Matthew 22:15-22 (NRSVUE)
Sermon for October 18, 2026
Some of you know the line. In Return of the Jedi, the rebel fleet comes charging in for what’s supposed to be the decisive blow, and Admiral Ackbar stares at his screen and shouts, “It’s a trap!” Somewhere along the way that line jumped off the movie screen and became one of the internet’s classic memes. It shows up any time somebody spots a setup coming a mile away.
The free cruise that requires a ninety-minute timeshare presentation. The boss who drops a “quick question” on you at 4:55 on a Friday. The teenager who opens with, “You love me, right?” And I’ll confess, I’ve been known to think it in the church hallway when someone catches my sleeve and says, “Pastor, can I ask you something real quick?” Some questions come with the hook already baited.
That’s where we find Jesus this morning.
If we’d been in the lectionary the past three Sundays, we would have watched the religious leaders of Jerusalem come after Jesus and lose, repeatedly. Every parable he told landed squarely on them, and they knew it. So Matthew tells us the Pharisees “went and plotted to entrap him in what he said.” The Greek word there is pagi-deuō, a hunter’s word. It means to set a snare: lay a loop of wire across a game trail and wait for the animal to put its own foot in it. That’s the plan. Get Jesus to catch himself with his own mouth.
And look at who they send. The Pharisees send their students along with the Herodians. The Pharisees resented Roman rule. The Herodians were the party of Herod, the local king who held his throne because Rome let him, the collaborators who did well under the arrangement. On any other day these two groups would be at each other’s throats. About the only thing they share is that they cannot stand Jesus. When sworn enemies start collaborating, somebody’s about to get hurt.
They open with flattery. “Teacher, we know that you are sincere and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one.” Here’s the irony: every word of that is true. They are telling the truth about Jesus in order to set up a lie. And that last compliment leads to the trap that they are setting. You don’t defer to anybody, Jesus. So surely you won’t bow to Caesar.
Then the question. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”
This tax in question was the poll tax, a flat head tax paid in Roman silver. The farmer scraping by on rocky ground owed exactly what the wealthy landowner owed, and every payment reminded you that you were an occupied people in your own land. The word “lawful,” exestin in Greek, can mean legal under Rome’s law or permitted under God’s law. The question is built to cut both ways.
If Jesus says yes, he’s sold out the crowds who hoped he’d finally drive Rome into the sea, and he seems to have compromised Israel’s loyalty to God alone. If he says no, the Herodians have their notebooks out, and by Friday he’s a revolutionary. Rome had a well-worn answer for revolutionaries, made of wood and nails.
Yes, he loses. No, he loses. The snare is set.
But Jesus is “aware of their malice.” He asks, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?” The word hypokritēs comes from the theater. It means an actor speaking from behind a mask. These students are playing earnest young seekers. Underneath the mask is a hunter on a trap line.
So Jesus says, “Show me the coin used for the tax.”
Stop there. Jesus doesn’t have one. The man with nowhere to lay his head isn’t carrying Roman silver. But his questioners produce one right away, and they do it standing in the temple courts.
A denarius was about a day’s wage for a laborer, twelve hours of sweat pressed into a disc of silver. On it was the face of the emperor Tiberius, with an inscription calling him the son of the divine Augustus. A graven image of a man claiming to be the son of a god. Anybody raised on the Ten Commandments knew what that was. And here it is, pulled from a purse inside the house of God, by the very people asking whether paying taxes is lawful.
The trap snaps shut on the people who set it. They’re the ones carrying Caesar’s economy in their pockets, trading in it, and doing it in the temple.
“Whose head is this, and whose title?” “The emperor’s.” Then Jesus says, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
There’s a small change in the verb that’s easy to miss. They asked about didōmi, the ordinary word for “give” or “pay.” Jesus answers with apodidōmi. Give back. Return. Caesar minted that coin and stamped his face on it. It circulates on his roads, under his soldiers. Fine. Hand it back.
