Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ. Amen
The text
for this meditation is written in the 22nd Chapter of the Gospel
according to St Matthew: Verses 15 – 33:
15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. 16 And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” 21 They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” 22 When they heard it, they marvelled. And they left him and went away.
23 The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection,
and they asked him a question, 24 saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother must
marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.’ 25 Now
there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no
offspring left his wife to his
brother. 26 So too the second and third, down to the
seventh. 27 After them all, the woman died. 28 In the
resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her.”
29 But Jesus answered them, “You
are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 31 And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” 33 And
when the crowd heard it, they
were astonished at his teaching.
I can
still hear the words of a very learned Doctor of Theology and Seminary lecturer. ‘Anytime you are doing any form of
communication, three things are very important; context, context, and context.
This is true when you are listening to a speech. This is true when you are reading a
book. This is especially true when you
are working with the Bible’.
In order
to understand how bizarre the situation is in today’s Gospel, we need to look
at the cultural context of the
Gospel. The Gospel we just heard tells
us that some disciples of the Pharisees and some Herodians came to Jesus. Since it is most unlikely than any of us have
ever met any Herodians or Pharisees, we probably do not understand how strange
this is.
One of
the many things that you can say about the Pharisees is that they were
extremely nationalistic. They believed
that Jerusalem should be ruled by Jews and not by gentiles. After all, the law of Moses states, [Deuteronomy 17:15] “One from
among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner
over you, who is not your brother.”
Therefore they hated the Roman occupation. They were realistic enough to understand that
Rome had a lot of power. So, they
weren’t stupid enough to be terrorists against Rome. On the other hand, if someone presented a
reasonable plan to get Rome out of Israel, they would help wherever they could.
The
Herodians were just the opposite. As you
might guess by their name, they supported Herod. Herod was a puppet king of the Roman
Empire. The Romans had put his father in
power and they kept him in power after his father died. The Herod family was NOT Jewish. So, if you were
a Herodian, you were a fan of Herod, and,
since Herod was a puppet of Rome, you were a fan of the Roman occupation.
Ordinarily,
the Pharisees and the Herodians would be at each other’s throats … if not
literally, at least figuratively. The
fact that these two groups worked together to attack Jesus tells you something
about how much they hated Jesus.
They had
a plan. The idea was to put Jesus
between a rock and a hard place. They
asked Jesus a question that was designed to get Him into trouble: “Is it lawful
to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” If he
answered yes, then the people who hated the Roman occupation would hate Him
too. If He answered no, then the
Herodians would report Him to the Romans and get Him arrested. If He did not answer, then the crowd would
label Him as a coward. The Herodians and
the Pharisees thought they had Jesus in a no win situation.
Of
course, it is not so easy to trap Jesus in His words. Jesus saw the fallacy in their plan. There weren’t just two possible answers to
their question. There was a third
answer: “Therefore render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
The
Gospels record many interactions like this between Jesus and His
opponents. The opponents come up with
some sort of plan to trip Jesus up in His words. They hope to embarrass Jesus in some way and
diminish his influence among the people.
Then Jesus very neatly finds the flaw in their plan and embarrasses
them. Plans to trap Jesus in words
always backfired.
We are
tempted to believe that Jesus won all these debates because He was such an
excellent debater. We are tempted to
believe that it was His superior skill and knowledge that won all these
debates. While Jesus was the perfect
human being and was flawless in his thinking, that was not His main
advantage. His main advantage was that
He knew the truth and He never wavered from it.
Making a case based on truth gives anyone a tremendous advantage over
those who depend on lies.
The
opponents in today’s Gospel engaged in a logical fallacy called the false
dilemma. This is a logical fallacy that
falsely offers only two possible alternatives even though a broad range of
possible alternatives are really available.
The opponents offered two possibilities: either you pay your taxes or
you don’t. Jesus simply exposed their
faulty reasoning by showing that there actually were other answers. We can pay our taxes, give our offerings, and
care for our families. God is gracious
enough to give us the resources to do all three and maybe even have a little
left over for recreation. The opponents
tried to trap Jesus using a dilemma that did not exist.
The enemy
often presents us with false dilemmas.
One that involves our very salvation is the dilemma between
self-righteousness and despair. It goes
something like this. By the way, please
remember that this is a fallacy.
As we
read the Bible, we see that God gives us a lot to do. Do we do what God says and go to heaven, OR are we failing and on the road to
hell? This false dilemma often becomes a
reality for us weak and sinful human beings.
We become blind to the fact that there is another way. Good people go to heaven. Bad people go to hell. Are we good or bad? How good do we have to be in order to be good
enough? This is the false dilemma of the
law.
I can
deny the truth of my sin and insist that I am one of the good people that go to
heaven. This is self-righteousness and
directly contradicts John’s epistle: [1 John 1:8, 10] “If we
say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us … If we
say we have not sinned, we make [God] a liar, and his word is not in us.”
To even say that I hope I am
good enough to go to heaven is the most arrogant of all pride and a sin in
itself. If I go this way, I am lying to
myself and calling God a liar.
My other
choice according to this false dilemma is the utter honesty of recognising my
sin and believing I have no hope. This
is despair. Here too, there is a strange
sort of pride … the belief that my sin
is more powerful than God. My sin is so
terrible that there is nothing that God or anyone else can do. In the case of Judas, the pride of his
despair was so great that he took justice into his own hands and murdered
himself.
What a
comfort and relief it is to learn that the two choices offered by the law are a
false dilemma. Just as Jesus provided a
third answer to the Pharisees and Herodians, He provides a third answer to the
false dilemma of the delusion of the law.
In the middle of John’s condemnation of our sin, we hear, [1 John 1:9] “If we confess our
sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.” Here is the way
that God forgives our sin and cleanses our unrighteousness. God has given us a third answer in Jesus
Christ.
Jesus is
the one who did the work that makes this third answer possible. Jesus actually did what God gave Him to
do. He kept God’s law perfectly. Then He went to the cross and endured the
punishment we deserve for failing to do what God commands. In this way, He provided the third answer …
the third answer that avoids both self-righteousness and despair. We are no longer responsible for our own
salvation. Jesus has taken that
responsibility for us. He is the one who
earned forgiveness for us. He is the one
who offers to cleanse us of all your sin.
Jesus
demonstrated the benefits of His third answer by rising from the dead and
ascending to the Father. Those who trust
Jesus will also receive this blessing.
God will raise them to immortality on the Last Day and join body and
soul once again. On that day there will
be a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and earth will have passed
away. Then our Lord [Revelation 21:4] will wipe away every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor
pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
The
Pharisees and the Herodians in today’s Gospel tried to make Jesus irrelevant by
asking a trick question. When that
didn’t work, they gave up on subtlety.
They decided that the only way to remove Jesus from the scene was to
remove Him from this life – to kill Him.
During the next few days they carried out their plan and arranged to
have Jesus crucified. When Jesus was
dead, the powers of sin, death, and the devil thought they had won. They didn’t understand that the death and
resurrection of Jesus is His greatest victory.
It is by
this victory that we receive forgiveness, life, and salvation. It is by this victory that even though we
die, we shall rise again. His
resurrection is the assurance that the work He did on the cross is the ultimate
victory … the assurance that self-righteousness and despair are a false
dilemma. In Jesus Christ there is
another way … a way that leads to life everlasting. Amen
The Love
and peace of our Great Triune God that is beyond all human understanding, keep
your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen
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