“The God of Creative Tension”
Matthew 22:15-22
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
11/5/17
Jesus has been
pushing the envelope with the Jewish leaders. In an effort to rein in this
renegade rabbi, and to try to restore a sense of normalcy, at least in their
own minds, some Pharisees hatch a scheme to ambush Jesus with a question.
“Is it
lawful,” they will ask, “to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”
The plan is
for Yes and No to be equally dangerous for Jesus and equally expedient for the
Pharisees. Depending on what gives them the most leverage over Jesus, the
Pharisees are willing to position themselves as either loyal Jews first or loyal
Roman subjects first. Now, the tax at issue has to do with harvests and
personal property.1 Like a sales tax, it’s regressive. It imposes a
much heavier burden on the poor than on the rich. If Jesus says Yes, he will appear to be double-crossing
the Jews in general, and the tax-oppressed poor in particular – the very people
on whom Jesus’ ministry has focused.
On the other hand, if Jesus says No, the Pharisees can simply report him
to the Roman authorities for sedition.
It seems like
a fool-proof plan, unless, of course, the plan has been hatched by fools –
fools, in this case, being those who are motivated by fear and revenge, yet tell
themselves that they’re champions of righteousness and justice. One aspect of Pharisaic foolishness is to separate the
world into dualistic categories – Jew and Gentile, male and female, clean and unclean.
How many times have you heard
someone say, “There’re two kinds of people in the world”? Those eight words
almost always precede some kind of mind-closing statement of opposing
absolutes. And such statements usually imply that one side is strong, or right,
or good while the other side is weak, or wrong, or bad.
The genius of
Jesus is that he teaches attitudes and models actions which are righteous and
just while living in such a way that he doesn’t bisect the world into opposing factions.
It’s his followers who divide the world into saved and unsaved, lost and found, good and bad. And how can disciples justify polarized
and polarizing living when the one whom we claim to follow goes out of his way
to be not only in the presence of but in relationship with everyone, including
those who oppose him?
It seems to me
that Christians often practice Pharisaism in order to maintain a sense of
authority, security, and even supremacy in the world. And I think we’re tempted
to do it all the more viciously when the world seems to be falling apart around
us. Remember, the Jewish world is falling apart during the first century, too.
Rome holds all of its territories in a kind of social, political, and economic
choke hold. Caesar finances his continuing wars and conquests by emptying the
pockets of the peoples he has vanquished. For the Jews in Palestine, everything
familiar is ending. The future is unfolding toward something unknown and
terrifying. Trying to regroup and to return to what was is futile. They’re
in the midst of an all-encompassing death, and to the Pharisees, Jesus seems to
be just another sign of the world’s demise.
As an Easter community,
the Church proclaims that Jesus is God’s sign and promise of all that’s new and
hopeful, all that’s righteous and just. Even when familiar things are dying
around us, following Jesus means following him into that death. The crazy and beautiful
thing for Jesus-followers is that entering death means entering, at the same
time, into resurrection. Not only does Jesus transcend all the fragmenting categories
of opposites, he transcends all that appears to separate life and death.
Looking at the
coin used for the tax, Jesus asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?”
“The
emperor’s,” they say.
“Give…to the
emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are
God’s.”
Stunned and
speechless, the Pharisees leave Jesus alone.
The Pharisees
try to bait Jesus into to dividing the world into two kinds of people – those
who collect taxes and those who pay taxes. And Jesus won’t bite. What’s more,
he won’t even divide the world into spiritual and mundane. His answer reveals
that the creation is a place in which holiness and worldliness are woven
together into an indivisible wholeness.
In his book Things
Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Richard Rohr observes that, in the first
creation story, it isn’t until the third day that God begins to call the
creation good. The first two days had been about making separations – light
from dark, sky from earth, up from down. When water and land begin to coexist,
when plants and animals begin to appear on the same ground and in the same waters,
only then does God begin calling things good.2
In the story of Noah, the Hebrews weave
the ancient Gilgamesh epic into their own story. And in the Hebrew version, an
ark gets inhabited by all these opposites – male and female, clean and unclean,
predator and prey, things that fly and things that creep. And God confines all
these opposites together in one place. The ark is a magnificent metaphor. It’s
a microcosm of the entire creation. The ark is the earth! And we all live in it,
together!
“The…reason that Jesus is the icon
of salvation for so many of us,” says Rohr, “is because he [holds opposites]
together so beautifully.”3
Discipleship means doing what Jesus
does. It means learning to live in the “paradox of incarnation,” holding within
us “flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering.”3 To be fully
human means living in that relentless but creative tension in which we
encounter and embrace otherness. We
cannot experience God as good, nor can we experience the creation as good outside
of this tension. As the body of Christ, we are called, individually and
corporately, to commit our time, our money, our very lives to bearing witness
to the God of creative tension.
Jesus does make one clear
distinction in today’s story. There’re two kinds of people in the world, he
says: Those who think they’re God, and those who know they’re not. When Jesus
says to give to the emperor that which is the emperor’s, and to God that which
is God’s, he’s saying that, contrary to what the Caesars of the world believe,
they are not God. That’s exactly what
the signatories of The Barmen Declaration were saying back in the
1930’s. Jesus is Lord, not Hitler, not the Third Reich, and not the conspicuously
pious, Christian Pharisees who were selling their souls to save their lives by
colluding with those who were trying to use genocidal fear, prejudice, and violence
to return their country to prominence, and to keep it pure and Aryan-nation white.
God is never behind the easing of the tension of opposites. God is always right
in the thick of it.
“Give…to the emperor the things
that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” We hold those
things in the same two hands.
As human beings, our Sitz im Leben is the tension between holy
and worldly opposites. We can deny that reality, but we can’t change it. We
can’t legislate, preach, or bomb our way out of it. Nor should we try, because,
for Jesus-followers, living in the tension means that every day, every moment,
every encounter, and conversation presents us with opportunities to experience
both our humbling, human limitations and the transcendent power of resurrection.
Look around you. Look across every
aisle you can imagine. Giving to God that which is God’s means recognizing and
giving thanks for the mystery and holiness that lives within every corner of the
known and knowable creation – including your own life.
1Susan Grove Eastman, Feasting on the Word, `(Year
A, Volume 4), David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds., Westminster/John
Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2011. P. 191.
2Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality,
Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, OH, 2008.
Pp. 32-33.
3Ibid. Pp. 36-37.
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