WWJT: What Would Jesus Tax? by The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Posted on
October 19, 2014
Trinity Parish, Hartford
Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
In today’s Gospel Jesus takes hold of a coin used to pay taxes to the Roman administration and says “give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." This utterance by Jesus has been one of the most important and most misunderstood of any of his sayings. One reason for these misunderstandings seems obvious on the surface: Jesus doesn’t actually tell us specifically what belongs to the emperor and what belongs to God. This is especially puzzling because in one sense everything belongs to God and we are only the stewards of God’s possessions. But Jesus does not question the fact that emperors are also stewards of God’s wealth. The question is what does that stewardship consist of?
One particularly false reading of the passage concludes that Jesus resolved the perennial tension between religion and the government, which for us today is the parallel to the emperor, by, in effect, dividing them completely. This interpretation suggests that we give to the governmental powers that be whatever they demand in the form of taxes and then get on about the more important business of developing our spirituality, our relationship with the non-temporal, non-governmental dimensions of our lives. It is assumed that Jesus, in his pithy comment, is simply dismissing the world of politics and governance and replacing it with the world of God and religion. Since God has established the worldly powers they need to be respected and obeyed but they are not really all that important. If we pay too much attention to them they will suck us up into a realm of concern for the nitty-gritty of everyday living and in the process distract us from the higher, transcendental obligation to deepen our spirituality and focus on our religious aspirations. We ought, it is claimed, to keep moral judgments out of politics and restrict them primarily to our personal relationships which we believe are uncontaminated by the messiness and corruption which we see throughout the political order.
But this division between religion and government is dangerously false if understood in the wrong way. Now it is true that Jesus was not, in today’s sense of the term, a social reformer. He had no political or social agenda or program or policy recommendations to set before the Roman government. His mission was more basic: he was laying the groundwork for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. That groundwork consisted of a set of moral and spiritual principles upon which the kingdom would be built. But it was a kingdom which no human government would ever fully embody. It was a kingdom that, in significant ways, went beyond any form of human society.
Nevertheless, the principles of the kingdom of God are not utterly alien to our life together in this world prior to the full establishment of the Kingdom. After all, a kingdom is a family, a society, a fellowship – in short a community of some kind. It is a polis, the Greek word for a city-state in which people live out their social natures in relationship with others through the common work of the people known as politics. It is where we as human beings belong if we want the fullest aspects of our potential for wholeness to be most fully realized. The truth of the world God created is that we cannot fully flourish or attain the fullest expression of what God created us to be individualistically by ourselves or for ourselves. We were made for each other, to live in bonds of the deepest attachment and intimacy with each other, to experience the exquisite delights of mutual love and companionship. The kingdom of God when it is fully developed will consist of these delights, or as Ben said last week, our deepest joy. In the meantime our religious lives will try to model, albeit brokenly and incompletely, something like a foretaste of the Kingdom, but they will not participate in the Kingdom in its fullness until God brings it about in God’s own time.
And in the meantime all our other forms of communal or social living will remain part of how we live in the world. Among those other forms is the world of organized society. And society is what human beings form in order to live together in accordance with the principles of justice. Justice is the hallmark of a good society. It is treating all people fairly and in accordance with their basic needs and our ability to fulfill those needs (and these are genuine needs essential to living abundantly in accord with our God-created nature. They are not just desires or wants which may have little to do with what we truly need). Perhaps justice will not be necessary in the kingdom of God because there we will relate to each other solely out of love and mutual regard. But in a society in which love is never a reliable basis for governing, given our still sinful and self-seeking sinful natures, we need principles of justice to counter such selfishness; to block the unfair aggrandizement of power by the few at the expense of the many; to stymie the excesses of greed and self-seeking; to protect the rights of the oppressed; to ensure the rights of all to fair play, meaningful employment at a living wage, health care, food, decent housing: the list is long and unfortunately we have only made little progress in addressing it.
