribute struck at the heart of the legitimacy of the Roman Empire's most essential function. The question of tribute was a clandestine referendum on Rome's right to occupy Judea….[2]
The question of whether to pay taxes as tribute to Caesar, as we all recognize, was not really a naïve request for wisdom from curious minds who want to know what a wise teacher has to offer them on the topic – it was a clever political ploy which was designed to force Jesus to side with one part of public opinion or the other. If he replied that the taxes should be paid, he would cause outrage among those who believed that Jerusalem was the holy city of God and the Jewish people, and who believed therefore that Caesar must be resisted in whatever ways might be possible, whether actively or passively. On the other hand, if he took their side openly, the rulers of the land would be quick to still his voice for teaching civil disobedience to the law of the land – that was the job of the Herodians, followers of Herod, the local ruler, who came along to make sure that their interests were served.
This is the sort of dilemma that is designed to make teachers or political candidates break into a sweat and look nervously from side to side. Jesus was a little more audacious. He asked those who questioned him to produce an exhibit for the court of public opinion, the coin which was to be paid to or withheld from the tax collector. Now, this whole exchange took place in the precincts of the temple in Jerusalem, a place which from its very inception was to be free of any idols or images of any sort. For observant Jews, even to carry a Roman coin into the temple was a violation of the Second Commandment, [Deut. 5:] 8 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image -- any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 9 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them.” So when his questioners produce the coin, Jesus already sets them back on their heels – they’ve shown themselves to be hypocrites and actually as being on the side of Caesar – just by presenting the coin. Presumably Jesus doesn’t even touch it himself, much less hold it; instead he merely asks them to tell him what is obvious to all – whose image is on the coin. The image is that of Caesar and, what is worse, the words on the coin make a claim to the divinity of Caesar; it would have read “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest.” In other words, the coin itself claimed that the emperor was son of a god, his father Augustus Caesar. Right there, in a temple dedicated to the worship of the one God of all creation; right there, where the religious leaders who were presenting this confounding question presumably remembered the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 24, [Ps. 24:1] “The earth is the LORD's, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein.”
Anyone with an eye to see and an ear to hear, as Jesus loved to put it, must have seen right where this was leading. The answer to their question was right their in there hands: the coin itself was a violation of the Law of Moses. But then Jesus pushes it one step further and answers the question: "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." Of course, this doesn’t answer the question at all; instead it leaves the most critical part up to the listeners, whatever their political or theological loyalties might be: What is God’s? What is Caesar’s?
In its simplest form, of course, Psalm 24 answers the question: Everything is God’s, nothing is Caesar’s. Or, taking a more political turn as suggested in our reading this morning, only the coin itself, an idol by its very nature, belongs to Caesar; indeed, it is a symbol of the occupation of the land by Caesar’s minions and it should be expelled from the land along with the soldiers and overlords who rule the land on behalf of the far-off empire. But the word “image” invokes the memory of another passage in the Bible, the story of the creation in Genesis 1, where we read [26-27] ‘Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27 So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God he created them; male and female God created them.’ Jesus’ use of “image” and “likeness” hark right back to the creation and remind us that even the grandest of rulers, even Caesar himself, standing astride the world, ruling from great palaces in Rome, – all of us are created beings, none of us have made ourselves.
So the challenge of the puzzling answer that Jesus gives – an answer that is not an answer but a question of its own, an answer that is like a Zen Buddhist koan such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” – an answer which requires us to find our own answer – his answer demands that we examine ourselves and our lives and our world in a profound way. Whose world is this, anyway? Does it belong to the rulers of the world? Does it belong to the rich and not the poor, to those in power and not to something greater than all of us, greater even than this whole earth of ours?
Which realm do we live in, really? The realm of wealth and power and political authority, or the realm of a world which includes everyone and everything? Are some of us special and different and entitled to rule over others, to exploit each other and the earth and to keep everything we can reap for ourselves? Or might we instead come to understand, as in our story for all ages this morning, that “We are all one”? Sometimes it takes an earthquake in our lives to remind us that we are part of something even bigger than the realms that the rulers of this world dominate. The Buddha was started on his path to enlightenment when the carefree luxury of his father’s pleasure palace was shattered by the appearance of poverty, sickness and death. Some of us awaken from the conventional presumptions of our everyday lives when an encounter with illness takes sudden and urgent priority over all the things that seem so important the rest of the time. Sometimes the death of a loved one reminds us of the fragility of all life, of our own lives; and when we recover from the shock and grief and anger and desolation of the loss, we open ourselves to having more compassion than we might have thought possible because we see that our lives are one with the common lot of all humankind – that we all suffer loss, and grief, and illness, and death, and that all the coins of Caesar cannot buy back our illusion of perfection and invulnerability. Sometimes a financial disaster as a family or as a nation provides an opportunity to re-examine our living and figure out what really matters. Perhaps this is a good time for many of us to take an accounting, to decide what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to something greater than Caesar.
We are all one. Every opportunity we have to experience our common humanity, to reaffirm that all are entitled to dignity and that we are part of an interconnected web of being is a blessing. “The earth is the LORD's, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein.” We are all one.
Amen.