I know I wrote/talked about this last week, but I’m just not done with it – this “Render unto Caesar” moment Jesus has in the Gospel narrative. Jesus is teaching at the temple in Jerusalem, and people are paying attention. His teachings – which are spiritually challenging, socially relevant, and pregnant with both personal and political implications – don’t fit within the established binaries of those in power in his time. So, some of those in power send a group of underlings to question Jesus publicly in hopes that he will slip up and be more easily dismissed.
One of the big political topics of the day for Jews in Roman-occupied Israel is whether or not they should be paying the mandated taxes to Caesar. To support paying Roman taxes was to enable a certain level of safety for the average Israelite, but meant acquiescing to the oppressive and unjust status quo. To oppose paying them was to support Jewish agency and liberation, but presented a very real risk of violence visited upon an already beleaguered people. Both sides were complicated and problematic.
We are well acquainted in our own time with complicated problems being flattened out for the sake of creating two sides. Pick your side and demonize the opposition.
If those seeking to undermine Jesus could get him to publicly pick a side, they’d be well on their way to undermining his subversive stature and impact. So someone steps up to him and asks the crucial question, “Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
Regardless of how Jesus responds, it is essential for us to recognize and name this: The question itself is disingenuous. It is not asked with sincerity. It is not asked with respect. It is not asked out of curiosity. It is not asked with the desire to engage for the sake of a deeper understanding of how Jesus’ mind works. The challengers seek only to trap Jesus, to shut him down, to disprove him. He is not a sibling, friend, or conversation partner: He is a threat. They posture themselves as wanting to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn, but the narrator lets us know ahead of time that this is pure pretense. They are acting in bad faith.
We are well acquainted in our own time with disingenuity in disagreement. We are quite capable of recognizing bad-faith questions disguised as debate.
Argument and debate are important parts of relationships and of living in a society. But not all argument is created equal. There is a marked difference between trying to reach an understanding and trying to win. In one, the goal is to know one another better and find a place of connection – even in disagreement. In the other, the goal is to be right and prove the other wrong. That’s it.
Treating engagement across difference like a zero-sum game that must have winners and losers is, well, emotionally immature. I don’t say that as an insult – I mean it literally: Emotional maturity helps us recognize humanity differently. I am meant to learn how to appreciate and care for others even when we are on different sides of an issue – even a serious and life-affecting issue. I may even seek to prove my point and disprove theirs. But if I do this with contempt, if I do this through dehumanization, or aim for humiliation and mockery, I am missing Christ’s presence in the person right in front of me. And Christ is undoubtedly present in the person right in front of me.
I was recently blessed to attend a talk given by the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde – the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. You may remember her as the preacher at the Prayer Service attended by the President following his inauguration earlier this year. She was widely quoted for the portion of her sermon where she asked the President to be merciful upon people on the margins of our society. You might remember this, and you might remember that she was both passionately praised and loudly derided. Seemingly, regardless of her own words, everyone picked a side.
In her talk, she spoke from personal experience of the contempt and dehumanization that is so achingly present in the national dialogue today. And then she knocked me over when she insisted simply and clearly that “The antidote to contempt is dignity.”
The antidote to contempt is dignity. The way out of the mire and hatred of our time is to insist upon the dignity of all people – even those we consider enemies. There is no future for us if we insist on contempt. Our hope is found in the insistence of dignity.
People like to tease me for always talking about love. And I mostly put up with it, because, honestly, if I’m going to be made fun of something, I’m glad for it to be that. Oh, that Phil DeVaul, he talks about God’s love too much. I’ll take it.
I think we are worried that love isn’t enough. And that is true, if your vision of love is mostly about having warm feelings for people and being nice. Love is so much bigger than this. Love is the insistence on the humanity of the person in front of you. And this matters to the Christian specifically because we say that all people are made in God’s image. To recognize the humanity of the person in front of you is to recognize that they are made in God’s image, that they have something of the Creator living and moving within them – and that truth is meant to be honored and respected.
This is the real work of love – not trying to feel the right way about someone – rather trying to view them through the lens of Jesus: to see them as beloved, as belonging, as bearers of the image of God.
Jesus’ challengers treat him with contempt. His response is to treat them with dignity. He asks whose face is on the coin with which they pay taxes? It is Caesar’s face, of course. And he says, “Well then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.”
This is, in fact, an incredibly honest and loving response from Jesus in the face of clear passive aggression and insincerity. He does not give in to the false binary his questioners have constructed for the sake of trapping him. He does not submit to the paradigm that is too small for his understanding of God and the world. But he also does not ignore them or refuse to engage at all. In fact, one of the great gifts of Jesus’ ministry is his insistence on engagement – his insistence on looking people in the eye, in listening deeply, and in speaking from the heart.
Jesus treats even his enemies with dignity. Dignity is the antidote to contempt.
Give to God what is God’s: Your disagreeing neighbor, your adversary, your opponent, your enemy – they are God’s. They belong to God, and you can give them to God not by force, coercion, or violence, not by humiliation, not by winning, but by lifting them up in prayer, by refusing to demonize them, by insisting on their full humanity.
This does not in any way require you to mire yourself in false equivalencies or call evil good. This does not require you to lay down and let someone roll right over you. This does not require you to paste on a false smile and pretend that all is well when real harm is being done. This does not require you to lose yourself, to mince your words, or even to be nice all the time.
Right this moment God is empowering you to be the antidote to contempt. You yourself, imbued with the divine dignity of your creator, belonging utterly to God – God is giving you the gift of recognizing the dignity even of those whom you oppose.
Give to God what is God’s: You are God’s. Give yourself to God – not primarily through religious adherence, though that is helpful and can be meaningful – but by devoting yourself to the care of others, by bearing one another’s burdens, by entering into relationships of sincerity, honesty, compassion, kindness, and truth, by building communities that foster this kind of godliness, by working towards a common life that reflects the truth of every single person’s belonging. This is divine dignity. This is the antidote to contempt. This is our work.
