Caesar and the Greatest Commandment | S4 E6

In this episode of The Extraordinary Story, we’re with Jesus during the last week before he died.

And we learn how two challenges from his opponents provoked Jesus to share wisdom that has changed the course of history.

We will learn who asked him to pay taxes and why, and how his answer reaches the fundamental problems of alienation in our world today in the 21st century, and just what it means to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ.

God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him today and always.

The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

I’m Tom Hoopes.

I’m a writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

We’ll go to Luke chapter 20.

The scribes and the chief priests tried to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people, for they perceived that he had told this parable against them.

So they watched him and sent spies who pretended to be sincere that they might take hold of what he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor.

They asked him, Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly and show no partiality, but truly teach the way of God.

Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar or not?

But he perceived their craftiness and said to them, Show me a coin, whose likeness and inscription has it?

They said, Caesar’s.

He said to them, Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

And they were not able in the presence of the people to catch him by what he said.

But marveling at his answer, they were silent.

We started season 4 with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

Jesus, the new king, coming to Jerusalem to change it and us forever.

He rides on a donkey because he is a king who conquers through real power.

It doesn’t have to dominate, but wins over instead.

And we know by heart what he’s trying to do because we recite it in The Our Father.

He is establishing a place where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

In other words, he’s rebuilding Eden on earth.

We have watched him spend his last days before his death, telling us how to re-Edenize the world.

Since his new kingdom is Eden, we heard him compare the kingdom to vegetation, just like the plants in the original garden.

Adam and Eve tilled that garden, and we’ve heard him compare our lives to working in his vineyard.

We even heard him call his project a marriage, like Adam and Eve’s, pairing Christ the bridegroom with the bride, the church.

That leaves one key aspect of man’s original relationship with God to go.

And here’s how Genesis describes that.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after 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 earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them.

So God in the very beginning gave man dominion over his world.

This was not a dominion that gives us permission to destroy it.

It’s more like the celebrity owner of a mansion handing over the keys and inviting your family to be a house sitter and caretaker.

You would take that job pretty seriously and plan out how you would fulfill it, not by destroying the place, but by the very opposite.

Or better, this is like a king leaving princes and princesses in charge of his kingdom.

Well, if we are royal children standing in for God and dominion over the world, we need to know how things should be run.

And that’s what he does in the two gospels that we’ll address today.

He addresses what our dominion will look like in the fundamental civilizational building blocks of the state, marketplace and the church.

We get a lesson from Jesus that has changed society and holds true to this day.

The gospel starts with the Pharisees and the Herodians trying to trap him to make him deserve death.

Ironically, it is the temple people trying to get a religious messiah to be under the jurisdiction of the governor, so it’s the church bowing to the state, so the power is all fouled up from the very beginning.

They plot together, though they must not have been very friendly before this.

The Pharisees were Jewish purists and the Herodians were compromisers.

That they were plotting with each other shows just how polarizing a figure Jesus was.

He made friends of enemies because they both hated him.

It’s even more shocking if what many scholars have claimed is true, that the Herodians were actually Jews who thought Herod was the messiah.

If that’s true, then the Pharisees, hoping to stop Jesus from claiming to be the messiah, are teaming up with a truly false messiah to do so.

It’s probably more likely, though, that they were merely partisans of Herod, who favored peace with Rome and wanted Jews to pay their taxes and not cause trouble.

If that’s the case, the Pharisees probably teamed up with the Herodians because only pro-tax people, the Herodians, could make their taxation question seem credible and plausible.

It’s the perfect bait for the trap.

Luke’s account gives us this interesting wrinkle to the story.

They say that particular challengers to Jesus were waiting for their chance and that they sent spies to him in the guise of honest men to trap him in speech so that they might then hand him over to the office and authority of the governor.

By spies, I imagine it means they found a couple of young guys who were more sincere than the corrupt veterans and sent them over ready to make Jesus think that they were asking him a real question.

When I was an aide on Capitol Hill, often the young staffers were the true believers, and the veterans saw their naivete as useful in that same way.