Jesus is a realist here. He isn’t going to send poor farmers to their deaths over a coin. The scholar Warren Carter puts it well: you can pay an imperial tax without casting a vote for the empire. Paying concedes Rome’s power while keeping the question of its moral right to rule firmly in God’s hands.
Now, this verse has been put to strange uses. Some read it as Jesus drawing a line down the middle of life, religion over here and politics over there. Others hear him saying faith is a private matter, so God doesn’t care what you do with money. Still others take it as a command to obey the government no matter what. I think Matthew rules all three out. This is the same Jesus who said back in chapter six, “No one can serve two masters.” Whatever he’s doing with this coin, a fifty-fifty split of your loyalty is off the table.
Listen to the second half of that sentence the way the Greek sounds. The verb isn’t repeated. Jesus says, in effect, and the things of God, to God. God, God. It lands twice, its supposed to give impact.
And remember what he asked: whose image is this? The word is eikōn, where we get “icon.” Every faithful Jew in that courtyard would have heard the echo from the first page of their scriptures, where God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”
Caesar stamped his face on a piece of silver. God stamped God’s face on you.
Picture Jesus turning that denarius over in his fingers, handing it back, and then looking each of them in the eye. The question doesn’t need to be spoken aloud. And you, my friend. Whose image do you bear?
If the coin goes back to Caesar because it carries Caesar’s face, then you go back to God because you carry God’s. All of you. Your work, your money, your marriage, your ballot, your temper, your Tuesday afternoons. Caesar gets a coin. God gets the hand holding it. Caesar might rule an empire, but God made the cosmos, and Caesar himself is one more creature walking around wearing the image of the God he pretends to be.
So what do we do with that?
Martin Luther, in his commentary on Galatians, described two kinds of righteousness. Civil righteousness is the good we owe the world: paying taxes, serving our communities, working for justice. And there’s the righteousness that sets us right with God, which comes entirely as a gift through Christ. That distinction exposes two traps of our own.
The first is confusing our causes with our salvation. We get so sure our side’s agenda is the gospel that we measure everyone’s faithfulness by how they vote. Working for justice is good and faithful work. It still won’t make us more beloved by God than the person across the aisle. Especially in this time and space we need to remember; We are not enemies. We are co-image bearers of God, and our standing with God was settled at the cross.
The second trap runs in another direction. We get so comfortable in grace that we decide the world’s problems are somebody else’s business, keep our heads down, and call it maturity. But if you bear God’s image, so does your neighbor. So does the fourth grader who comes to school hungry. So does the family that just arrived in Phoenix with nothing. You can’t render yourself to God and then shrug at what happens to the people who carry the same face.
Look, Jesus doesn’t hand his listeners a policy paper. He hands them a question and makes them carry it home. And people of real faith will land in different places on some of those questions. Some of them are sitting in this room. Can we trust that God is at work in them too?
What we can’t do is what the questioners did. They heard the best answer anyone had ever given them, they were amazed… and they walked away. Amazement without change. Jesus has been warning about that for the previous three chapters: fruit proves the root.
So what’s the currency of God’s kingdom? Matthew already told us on the mountain, in the Beatitudes: mercy, peacemaking, a hunger for what’s right. The Hebrew Prophet Micah said it plainly: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. In next’s weeks gospel lectionary reading, Jesus boils the whole law down to loving God with everything you are and loving your neighbor as yourself.
That’s the coin we render. It’s paid by a teacher who stays late for the student nobody else has time for. It’s paid by a parent who apologizes to a child after losing their cool. It’s paid by the neighbor who sits with a widow after the casseroles stop coming, long after everyone else has gone back to their lives. It’s paid by the person who visits the guy in the memory-care unit who no longer remembers their name. And it’s paid by the brother who picks up the phone first after years of silence.
Pay your taxes. Give Caesar his coin back. He can keep it.
But you were never his. You were minted in the image of the living God, and you carry that face into every room you enter this week. Give yourself back to the one whose image you bear.
Amen.
Sermon by : Rev. Dave Wasson
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