NOTES for Mat 22:19-21

The Pharisees' question and Christ's answer about tribute to Caesar reveal an enormous difference in their original assumptions. Trying to catch the Lord, the Pharisees ask a question about priorities: what is more important, obedience to an alien but actually powerful authority, or national self-determination? It is important to note that both of these supposed values lie outside the religious sphere. More than that, by this time Israel's history already knew examples when national dignity demanded resistance, while the Lord, through the mouth of a prophet, called the people to submit to the conqueror, because he was the Lord's instrument.

Further, the Pharisees expect that the Savior, proceeding from the idea that God's Kingdom, that is, God's sole rule, is above all, will say that one should not obey earthly authorities. For precisely this case they brought the Herodians with them, so as to hand the Lord over at once to those very authorities. But the whole point is that the Pharisees suppose that the Kingdom of God and the principate of Augustus are phenomena comparable in nature and scale, and that they can be related to one another within the proposed, even if cunning, alternative. For them the Kingdom of God is a politically successful earthly Israelite state headed by the expected Messiah.

But the Lord's answer leaves not one stone upon another of this assumption of the Pharisees. In Christ's answer the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar look like two nonintersecting planes, incomparable with each other in scale. The Kingdom of God belongs to eternity and encompasses all that exists, while an earthly kingdom, limited in time and space, cannot even be its small likeness, just as a crowd of infusoria in a yard puddle cannot be a comparable likeness of Earth's biosphere. Thus Christ's answer completely rejects the Roman, and also late Jewish, sacralization of an earthly kingdom. Later the apostle Paul will give the final clarifications on this theme when he says that our citizenship is in heaven, and that we should obey earthly authorities only because, and only to the extent that, they resist evil and violence.

But the most important thing in Christ's words is the call to render God's things to God. Even the question of the relation between earthly and Heavenly kingdoms recedes into the background. The main thing is not how you arrange your earthly affairs and relationships; the main thing is how you build your relationship with God. Whether to pay tribute to Caesar is not such a simple and obvious question, but it can be solved. A person's life, however, is determined not by this, but by what he brings to God.