Of course, Jesus sees right through this.

They come up with a plan to put him between a rock and a hard place, but they start by approaching him with flattery.

But it’s instructive to understand that the flattery is 100% true in this case.

In fact, the very fact that they are trying a verbal trap is evidence of the fact that they don’t think that they could get away with anything real.

His actual behavior was above reproach.

Anyway, they say, teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and teach God’s way sincerely.

You court no one’s favor and do not act out of human respect.

That’s a classic opening line.

I know you are wise, fair, and so of course you’ll agree with me.

But here, they’re not trying to get him to agree with anything, but to share his true unadulterated vision of whether or not taxes should be paid, because they know either answer is a loser for Jesus.

Tell us, what do you think?

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

No, they ask if it’s lawful or in other words, permissible or not.

It’s a trap because if Jesus sides with the pro-tax Herodians, the Pharisees will peg him as the sort of left-wing radical, unpatriotic and too friendly to the big government of Rome.

But if he sides with the Pharisees, the Herodians will say he is a right-wing radical, provoking a fight and unwilling to compromise for the common good.

But Jesus doesn’t side with either one of them.

In the reading, Jesus brilliantly turns a trap set for him into a trap for his opponents.

Jesus begins by exposing and rejecting their flattery.

But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, Why put me to the test, you hypocrites?

Then he proceeds, Show me the money for the tax.

Whose likeness and inscription is this?

They say, Caesar’s.

And he said to them, Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.

When they heard it, they marveled and they left him and went away.

That’s a beautiful answer because it both outsmarts them, but doesn’t disrespect them.

The Pharisees appreciate the answer because the coins and this image of Caesar, a ruler who claims he’s divine, is wrong in a number of levels for them.

And they just as soon give that image back to the pagans.

The Herodians probably like the answer too because they can consider it pro-tax.

But it’s a profound answer that literally changed the course of the world, making a distinction between rendering on the one hand the things of the state, on the other hand, the things of God or the things of the church, the things of the sacred space.

It also implicates the market.

Think of what a coin is.

It is created by the state to act as a marker for the value of goods and services.

It represents the work of people in the marketplace.

So a coin is the marriage of state and market and makes them implicated in one another.

St.

John Paul II said in Centesimus Annus, The individual today is often suffocated between two extremes represented by the marketplace and the state.

At times, it seems as though man exists only as a producer and consumer of goods or as an object of state administration.

People lose sight of the fact that life in society has neither the market nor the state as its final purpose, since life itself has a unique value which the state and the market must serve.

So John Paul II sees us sandwiched between these two overwhelming forces, the marketplace and the state.

If you’ve ever stood in a DMV line or been at a Walmart on Black Friday, you know exactly what this feels like.

John Paul says, the overwhelming nature of both of these realities, the market and the state, make us feel isolated and alone.

But where do we find ourselves in the midst of all of this?

It is in interrelationships on many levels that a person lives and that society becomes more personalized.

These develop as real communities of persons and strengthen the social fabric, preventing society from becoming an anonymous and impersonal mass, as unfortunately happens often today.

So while we’re dehumanized by the market and the state, we are rehumanized in communion with others, in communities, fundamentally the family, but also in friendships, in formal and informal groups.

In Tim Carney’s book Alienated America, he shows how these communities, these families and formal and formal groups, are mostly found in places of extreme wealth or in places where people frequently attend church.

So when Jesus says to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, he means more than pay your taxes and be good.

He means to give yourself to things that are worthwhile while allowing the government to play its role.

We’ll talk more about rendering ourselves to God in a second.

It’s important first of all to notice that Jesus isn’t rejecting government altogether.

Quite the contrary.

In reaffirming the Roman Emperor’s authority, Jesus is addressing a principle that stands to this day.

The Catechism says that Catholics must follow God first, refusing obedience to civil authorities when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience.

But none the less, it adds, Quote, submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote and to defend one’s country.

End quote.

That can seem wrong to us sometimes.

