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Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax."And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

In Joseph Heller's book Catch-22, an Air Force bombardier is desperately seeking relief from going out on the deadly missions he must fly each day. As he gets close to the number of missions that will allow him to be rotated, the number of missions needed for rotation keeps changing. He concludes that only a crazy person would keep flying those dangerous missions. He thinks he must be crazy, and therefore he should be sent home. His superiors agree with him that a crazy person should be sent home but only a sane person could recognize the danger involved. Therefore, anyone who sees the danger is not crazy. He is caught in catch-22.

On the day after people poured out of Jerusalem to greet Jesus and accompany him with palm branches and shouts of acclaim into the city, agents of two groups that had little use for each other, but even less use for Jesus, joined forces to keep Jesus from capitalizing on his warm welcome into the city. They intended to trap Jesus into taking a stand that would get him into trouble. Their means of entrapment was to be a catch-22 question: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" If Jesus said "No," he could be accused of sedition and turned over to the Romans. If he said "Yes," he would at once lose the sympathy of many of his supporters, who naturally hated the Roman tax and expected that if Jesus were the Messiah he would break the yoke of the Roman oppressors and not urge tribute to them. Either way, the religious leaders would achieve their end.

Jesus asked for a coin, a denarius, the coin used to pay the head tax to Rome. He asked the agents to verify whose image was on it. "The emperor's," they said. "Very well," said Jesus, "give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's" (v. 21). With that answer Jesus put responsibility for one's conduct back on the individual. Each one would decide how to respond. Those words still have a message for us.

The first thing Jesus does is acknowledge that there are some things the citizens owe to their government. One of those things is obedience to its just laws. Obeying the law sometimes means we have to abide by restrictions on our actions for the sake of the common good. I read recently about a dairyman who objected to having his cows inspected for tuberculosis. He ran the inspector off with a shotgun. In justification of his drastic action he said, "I am free, white and 21, and no government official is going to tell me how to run my business." What he forgot is that his freedom to sell milk ends where the rights of babies to have healthful food begin. Because most of us see things only from our own point of view there are laws protecting the general welfare, and good citizens need to respect those laws, even when it is personally distasteful.

Another thing a country may expect when its government is responsive to the needs of its citizens is loyalty. Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, was marching in Virginia in 1863. Long columns of soldiers were strung out. The general rode back, watching the men, and saw one limping. He called out, "Do you think you'll make it, soldier?" The weary soldier responded, "I guess I'll make it, but I hope to God I never have to show my loyalty to another country." Loyalty can often require us to make great sacrifices.

Even those who break the law may have a sense of the importance of loyalty. Some years ago, an indignant thief called the New York office of the FBI to confess that he stole a suitcase in Grand Central Station. "It's full of blueprints and other stuff that looks like secret military information," he said. "I think the guy I stole it from is a spy. I've checked it in one of the public lockers and I'm mailing you the key. I may be a thief, but I'm a loyal American thief." The country that has nurtured us can reasonably call for our loyalty.

Still another thing a government such as ours ought to be able to expect of its citizens is responsible involvement in making things better. When heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis was asked why, in view of American discrimination against blacks, he was happy to serve in the United States Army during World War II he responded, "Man, whatever is wrong with my country ain't nothin' Hitler can fix!" In our country, commitment to active citizenship is important. The contributions of morally conscientious Christian citizens are particularly needed.

A government also has a right to expect that its citizens will pay for the benefits they receive. For the Jews of Jesus' day, the head tax was particularly repugnant because it was paid to a foreign power. The most conservative Jews thought of themselves as a nation ruled only by God. Therefore, to pay the tax was to acknowledge the existence of another king. But Jesus points out that there are indeed earthly rulers, and it is appropriate to pay for the services they provide. We benefit from public services: law and order, fire protection, water, education, defense, the justice system, and social security. That means we have obligations to our country, state, and community. It was pointed out during the debates over taxation that thousands of persons whose annual income exceeded $200,000 a year were able to avoid any payment of taxes. That constitutes taking something and not paying for it. One of the things that stirred up public sentiment against the hotel owner Leona Helmsley a number of years ago was her alleged statement: "Only little people pay taxes." Her feeling was that the better off one is, the less necessity there is to pay for what one receives. This is a long way from Jesus' admonition to give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's.

One further thing the citizens of a republic owe to the government is continuous scrutiny of its policies. One commentator on the American scene urges us to behave toward our country as women behave toward the men they love. A loving wife will do anything for her husband, except to stop criticizing and trying to improve him. We should cast the same affectionate, but sharp, glance at our country. We should love it but insist on telling it all its faults.

It is not the critic who is a danger to a republic, but the noisy chauvinist. For many years a leading newspaper in this country had on its editorial masthead: "My country, right or wrong." Many patriotic Americans accepted that as their philosophy too and felt called to defend whatever policy the government might have on a particular issue. They may have done better to accept the whole statement as Carl Schurz stated it in an address before Congress in 1872: "Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right." "Pay to the emperor what is the Emperor's."

