The Coin
of Tribute
Sermon--
November 21, 2006
In western history, philosophers have been famous for
cherishing ambiguous things, like the figure on your program: the duck rabbit,
a favorite animal of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Take the protrusions to be a bill:
it’s a duck. Take them to be ears: it’s a rabbit.
Such things are all over the history of philosophy.
Heraclitus is famous for saying: “The upward and the downward way are
one.” The road going up surely feels
different from the road coming down, but it’s the same stones and gravel. He
also said, “You can’t step in the same river twice.” On the one hand, it’s the
Mississippi, just like always. But the water I stepped in yesterday has moved
downstream. The road is different and the same. The river is the same and
different.
Philosophers seek out such objects and think about them.
That is a central discipline of philosophic practice.
For a long time, I was convinced that Jesus was very far
from philosophy. Jesus stories always sounded like moral lessons: about
sympathy, respect, humility – and the parental, assured tone of those stories
seemed different from the attitude of philosophers.
However, as I learned more about New Testament
scholarship, helped by the work of Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar, I
became less sure that my impression of Jesus as moral authority was accurate. I
learned that editors likely contributed much of the specific moral teaching of
Jesus stories and that the body of text uncontroversially attributable to Jesus
is small and slippery. While the Jesus of the gospels is primarily a moral
authority, the historical Jesus is not so easily defined.
I also became
gradually aware of how many first-rate duck-rabbit examples there are in Jesus’
preaching. A denarius is a fair wage for a day’s work, but it is also unfair,
if it is the same wage paid to people who only work an hour. The place closest
to the host is the best seat at the banquet, but also the worst seat, since in
that seat, one is most in danger of being displaced and disgraced by a more
distinguished guest. The vagabonds on the road are unsuitable wedding guests,
but when all the invited guests fail to come, the host eagerly welcomes them to
the wedding. This is just one more sheep, one more coin, until it gets lost,
and then it becomes the sheep that matters, the coin that matters. This little
coin is a very small contribution to the treasury, but if it is a widow’s last
coin, it is a very large contribution to the treasury. New wine drunk first at a party tastes good;
if you drink it after drinking aged wine, you don’t want it. After a good
harvest, it is reasonable to build new barns. But, if one is to die tonight, it
is unreasonable to concern oneself with building barns. A merchant may value many gems, and then,
upon finding one grand one, sell them all to buy it. The prize of the
collection suddenly becomes dispensable.
I am now coming to
suspect that there is at least a strand in Jesus’ talk that is doing something
else besides giving moral advice. He seems to want to tell us how he sees the
world – wide where we take it to be narrow, open where we take it to be closed.
Jesus reminds us of complexity where we are tempted to take one way of seeing
as normal, as forced upon us. And so those of us who were locked into a way of
seeing are given a choice. And those who stayed with Jesus, day in, day out,
through thousands of such remarks, might come to see choices everywhere:
1. I don’t
have to see my wage as unfair. From some standpoints, it is just what I
deserve.
2. I don’t
have to strive after wealth. From some standpoints, a single coin is more
precious than a bank full of coins.
3. I don’t
have to hold a grudge. From some standpoints, what someone forces upon me is
what I most want to do.
4. I don’t
have to dislike this wine. Had I been served it earlier in the evening, I would
have liked it very well indeed.
5. I don’t
have to curse my situation. From some standpoint, I am the luckiest person
alive, just to be still living.
Suppose one takes Jesus to be recommending that one find
one’s way through a very beautiful, mind drenched, scintillating world by
recognizing its full subtlety and then taking full account of one’s choices of
stance and attitude. Suppose Jesus acted
on the minds of his disciples, instance by instance, with one message: “You
don’t have to think that. You don’t have to react that way. You don’t have to
be stuck in that dilemma. You can, of course do all those things. But you don’t
have to. There is always another place to stand.” On this view, Jesus’ actions
as a teacher are precise counterparts to the healing stories: the blind see,
the lame walk, Lazarus rises. Those who are bound by their assumptions, by the
constraints of their reasoning, are given incomprehensibly wide scope, a whole
world of new things to try.
I am proposing, just as a hypothesis, that Jesus, like
Socrates, is principally modeling a method, not giving answers, and that the
point of that modeling is to lead people into a practice of freedom like that
which has been the goal of western philosophic discipline.
One more specific example of how this might work -- seeing
possibilities and ambiguities sometimes makes life possible, resolves the fatal
deadlocks. Paul Linebarger, an Asia
expert attached to the American army in Korea, was faced with an intolerable
standoff. Thousands of Chinese soldiers were surrounded and outnumbered by the
Americans, who wanted to take them prisoner and avoid a massacre. But the
Chinese could not surrender and retain their honor; they were prepared to die
fighting. Linebarger went to the Americans and asked, “What do the Chinese have
to do to surrender?” The answer, “They have to say, “We surrender.” Linebarger
then constructed a list of Chinese words: “Love, duty, humanity, virtue.” He
distributed leaflets asking the Chinese to say those words, which, to American
ears, sounded like “We surrender.” Honor was satisfied, the Americans were
satisfied, and nobody died.
Consider the situation in our reading for today. The Jews
find themselves under Roman occupation. Their country has been occupied for a
very long time by one foreign power after another. It is a strategically
valuable piece of property that major powers cannot leave unguarded, and the
Jews seem incapable of forming a kingdom strong enough to defend that territory
in the long term. Some kind of benign occupation may be their best hope. But
occupation leads to cultural domination and the loss of their heritage. In the
current era, the coins they must use to
pay their taxes proclaim Tiberius the son of the god-emperor Augustus. In this
and a thousand other small ways, life in the Roman empire dilutes, trivializes,
and compromises their Jewishness. They face a choice: be second rate Jews, or
revolt and be wiped off the map altogether. The dilemma is brought to Jesus in
the story as a question about paying the head tax, a particularly hated form of
Roman taxation, requiring Jews to handle the idolatrous Roman coins. I suggest
we read Jesus’ solution to this as parallel to Linebarger’s move in Korea. He
asks the conscience-tortured taxpayer: “What exactly are you paying the tax
with?” The answer: this seductive piece of silver, easily the most beautiful –
possibly the most valuable -- thing in my house, that proclaims as the common
sense of the known world the patent falsehood and abomination: “Caesar Augustus is God.” And Jesus says, as
I read the story, “There’s no problem here, except in your understanding of the
situation. You can do what a really good Jew would do. You can rid your house
of what is transparently an idol – a danger to the faith and mental health of
all who live there. And the Romans will think that you are being a good
citizen, paying your head tax. Instead of doing this action as a sort of
compromise, you can do it as a full expression of your Jewishness, and it will
count, within the Roman frame of reference, as submission.”
This story is often read as the set-up for a
recommendation about a specific matter:
the limits of a believer’s proper loyalty to the state. It may be just that.
But I am tempted to think that it is more an example, a model of how to
navigate tight moral spaces, where conflicting obligations force one into
morally terrible predicaments. The suggestion would be this: look at the
situation from all standpoints. Try to see things in enough ways to get your
freedom back. You may find a way to endure without losing anything important.
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