Flip the Coin

One day, some of the powerful religious elites buttered up Jesus with praise. They said Jesus must be from God because he always told the truth. Then they turned the tables and tried to trap him with a trick question: 

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? 

 Should we pay them, or should we not?” 

Sniffing out their hypocrisy, Jesus got his hands on some currency. 

“Whose image is this,” he asked, “and whose title?” 

The answer was obvious. Caesar. 

 Jesus responded with something that the audience thought was amazing. 

“Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, 

 and give to God the things that are God’s.” 

What’s amazing to me is how this passage has been counterfeited by American Christians to support their devotion to Caesar. They say that Jesus was separating life into spiritual and political realms. That people should pledge allegiance to both God and country. That we should make America great, even if half our polices sideline Jesus’ sermon on the mount. This destructive interpretation must be deconstructed. 

When we dare to come back to the reading and reconstruct it, we realize, as a Jew, Jesus believed that everything belonged to God. “The earth is the Lord’s,” the Hebrew Psalm says, “and everything in it.” If that’s the case, then nothing belongs to Caesar. In fact, many of Jesus’ earliest followers were persecuted because they defied Caesar, the one Romans referred to as “the Lord and Savior of the world.” 

Jesus was warning his audience that Caesar had a supremacy problem, a god complex. Jesus challenged folks to flip the coin and choose the other side. Heads it’s the image of Caesar. Tails it’s the image of God. The flipside of supremacy is mutuality, the radical notion that everyone, including Caesar, is a child of God. Nothing more, nothing less. No matter what we look like, who we love or where we are from. 

Supremacy is a story that always hides the other side of the coin. If you are on top, if you side with Caesar, you cannot see what’s on the bottom, where God breathes with the meek, the merciful, the poor, the persecuted and those who hunger and thirst for justice. When we flip the coin, we see that Caesar’s always got his knee on someone’s neck. So we must break rank with Caesar and live for those who can barely breathe.