The point is that until we live fully in the kingdom of God we have a moral responsibility to take seriously the building of societies on principles of justice and fairness. And whether we like it or not the application of those principles directly involves us in the work of government. And government requires a principled and engaged involvement with the work of politics for the polis. And the work of justice and politics directly implicates the issue of taxes: the very issue in the gospel this morning to which Jesus’ words regarding the coin point us. For that coin was intended to pay taxes to the emperor. The emperor was the head of government in the Roman Empire and he determined where the tax money would go. Taxes are nothing more and nothing less than the means by which a society pays for the institutions and practices that, in theory, put the principles of justice into effect. Unfortunately, justice for those in need is not free. It requires the expenditure of time, labor, and resources. If it is only just that all persons have equal access to quality medical care, then the provision of that care for everyone in the polis takes money. Taxes are the means by which a society pays for what services and resources its people need in order to live justly and humanely. Therefore, taxes are inherently a moral matter. If you want to know what the moral convictions of a society are look at its budget and how it raises and spends its tax revenues.
Unfortunately today many people have come to believe that society is best governed without socially mandated taxes. The mania of hate and loathing against taxes has reached a fevered pitch that is leading many people to blindly and irrationally oppose all taxes, except perhaps those which pay for the services and privileges which they happen to enjoy and which some of them seem to think do not require taxes such as Medicare and Social Security. This hatred of taxes has sometimes been justified by some Christians by appealing to this morning’s text in which Jesus fails to tell us what really belongs to Ceaser.
This coming weekend the Diocese of Connecticut at its annual convention will consider a proposal to address one of the crying issues of justice in our country today. This motion asks that the Church name economic inequality as a spiritual and moral issue of immediate and urgent concern. It notes that since 1970, the richest 1 percent of Americans have gained a larger share of total national pretax income, and this increase in inequality has been exacerbated by a regressive tax policy. [Tax rates on the top 1 percent of taxpayers have fallen over this same period while the bottom 60 percent lost wealth during these years.] [Our sense of values has become distorted, when making money justifies the means, and where the U.S. subprime crisis came to mean exploiting the poorest and least educated among us.]
Joseph E. Stiglitz (Nobel Prize Winner in Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank) has written, “Much of what has gone on can only be described by the words MORAL DEPRIVATION.” If Stiglitz, an economist, can invoke moral judgment, surely the Church ought to do so as well. The motion goes on to say that as Christians we should be deeply concerned about moral deprivation. In our Book of Common Prayer, we pray that in this nation no one may suffer the ravages of poverty and that “every one of us may enjoy a fair portion of the riches of this land.” (Prayer 36, pg. 826) We also pray that God will “guide the people of this land so to use our public and private wealth that all may find suitable and fulfilling employment, and receive just payment for their labor.” (Prayer 30, pg. 824) And in our psalm this morning we say “O mighty King, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob”.
The motion concludes by enjoining us to take responsibility for our own relative wealth and evaluate our own financial practices individually and as a church. We must use our voices and our assets to seek justice and relieve the suffering and inequity that surround us.”
This lengthy section of the motion which I’ve just referenced reminds us that we have a deep moral responsibility to take seriously the use to which we put our coins for the emperor, or in our terms, for the governance of justice in our society. We cannot pretend that what belongs to the society is not of crying moral concern or that we can avoid engaging with the political, economic, and social order just because it is not yet the complete Kingdom of God on earth. Until that divine kingdom comes in its fullness we will have enough to do here in our human kingdoms to use our common resources and common wealth to create a tax system that will truly direct our taxes toward meeting the needs of the poor, the hungry, the ill-fed, the homeless, the sick, and those working at jobs which do not pay a living wage. Instead of shunting the issue of taxing into a realm of life we would prefer not to deal with, we must embrace tax reform as one of the fundamental moral issues of our time. If a fair and flourishing life in this world is part of what God intends for us, then using the resources gathered from our tax system is part of providing that life. And it integrates both our social responsibility and our most basic religious principles.