48. Mark 12:13-17: Taxes

Mark12:13-17 bookends the Parable of the Vineyard with 11:27:33 and the Questioning of Jesus’ authority. We’ll treat it here before turning to the parable. Authority is the issue here as well.[1]

This story is infamous in all the varied and conflicting ways it has been used. Most think in terms of “Two Kingdoms” – God’s and Caesar’s. We are to divvy up our loyalties and stuff between the two and live according to the rules of each in their proper spheres. But . . .

Pharisees and Herodians approach Jesus to catch him up in the “question of the day” that divided loyal Judeans from Roman collaborators: “Should we pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

Jesus reveals the hypocrisy of his interlocutors by unveiling their allegiance by requiring them to produce a coin, one with Caesar’s visage on it. A loyal Judean would not have one. The “August and Divine Son” inscribed on it could only remind of them of the one to whom that title truly belonged (1:1). This is a story not of divided loyalties but of choosing between rival loyalties: “Whose head is this, and whose title?”

Just as Jesus forced the “chief priests, scribes, and elders” to choose between John the Baptist and their own interests, so here he forces the “Pharisees and some Herodians” to declare their loyalties. That these “hypocrites” were amazed at Jesus’ answer is clear evidence that he did not offer them an innocuous “two kingdom” kind of answer. If he had, they would have rejoiced because they would have sunk him as a “people’s” Messiah. Leading a “No King But God” movement (which is what Jesus’ kingdom movement was all about) and suggesting that their hated pagan overlord had any claim on their loyalty and stuff would have done him in with the people. His movement would be dead in the water.

“Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” means “Choose who you stand with!”

“Jesus’ pedagogical strategy is to break the spell of credulity that the social order casts over its subjects and so force a crisis of faith. He engages the disciple-reader with disturbing and disrupting quandaries that animate toward change, rather than with logically satisfying answers that pacify.”[2]  

Just so!

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[1] On this story see Myers, Say to This Mountain, 154-156.

[2] Myers, Say to This Mountain, 155-156.