Some of our tax money goes to Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion business, and other bad things that we disagree with.

Well, taxes in Jesus’ day went to terrible things too.

In fact, in this week of all weeks in Jesus’ life, we are reminded that the very taxes Jesus was telling the Pharisees to pay would help pay for his own death.

He said to pay it anyway.

Same with us, we pay it anyway.

Sometimes there seems no good choice on a ballot, and in those cases, we vote anyway.

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to defend America, but we defend America anyway.

But I hasten to add that society often demands that we render to Caesar certain things that we cannot, that do not belong to him.

One is conscience decisions.

No one should be forced to act against his or her conscience, particularly in grave matters such as the performance or referral of abortion, or prescribing contraception, or participating in the redefinition of marriage.

Yet increasingly, Caesar is claiming power over these things by forcing individuals to act against their consciences.

Another is religious freedom.

The fundamental freedom is the right to recognize God because he is our author and our end.

But with contraceptive mandates and government regulations on gender theory, the government is increasingly preventing organizations from practicing their faith in how they spend their money and how they run their organization.

Another is the right to life.

The state has no power over the right to life.

Even when the state must go to battle or execute a criminal, this principle applies.

One may only kill when it is the only way to prevent someone else from taking a life.

The only power the state has is to defend life, not to take life.

Yet in abortion especially, but also in excessive use of the death penalty and in unjust warfare, the state is increasingly claiming to own the right to life and to be able to grant and remove it.

None of these things are Caesar’s and none should be rendered to him.

So what should we render to Caesar?

According to the Catechism, one thing is the respect for the rule of law.

We owe respect and obedience to legitimate authority acting towards the common good.

We do not, however, owe allegiance to unjust laws.

Racist laws are those that deny the right to life, for example.

Another thing that we should render under Caesar is the common good.

We owe it to the government to cooperate in efforts that promote the common good, which means the promotion of human rights, spiritual and material benefits, peace and security.

This is best reached through small communities, clubs, parishes and other organizations, but the government is often needed as well.

Third, we need to render taxes to Caesar.

As Jesus says, we owe taxes to the government.

Washington is on our dollar bill, and we must render it unto Washington, DC.

But perhaps the most important lesson today’s reading isn’t about Caesar, but God.

We must also render unto God what belongs to him.

Our coins have the president’s heads on them, but when God gave us dominion in that passage from Genesis I read, he also stressed that we bear the image and likeness of God.

To him, we owe our very lives.

The same way, of course, we need to give God what is stamped in his image, which is every human being.

And that brings us to our next gospel passage today.

There are several versions of this from Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

I’m going to read the one from Mark.

This is from Mark 12.

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, which commandment is the first of all?

Jesus answered, the first is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no other commandment greater than these.

And the scribes said to him, You are right, teacher.

You have truly said that he is one, and that there is no other but he.

And to love him with all the heart, with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.

When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, You are not far from the kingdom of God.

And after that, no one dared to ask him any question.

This is the third challenge to Jesus this week before he died.

The first one was from the Herodians and the Pharisees about taxes.

And that one was kind of a word trap.

The second one was from the Sadducees asking a tough question about the resurrection.

We talked about that one last week, and we talked about the marriage theme.

That one was sort of a trap and sort of not.

It’s a fair question for someone who doesn’t understand the resurrection, but who also were Jewish leaders who rejected Jesus.

Now comes this question from a good man, a scribe who is genuinely searching for answers, who Jesus himself praises.

I said before that the spies or the herodians may well have been a young true believer being used by veterans.

Well, here’s the positive side of that.

I always picture this as one of the young men who is dedicated to truth and hasn’t been corrupted by trying to be acceptable to every power that the temple is beholden to.

He asks a simple question and he gets a beautiful answer.

Jesus tells him not just the first commandment, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

But the second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

He puts them both on a level with each other, saying there is no other commandment greater than these.

Jesus is repeating the law’s teachings about our relationship with God from Deuteronomy and expanding what the law says about our relationship with our neighbor in Leviticus while synthesizing the two.