The second thing Jesus says is "(Give) to God the things that are God's" (v. 21). Surely one of the things due to God is worship. In the story on which the play Fiddler on the Roof is based, Tevya the dairyman prays three times a day. He addresses God, whom he loves, with affection, irony, sympathy, reverence, impudence, and hope. Every morning at sunrise he says his longing prayers with a prayer shawl over his head and other reminders of God on his brow and arm. When he comes to America, he is all the more determined to keep his relationship with God, for when people tell him that religion is superstition, he responds that if all the persecutions of the ages and all the bitterness of exploitation could not prevent him from repeating the prayers of his fathers, he certainly can't be made to fall away from them in the world of freedom. Worship gave Tevya his perspective.

In his book How to Believe (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1953, p. 161), Ralph Sockman wrote:

In our jobs we sit for five or six days a week like an Oriental weaver behind his loom busily fingering the threads of an intricate pattern. Every seventh day the Church, in her worship, calls us around in front of the loom to look at the pattern on which we have been working. She bids us compare the design of our days with the pattern shown us on Mount of Sinai and the Mount of the Beatitudes.

Worship is God's due, but those who do the worshiping are the beneficiaries.

Another thing we owe to God is service. "Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me," says Jesus (Matthew 25:40). Dr. Ernest Campbell, former minister of New York City's Riverside Church, tells how he became involved in social and political problems. He told of his experience in visiting a poor woman in nearby Harlem, who was grieving over the tragic death of her teenage son. He wanted to express Christian concern and bring the peace of God to this troubled woman. While he was praying with her, his prayer was interrupted by a rat scurrying out of a wastebasket and across the floor. The woman explained that all her efforts to get rid of rats were to no avail, because the whole building was infested and the superintendent refused to do anything about it. Dr. Campbell felt he needed to do something to help, so he spoke to the management, who would do nothing. When he checked with City Hall, he found that the authorities would do nothing either, unless he became actively involved in politics. So he became involved and something got done. What started out as a simple worship experience, a prayer, led to involvement and social action: service to "one of the least of these."

Still another thing that Christians owe to God is obedience. That obedience has often led to painful conflict. During the Nazi control of Germany, many groups had to decide to whom to be obedient. Helmuth von Moltke, leader of a persecuted Protestant group called the Kreisau Circle, was picked up by the Nazis for speaking out on behalf of conservative Christian principles. Eventually Moltke died for those principles. In his last letter to his wife before being executed, he wrote that he stood before Hitler's court not as a Protestant, not as a landowner, not as a noble, not as a Prussian, not even as a German. He stood before the court simply as a Christian and nothing else. The claims of God and the claims of Caesar are sometimes in conflict, and then we have to decide to whom we will be obedient.

One more thing that a Christian appropriately owes to God is loyalty. It would be nice if we always kept our loyalties separate and equal, like writing a check to the IRS to satisfy the state, and writing a check to the church to meet our responsibility to God. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. During World War II, a word was coined that speaks to the divided allegiances that confront all of us. The word is "traitriot" -- a hybrid of the words "traitor" and "patriot." It pointed to the unhappy plight of those Japanese Americans who gave allegiance to the United States. For the time being at least, they had to turn their backs on Japan. From the time of Jesus' ministry, Christians have been aware that they are citizens of another homeland, and that dual citizenship sometimes requires painful choices.

The third thing I want to say is that when we are faced with painful choices, we must be careful that we do not look for the easiest way of resolving the problem. One of those seemingly easier ways is to allow others to make our tough decisions. Erich Fromm was a Jewish psychoanalyst living in Berlin when the Nazis came to power. Prior to that time he had assumed that humankind was coming of age. Instead, he witnessed with horror how the German people of the '30s gave up their freedom to Hitler as eagerly as their forefathers had fought for it. Out of his inquiry into how this could be so, came the realization that many people find that the freedom to choose is too much of a burden to bear. They would rather escape from freedom and rush to find some authority that would decide for them and allow them to be children again or even slaves. It is a constant temptation for all of us to abdicate moral responsibility and allow the government to decide for us what conduct is moral and what is not, or whether a certain war is morally justifiable or not. It is a temptation we must resist.

It is equally dangerous to turn governmental decisions over to the religious authorities. Jim Jones took his religious followers to Guyana to set up a new society with himself in charge. With no one to offer a contrary opinion, the leader became unbalanced and led his people to mass suicide. The church is no better at ruling the state than the state is at dictating morality.

Therefore, the decision as to what we render to Caesar and what we render to God is never something that someone else can make for us if we are to be moral men and women. Not only must we pray for wisdom to make the choice, we must pray for the courage to act upon our choice. Thomas More was Lord Chancellor of England and a friend of King Henry VIII. But when Henry divorced his first wife and married Anne Boleyn, More disapproved and indicated that he could not vote to make these actions legitimate. More was arrested and charged with treason. In the play based on his life, A Man for All Seasons, More's daughter comes to him and urges him to break his oath in order to save his life, for the king has sworn to take More's life if he does not break the oath. More responds:

When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again... If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since, in fact, we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice, and thought, and we have to choose (in order) to be human at all... why then we must stand fast a little -- even at the risk of being heroes. (Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons)

"Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." But when they are in conflict, what is due to God comes first.