**This post was originally given as a sermon at Regent’s Park College Chapel, Oxford University.

Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at this University, philologist, and best-selling author, J.R.R. Tolkien, would have been horrified by the title I have been given for this evening’s sermon. He wrote in a letter: “I would arrest anybody who uses the word state (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!” (Letters p.63).

Tolkien’s serious point was that the term “State” usually involves some dangerous confusions, whether it is the Sun-King of France, Louis XIV, declaring “L’État, c’est moi” or the overblown claims of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adolf Hitler, and the communists, to subordinate individual freedom to the diktats of the general will, the Volk, or the Party.

Regius Professor of Theology at this University, Oliver O’Donovan, similarly tried to avoid using the term “State” in his political theology, constantly drawing our attention away from abstract entities, to focus on the responsibilities of the people who govern, rule and judge.

Nonetheless, the objectionable term “State” does provide a key to understanding a perennial temptation to which rulers are subject, the temptation to inflate their own importance, and in so doing, unlocks the meaning of the passage from the Gospel of Matthew I have been set as my text.

I love a good thriller. The essence of any good thriller are the twists and misdirections. In this passage, Jesus is being set up, and yet he turns on the tables on those who are hoping to entrap him. We are told in verses 15 and 16 that the question is posed by a coalition of convenience: the religiously scrupulous Pharisees and the politically conniving Herodians. The question Jesus is asked is: is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? The question they were actually asking Jesus is this: are we permitted under our religious laws to pay taxes to Caesar? In this season of Lent and Ramadan, it was the equivalent of a Christian asking, is it lawful for me to eat meat on Fridays?, or a Muslim asking is it lawful for me to take a drink during the hours of daylight?

 The question: is it lawful to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? is a trap. If Jesus answers “No”, then his answer will be reported by the Herodians to the Roman authorities as an incitement to rebellion. If he replies “Yes”, then his credibility with the Zealots and with the Pharisees will have been destroyed.

Jesus’s response is to call for someone to provide him with a Roman coin. What they hand him is a denarius, a coin which carries on its face an image of the Roman emperor. The coins of the first Roman emperor Augustus proclaimed that he was “Divi Filio”, the son of the divine, a reference to the fact that Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who had been declared by the Roman Senate to be a god in 42 BCE. Tiberius, his successor who ruled from 14 AD to 37 AD, similarly produced coins saying “Ti Caesar Divi Aug F Augustus”, i.e. Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus.

The fact that Jesus’s accusers can produce a coin so quickly is a sign of the compromises his accusers have already made with the occupying Roman regime. What is on the coin is offensive. The coin is blasphemous, a violation of the second commandment “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath … You shall not worship them or serve them” (Exodus 20:4). It is a coin which symbolises the might of the imperial State, the State which declares that its interests define the law and that its rulers deserve unquestioning devotion, no matter how racist their attitudes or how disgusting their sexual exploitations of others.

This is the context in which Jesus delivers his answer: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Jesus’ point is not that there are two separate spheres of life, one where we honour Caesar and serve him and one where we honour God and serve God. As Jesus answers, he, the Son of God, holds the whole Roman Empire in his hand as he examines the denarius between his thumb and forefinger. Of course, everything belongs to God.  We are to give everything to God, whose claims on us are unlimited, and within that, to give limited obedience to Caesar, whose claims on us are limited.[1]

The lordship of Christ is definitive for Christian understandings of politics. Because Christ is the “Lord of Lords” and the “King of Kings”, human rulers are not, even if they are emperors of the Roman Empire. This the foundation on which political liberalism, the rights of the individual and of intermediate groups against government, are built. This is the affirmation that our duties to God outweigh our duties as citizens and subjects. This is the separation between the claims of God and the claims of rulers and nations. This is the lesson of the Christian contribution to political freedom which totalitarian rulers who persecute Christians have learned better than many Christians have.

The claim that our duties to God outweigh our duties as citizens and subjects is a dangerous one, but in Jesus’s answer and in his teaching elsewhere in the Gospels we see how our duties to God and our duties as citizens and subjects can be reconciled. Jesus calls us to love God and to love others, including our enemies.

Although Jesus cuts the claims of Caesar down to size, he nonetheless acknowledges their legitimacy. As Chris Watkin points out in Biblical Critical Theory: ‘giving to Caesar is part of giving to God. Paying taxes is a gift (so to speak) to Caesar, but it is also at the same time – and in a more fundamental way – a gift to God. [As the Apostle Paul would highlight in Romans 13:6-7] Paying taxes is part of my Christian duty. In so doing, I offer service to God. I am to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but I am to do so recognizing that everything – including Caesar and my very self – is first of all and ultimately God’s.’

Christians who have taken Jesus’s message to heart are freed to render rulers honest, loyal obedience when rulers are governing rightly and to render rulers honest, loyal disobedience when rulers are violating, abusing, and overstepping their authority.

It is precisely because Jesus calls his disciples to commit themselves fully to serving God that they are equipped to render to Caesar and Empires, to governments and States, the service those rulers really need, the service of those who are freed from slavish obedience, freed from fearful complicity, and freed to serve loyally but critically, urging governments to abandon grandstanding and sabre-rattling in favour of their calling of delivering justice, restraining violence, and protecting the interests of the relationally disadvantaged.

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[1] Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of his Mouth (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975) 171-77; N. Clayton Croy, ‘”Show Me the Money”: Jesus, Visual Aids, and the Tribute Question’, (2021) 71 Tyndale Bulletin 191-206.