The original in Deuteronomy, however, says, Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.

And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise, and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets before your eyes, and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

So this commandment in Deuteronomy is a very big deal.

But the second commandment is from Leviticus, where it’s in a long list of things, and right afterwards, it immediately starts talking about the breeding of cattle.

So it’s kind of almost feels like a throwaway in a list of commandments.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I am the Lord, is all it says.

So the scribe recognizes what a wise thing Jesus has done in bringing these two commandments together.

And for the scribe, this is a revolution in individualism.

It tells them that his personal love for God is more important than the sacrifices offered in the temple.

For Americans today, it’s a revolution in community.

It tells us that our love for God is not merely private, but must necessarily be directed toward others.

Think about it.

We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is what?

He’s a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them, says Genesis.

If we are to render to God what is God’s, we should see how we are in his image and likeness.

First, consider what we mean by God.

Who is God?

Who created the world?

St.

John is exactly right when he says God is love.

And if God is love, he can’t be simply one because one alone is loneliness.

He can’t simply be three because love unites, love becomes one.

Pope Benedict XVI explains in brilliantly brief remarks on the Trinity that God does not live in splendid solitude, but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated.

He’s three persons who are one God, said Benedict, because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit is love.

God is holy and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love.

So that’s what we mean by God, love.

Well, we say God created the world.

What do we mean by created?

Well, we use the past tense when we say that God created the world, but that can give rise to a mistake.

If we think of God as somewhere in the past, kicking the world off, banging the Big Bang and setting the planet spinning, then watching it delightedly and intervening more or less frequently, we’ve got it wrong.

Maybe it’s better to say God creates the world.

God is outside of time and space, so there is no past creation event for him.

He is the ground of being, who is now creating the world’s beginnings, completing the world’s end, and empowering the world’s now.

As Pope Benedict XVI put it, God is the creator and merciful father.

He is the only begotten son, eternal wisdom incarnate, who died and rose for us.

He is the Holy Spirit who moves all things, cosmos and history, toward their final full recapitulation.

Which brings us to man.

How is the human person in God’s image?

First of all, since the God outside of time is creating it now, everything on earth reflects God.

He’s present behind all the realities on earth, in his essence, his presence and his power.

You can see who God is as Pope Benedict XVI says, in both the macro universe, our earth, the planets, the stars, the galaxies and the micro universe, cells, atoms, elementary particles.

He adds, the name of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things, because all that exists down to the last particle is in relation.

In this way, we catch a glimpse of God as relationship, and ultimately, creator love.

So, I look at it this way.

Rocks are steadfast like God, the rain is fruitful like God, or punishing like God, and the mother hen is protective like God, but God created the human person in his image in a different way.

If God’s Trinitarian love is built into everything we see, what is especially Trinitarian about us?

The Catechism has some great explanations.

First, we are some one, not some thing.

Like persons of the Trinity, we are each capable of self-knowledge, self-possession, but also freely giving ourselves in communion with others.

We are embodied and embedded.

We are embodied because our soul and our body is one, such that we have remarkable abilities of intellect and reason, but we are embedded because we only make sense in communities.

The remarkable things our organs can do, particularly our brains, are in fact directed toward communion with others.

We can use abstract thinking to add nouns, prepositions, cases and imperatives to our grammar.

We can use symbolic reasoning, putting shapes and concepts to use in making tools, painting pictures and solving problems.

Wonder and awe fuel our imagination and drive us to question current circumstances and discover new possibilities to enrich our lives and the lives of those we love.

This is what our soul is.

The soul is not a separate, invisible version of ourselves that sits inside or alongside our body, directing us.

The soul is the animating principle or spiritual principle in man, the entire human person in the catechism.

Benedictine College philosopher James Madden has compared the soul to the user interface of a computer.

It’s not something separate from the computer.

It is what expresses the computer’s meaning and purpose, what opens it to others.

That’s what our soul is.

And being in God’s image means everything is ours to give back to God.

