Matthew 22:15-22 Commentary

The challengers come to Jesus feeling sly and like they have an Ace in their pocket. They leave their encounter with Jesus amazed even though they have “lost.” You’d think they had just watched a street performer do the most amazing trick they’ve ever seen!

What’s probably happened, though, if they were truly listening to Jesus’s words, is that their whole viewpoint on the world and their God has been reset. They came with a plan and instead they are being forced to question themselves and their own way of viewing what God requires of them.

But first, to the trap. The Pharisees make sure to give the Herodians front row seats to the conversation because the Herodians support Rome. If Jesus steps out of line and answers the question the way they hope, then the Herodians will join their cause of trying to bring Jesus down. Along with bringing in allies, they choose a sly method of approach, attempting to flatter Jesus so that he lets his guard down or thinks he’s among friends and followers.

The comments they make to butter Jesus up are, of course, all true but don’t immediately seem connected to the question of taxes. But that’s not the point of flattery, is it? They aren’t giving their reasons as to why they are seeking wisdom or advice from Jesus, they are trying to manipulate him and push him into a side of a very real conflict in their community. They want to pin Jesus to a side: imperialist or radical.

Clearly, Jesus doesn’t get fooled. Instead, he calls them out and calls them hypocrites. But it’s not just their method or even their question that lays as evidence, it’s everything else about their lives. Jesus uses their prompt to make his point, asking for a coin and saying the emperor can have what has his image on it because we give to God what is God’s—the implication being that everything and everyone has God’s image upon it.

No good believer can argue with the fact that God is God of all. From the time in the desert as the people of God were being regathered and reoriented, they have been enculturated in a spirituality where God is at the center, where their whole selves—body, soul, mind, and spirit—have been dedicated and anointed to the Lord. There is no question: we might belong to other allegiances here on earth, but ultimately, we belong to and bear the mark of the Creator.

As we think about what it means to be a faithful Christian in times like these, Jesus’s words are not a call to set aside discerning our contexts, but to understand them rightly from our position of belonging body and soul, in life and in death to our faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. To be sure, we have “Caesars” that make demands on us, but how we go about interacting with the world is a measure of who we are most aligned with. As it was for the Jewish people in Jesus’s time and for the early Christian church under the Roman Empire, we are challenged to be in the world, but not of it. 

Is this realization what made the servants of the Pharisees so amazed? Did they remember that there were some things they had forgotten about regarding facing the challenges of their day? Would they have even viewed the politics of the era as a way to entrap others if they had remembered that their most fundamental guide on how to conduct themselves was rooted in the Scriptures and the calling to bear God’s image in the world?

Despite the temptations of our own era, it is good for us to remember that if playing politics wouldn’t work on Jesus back then, it still won’t work today. Jesus’s command to give what is due to the powers that be and to God still stands; one is not the manipulative tool of the other. As we review our own uses of politics and spirituality, we must consider how we do so alongside—or perhaps even more than—the results they produce and for whom. If we are the image bearers of Jesus Christ, then the character of our ambitions, hopes and plans ought to reflect what we believe is the most powerful force on earth: his Spirit guiding us.

Perhaps this is why the servants of the Pharisees leave Jesus, amazed. Perhaps they have been hit by the truth of the Spirit and need to ponder and consider it all. One thing’s for sure, when they go back to their masters and tell them what has happened, the Pharisees are not going to be pleased; they are too caught up playing by the world’s rules to see the transformative power of Jesus’s way.

Textual Point

Perhaps you are more astute than me, but I missed this detail until one of the commentaries I read pointed it out. The Pharisees are the ones plotting to entrap Jesus, but they don’t actually do the work themselves: they send their own servants to try to entrap the Lord. Is this to give them plausible deniability with the crowd (who continues to favour Jesus) or part of their power trip?

Illustration Idea

The idea of “buttering someone up” in order to flatter them before getting something you want from them can be traced to ancient worship practices in India where people threw small balls of ghee (clarified butter) at the statue of their gods in order to curry favour for their requests. (In the West, people usually only think back to the Middle Ages and the servant buttering bread for their lord’s meal, but the practice in India predates this. However, it is where the word ‘curry’ in the phrase comes from, derived from the French word for grooming a horse.) Jesus isn’t buttered up because the people are about to make a request of him, but because they are hoping to get the kind of response that they can use.