October 22, Ordinary 29A (Matthew 22:15-22)
It's important to note what Jesus does not say about the Roman coin.
This week’s Gospel reading drops me into territory I don’t want to enter or navigate. Months into the Trump administration, I am tired, discouraged, bewildered, and afraid. I say this as a woman who finds the president’s misogyny inexcusable, as a person of color who is terrified by his casual racism, as a parent who cannot stomach the indecency my children are being exposed to, and as a daughter of immigrants who dares not take America’s welcome for granted.
But I also write in the full awareness that I have Christian friends, family members, and readers who hold radically different political views than I do—and to whom I owe every bit of love, respect, and faithfulness I can muster, quite apart from politics. So I’m struggling to find a way forward, struggling to do what Jesus asks of me in this week’s Gospel lesson: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
On its face, this passage from Matthew’s Gospel is about taxation. The Pharisees and the Herodians attempt to entrap Jesus with a clever question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” The Pharisees see the tribute tax as a heretical and antinationalist capitulation to a pagan emperor, while the Herodians see refusing to pay the tax as sedition. Answering this yes-no question is a lose-lose proposition.