Being the only someones among some things means the whole world is built for our sake, for us to hand back to God, much like the Father who gives all to the Son, the Son who gives all to the Spirit, and the Spirit who does the same.

So when Jesus says, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself, he’s talking about us in the image of God rendering that coinage, that image back to God, just like we did with the Caesar coin.

Jesus’ advice simultaneously sums up all we already know and subverts our expectations.

Loving God with all your heart means loving him with your deepest desires.

We would love to be able to win God’s favor through some external action, through burnt offerings and sacrifices as the gospel puts it.

We would be fine making a few grand gestures to keep God happy.

But just as family members demand more from us than symbolic gestures, God demands more too.

He wants our core desire and commitment to be for Him.

He wants us to love Him with our heart because we are in the image of God who gives himself fully one person to the other.

Loving God with all your soul means loving Him with your spiritual life and with religion even.

If our soul is our animating principle, the user’s interface, if you will, of our heart and mind with God, then our soul is the way we communicate with God and with others.

To love God with all your soul means to enter into all those means available to commune with God.

Loving God with all your mind means using your brain for God.

There are two traps when it comes to intellect and faith.

One is to turn the faith into a thought exercise only, a list of apologetics arguments.

The other is to turn faith against reason, deciding God is so mysterious that is useless to question Him or try to understand Him more deeply.

Loving God with your mind means to have faith, seeking understanding.

We love our spouse with our mind when we decide that our spouse is worth understanding more and then exert ourselves to understand.

What’s the same with God?

Loving God with all your strength means trusting Him alone.

It’s hard to love God with all your strength.

We want to hedge our bets with God.

We want to love God but keep a little something on the side in case He doesn’t fulfill us.

To love God with all your strength is to love Him like the psalm and embrace Him as the one all-important thing in your life.

My rock, my fortress, my deliverer, my rock of refuge, my shield, my stronghold, my strength.

Loving God also means loving everyone He made.

And the mirror shows us how.

Knowing that we have a hard time understanding how to love God, the Father gave us Jesus.

By seeing Him, we learn to love God properly because it is easy to love a person who has loved us and died for us.

But you can think of Jesus as an icon for what it means to properly love God.

But God also gave us an icon of what it means to love others.

He gave us ourselves.

We know how important every person is because we know how important we are.

We know what people need and want because we know what we need and want.

We know people need love even though they are far from perfect, because we are far from perfect and we need love.

One thing I teach my children is that every sign of the cross sums up the way we should love.

In the Catholic Church, we have this constant reminder of both of these commandments.

The sign of the cross remind you that you live in God’s name, the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that the cross marks your life because you make the sign of the cross over your body.

But it should also remind you of the ways you are supposed to love.

When you cross yourself, first you touch your mind, your brain at any rate, to remind yourself to love him in your thoughts.

Then you touch your heart to remind yourself to love him with your desires and with your courage.

Then you go from shoulder to shoulder, indicating your whole being, all your soul and all your strength now belongs to him.

In fact, with every sign of the cross, you are indicating the image of God on your own body, the coinage that you are supposed to render to God as surely as you render that dollar bill to Washington DC.

So loving your neighbor as yourself is the ultimate test of your love for God.

Since God is the creator of everyone we meet, and everyone we meet is made in his image with infinite dignity, we have to love every person as we love ourselves.

In this ultimate test, we have an incomparable example, of course, in Jesus Christ.

He has just arrived in Jerusalem to suffer and die for us.

In other words, as surely as a coin is rendered to Caesar, Jesus is about to be rendered to God.

Everything he has said about love will soon be incarnated in his example of love.

In his trial, he will show us his arguments before the Sanhedrin and Pilate that he loves God’s truth above all.

On the way to the cross, he will show in his interactions with the woman of Jerusalem, and the good thief, and his mother that he loves others as he loves himself.

And before all of it, he will show us in the institution of the Eucharist where his heart is.

In our hosts, Jesus looks like a coin rendered to each of us to show us what it looks like to give yourself to God and neighbor in his extraordinary story.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith and scholarship.

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