One of the most well known exchanges that takes place between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders in the gospels is that involving the question posed to Jesus, by the religious leaders, as to whether it was lawful for the Jewish people to pay taxes to the Roman emperor. At the heart of this question is the first of the Ten Commandments: “you shall have no other gods before me”.
The religious leaders are attempting to trap Jesus with this question. If he answers yes, that it is lawful to pay taxes to the Roman emperor, then he can be accused of not observing the first commandment of having no other gods before the God of Israel. However if he answers no, that it isn’t lawful, then he could seen by the Roman authorities to be defying Roman law. He is in a ‘no win’ situation.
But Jesus outsmarts the religious leaders by asking to see a denarius, the standard silver coin of the Roman Empire. Seeing as the religious leaders were using the emperor’s coin, they were implicitly acknowledging Caesar’s authority and therefore their obligation to pay the tax.
The coin they gave Jesus would have been stamped with an image of Tiberius Caesar, who ruled Rome from AD 14–37, and the words DIVI AUG. FILIUS, “son of the divine Augustus.” Such a coin should have been highly offensive to pious Jews, since it bore an idolatrous image and extolled the emperor as a god and so as well as violating the first commandment, it also violated the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Exodus 20:4 NRSV)
Jesus asks the religious leaders whose image and name are on the coin. When they answer, “The emperor’s,” Jesus then tells them to “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” In doing so, he avoids directly answering their question of whether it is lawful to pay taxes or not. Instead he advises them to know the difference between the claims of the emperor and the claims of God.
Living as Christians in a secular society in the world today is arguably similar to the Jewish people living under Roman rule in first–century Palestine. The Jewish people were permitted to practice their own religion, as long as they submitted to the rules and laws of the Roman Empire, and also accepted the divinity of the emperor. Hence the reason for the question the Jewish religious leaders posed to Jesus.
For Christians living in Australia today, which is predominately a secular country, we are essentially free to practice our faith without fear of discrimination, however as was seen with the debate surrounding the Religious Discrimination Bill 2022, there are grey areas where upholding a particular religious freedom may be viewed as discriminating against another individual’s rights, be that on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or belief system.
In recent years we have also seen opposition to the Christian Faith being played out in the public domain with religious education being banned from public schools, and more recently with debate taking place in Federal and State Parliament to stop the saying of the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of each sitting of Parliament.
It will be interesting to see what develops with regards to religious freedom in coming years as our society and country becomes increasingly more secular, which is certainly what the trend is suggesting. But for the time being, we would do well to follow the suggestion of Jesus, whose words I will paraphrase here: “Comply with the obligations and responsibilities we have under the rules and laws of society, and observe the responsibilities and requirements that come with our faith and belief in God and Jesus.”
