Weekly Devotion: Loyalties
Weekly Devotion: Loyalties
Give all to Ceasar or to God, but you need to pick one.
The Pharisees and the Herodians were two groups that were also dealing with being people within the Roman Empire and also people of faith. The Pharisees kind of straddled the line. Some sects of the Pharisees were against the Roman occupation. Others had a live-and-let-live style. The Herodians, however, were big supporters of the Empire. They derived their name from King Herod, Rome’s puppet ruler. The two groups had one thing in common, they didn’t like Jesus. They worked hard to find a way to trap Jesus and came up with a plan. They sweet-talked Jesus while asking a question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not? This was such a good plan, they thought. If he said that they shouldn’t pay the tax, then the Romans would get angry. If he said you should pay the tax then the people would get angry for being a sellout. It was perfect!
It was perfect...until Jesus asked for a coin. He shows the religious leaders up by asking them to retrieve that coin, the one that bore an image of Emperor Tiberius. The one that said the Emperor was divine. The law stated that you couldn’t have any other gods before God and yet on this coin is the Emperor, who was worshipped as a God. The minute that coin was produced, the game was over. This elaborate trap for Jesus that seemed so ingenious ended up like a trap made by Wile E. Coyote, the trap gets you and not Jesus.
One of the things that got the early church into trouble was the simple claim that Jesus was Lord. It was bothersome because in saying Jesus was Lord meant that Ceasar, the leader of the Roman Empire was not Lord. Rome was cool with people worshipping their gods, so long as worship of the Emperor came first. The church wouldn’t make that compromise.
We aren’t that different from the Pharisees. We aren’t trying to trap Jesus, but we are caught between two different loyalties, our nation and our God. Jesus never says “Down with Ceasar!” Instead, he says, “Give to Ceasar what is Ceasars, to God what is God’s.” Jesus said if there are taxes to be paid, pay them. The taxes weren’t the issue, what mattered was what they were doing when it came to God. In some versions of the Bible, Jesus says render when talking about who to give to. In Greek, that word is apodidomi, which means “to give away for one’s own profit what is one’s own.” Jesus was saying that if you are going to give to God you need to give everything to God. Actually, he was even saying more. Give all to Ceasar or to God, but you need to pick one. So yes you can pay your tax, but you have to choose who is Lord in your life and give everything you can to them.
Jesus calls us to follow him with our whole selves. Jesus doesn’t want us to have divided loyalties. Yes, we can pay taxes to Ceasar. Yes, we can and should vote. But when it comes to who comes first in our lives, it has to be the one that is on the road to the cross. Jesus is Lord.