If you’ve ever played the game of chess, you know the great joy and excitement that comes from planning moves for your various board pieces. You know the difficulty that is involved, as you balance deliberation, planning, and timing. You want to see at least one or two moves ahead but you don’t want to spend so much time staring at the pieces that your opponent sees your strategy. Sooner or later, when you have executed your plan and made your moves, you will experience one of two feelings. 1) you will know the exhilaration of removing key pieces of your opponents and see them grimace as their ability to defeat you dwindles, or 2) the disappointment of realizing some angle or consequence that you didn’t see and the sinking feeling that comes with the loss of some of your most powerful pieces. By far the most devastating experience is when you think you have your opponent trapped, when you believe their queen or some other crucial piece is yours, and then they not only slip out of your grasp, but they take something from you as well. The emotion can only be described as a sloppy mess of shock, disappointment, anger, and disbelief, similar to what Red Sox, Phillies, and Braves fans experienced in last couple of weeks.
This same dynamic can be seen in the gospel today. The pharisees and religious leaders of Israel are out to get Jesus. He has been driving them crazy by defying their view of God, extending forgiveness to public sinners, and challenging their view of the religion they thought they knew so well. He has called them hypocrites, liars, and challenged their authority in ways they never imagined. Jesus is becoming immensely popular and some are even thinking that he is the Chosen One of God. So they adopted a strategy and laid the perfect trap. This was a true catch-22 if one ever existed: get Jesus to answer a question where, no matter what, his answer would either offend the ruling government authority or insult the religious Jewish sensibilities of his most loyal followers. There was no escape and either way he was going to lose and lose big! Well, you just heard the question, and it was incredibly ingenious:
“Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not regard a person's status. Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?"
Jesus knew their evil intentions and said to them; “Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax." The scripture then goes on to tell us that the coin is produced and Jesus asks them "WHOSE IMAGE AND INSCRIPTION IS ON THE COIN"
They reply - Caesar's
And Jesus replies with that awesome answer that leaves them speechless: "Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."
What really strikes me is the strong language Jesus uses to address those who were trying to trick him. “You hypocrites !”
Hypocrisy is defined in dictionaries as the act of claiming a virtue one does not have. It comes from a word in the Greek, which had to do with theater: to play a part or to act on the stage.
In this case, the part, or role, that the Pharisees were playing was the role of the holy, and Jesus, by calling them hypocrites, suggests that they are not really people who know God, or understand his law. Rather they only know it in their heads, and act the part, rather than having it come from their hearts.
Which should lead us to ask ourselves: “Is our faith a matter of the head? The head that analyzes and categorizes and judges things? Or is our faith a matter of the heart? The heart that understands why Jesus wept, because it has experienced the joy of love and the sadness of condemnation?
The Pharisees are called hypocrites by Jesus, not simply because they were trying to trap him, nor because they were unloving and uncaring. No, they are called hypocrites by Jesus because they refused to go beyond what they already knew of God. You cannot really know God if you refuse to move beyond what you already know about him.
So what do we know about God? Do we know anymore about him than we did when we finished grade school, or PSR, or high school? Some of us know God hates sin and so we feel lousy all the time because we know we are sinners and do not believe that God, or anyone else for that matter, can or should love us. Others of us know that God loves and forgives sinners, and so we feel confident and never really question our actions because we believe that God will overlook any so-called "small" mistakes we make now that we are his followers.
The first group tries to traps God in a box of judgement, the second attempts to trap Him in a box of forgiveness. Neither group, unless their minds and hearts are open, can let the real God both judge and forgive them. Neither group really experiences the fullness of God. They trap God by their own understandings and therefore end up with only a shadow of what they should have. Sadly, they play a spiritual role, rather than live a spiritual life.
Now, we might not think that we lay the same sort of trap for Christ as the pharisees did, but is this entirely true? Haven’t we all played the game where we present God with a similar ultimatum: if you love me, grant my prayer. If you are truly God, find me a job, or save my marriage, or fix my troublesome child? Lord, if you expect me to believe you and follow you, then arrange things the way I think they should be.
So many of us, in fact, all of us in one way or another, want to divide God and the world God has made into easy-to-grasp categories. We take Jesus' answer to the question about the census tax, for example, and try to figure out what is Caesar's and what is God's. Most of us look at it in terms of what is the least I can do to get by. This simply isn’t enough. Instead, we should be asking “what can I do to show my love?” We have to do more, otherwise we will lose each and every time.
In conclusion, I think it is good for us to go back to the chess analogy. Our final goal is to get to the King. We have to be realistic and patient in that pursuit. We can’t rush in and expect to win the game in three moves. We have to take everything in stride adapting to the moves of our opponent. We also know that there will be losses. If we expect to reach the king without any sacrifices, then we will quickly lose our courage as the losses accumulate. The same can be said for us as followers of Christ. Our final goal is to reach the King of heaven and earth, the one who guides us in our relationship to both God and Caesar. We must be patient and trust that he will guide us to where we need to be, when we need to be there. There will be losses, sometimes significant and mysterious ones. But we can’t allow these to discourage us or make us lose heart. Any sacrifice suffered for Christ, pales in comparison to the glory of reaching him. So let us take heart, knowing that we are playing for God, who always has our best interests in mind. Let us be vigilant that we never make God our adversary like the pharisees. May this gospel insight encourage us to move beyond our limited view of God to a fuller, more-loving embrace of his command to “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."
