Should a Christian pay taxes? Christ's words about tribute to Caesar have often been understood as justification for a kind of “reasonable balance” between secular and religious life. Caesar, it is said, has his claims on us, and God has His. But Caesar and God are incomparable, both in their power and in our responsibility before them. God alone created us and gives us life. God alone must we serve and worship. We have received everything from God.

Many people think that we must first render “to Caesar what is Caesar's,” and then give God whatever remains. But if we first render to God His “due” (and we owe Him far more than we possess—remember the parable of the talents), what will be left for poor Caesar? Of course, a Christian must take part in the life of society, including paying taxes to the state, but this is not service to Caesar (one cannot serve two masters); it is service to society, to people, to our neighbours, and therefore service to love and to God. Thus Jesus' words about tribute continue His parable of the vineyard: we cultivate God's vineyard and must give Him its fruit.

For Jews at the beginning of the first century AD, the tax to Caesar was a humiliating sign of dependence on the Romans. If the Lord had said that it should be paid, He could have been accused of lacking patriotism (at that point the chief priests would urgently have become patriots). If He had said that it should not be paid, He could have been accused of inciting rebellion (in that case the chief priests would have had to present themselves as constructive collaborators with the Romans, which, in the end, is exactly what they did). Christ's answer is striking first of all because He clearly distinguishes the sphere of earthly ordering of life, to which all forms of national and supranational authority belong, from the sphere of the life of the spirit. The Lord does not reject the state and does not call for a religious reorganization of state governance. His answer places the life of the spirit and worldly authority on different planes.

On the one hand, this gives us the ability to see the real usefulness of authority for ensuring the normal life of society, as the apostles will later write in detail. On the other hand, Christ's answer frees His disciples from deifying authority and rejects the claims of earthly authorities over people's spiritual life. For that era this was an unprecedented revelation, and it was precisely for this that the Roman state persecuted Christians.

The most important thing in Christ's words is the call to render to God what is God's, to be no less concerned with fulfilling our duties before the Creator of the world than before its temporary rulers. And this is the hardest thing of all.

Such is the difficult fate of Christian revelation: all the time, everyone who could fish something out of it for himself tried to use it for his own purposes. But its true divinity consists in this, that these attempts never succeeded completely, and sooner or later they failed.

Such also is the fate of those who try to present the Christian gospel as a textbook of revolution and Christ as the chief revolutionary of all times and peoples. Such attempts have been made more than once in the history of European culture. Yet precisely to them one can present the words of today's Gospel reading: "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's." The apostles Paul and Peter were probably inspired by these words when they spoke the following words to the people of God. "Therefore be subject to every human authority for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors" (1 Pet 2:13). "Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist have been established by God" (Rom 13:1).

Only in one case is submission to the authorities impossible: when authority appropriates divine powers for itself; what is God's can be given only to God. That is why the early Christians went, on the one hand, against the words of Peter and Paul, but on the other hand, if one looks more deeply at all three quotations mentioned here, it becomes clear that they were walking the only true path.