Taxes! Now that is a relevant subject these days! The politicians bicker endlessly over taxes while the world holds its collective breath, and the news is full of the Occupy Wall Street protesters whose wide-ranging call to economic justice includes the question of taxation. What if Jesus stood on a New York sidewalk outside one of those flimsy tents among the noisy protesters and the eager reporters and the annoyed bankers? Whose side would he be on? What if a well-dressed day trader and a smiling politician came up to him and, posing and preening for the cameras, said, “Hey Jesus, we know that you are sincere, that you speak the truth fearlessly, that you love us, like it says in the Bible. So, come on, tell us what you think. Let’s settle this once and for all. Should we raise taxes or not? Come on, Jesus, tell us—whose side are you on?”
We hunt through the Bible looking for a Word from God that we can use to wield power over one another … or even to gain control over God … but Jesus would not play into the power games of the learned Pharisees or the opportunistic Roman collaborators, the Herodians, and I feel safe betting that he would not play into our power games right now. I bet that Jesus would not answer our question directly, either. In Jesus’ day, the Jewish people lived in an occupied land and paid a heavy tax burden to the hated Roman Empire. On the coins that they used daily to buy the necessities of life, was stamped a portrait of the Emperor, with the title, “The Son of God.” These coins were therefore blasphemous objects for the Jews, examples of idolatry, breaking the first two commandments. When Jesus cleverly gets his opponents to pull out a Roman denarius from their own pockets in front of the crowds in God’s Holy Temple, he has already marked their hypocrisy. And then he cleverly evades their question, refusing to choose sides. “To whom do you and your lives belong?” he pushes the crowd to ask themselves in his evasive proclamation, “to the emperor, or to God?”
Today on Wall Street, I wonder what Jesus would say to his modern interlocutors? Would he ask them to show him a dollar bill? Or would he ask to see the amount of debt on their platinum American Express cards? I’m not so sure that he would tell us to “give unto George Washington the things that are George Washington’s!” That would make no sense in our context. But this line of thought got me to reflecting further: if everything, including our money, belongs to God, and God’s image were to replace Caesar’s or George Washington’s on the currency that makes our world turn, what image would that be? Would it have a red face or a blue face? A white face or a black face? No, it would not be God’s face at all, for no mortal can see God’s mighty face and live. According to God in Exodus, it would not even be God’s fearsome Glory, that powerful, dangerous, forward-flung energy that heralds God’s presence in the world. But it might just be God’s backside printed on that money!
Let’s think about that for a moment. In today’s reading from Exodus, Moses stands as close to the mighty power of God as any mortal has ever come, yet, like us, he is still a bundle of worry and insecurity. Lost in the overwhelming heap of his own uncertainty as leader and covered in worries about the future of his people, Moses looks up at his God and begs to crawl into God’s bosom, safe and beloved, and to watch the storm of glorious majesty crackle overhead. There is a satisfaction in thinking that we have divine power with us, especially in times of conflict and doubt. Our weakness longs for God’s strength. If we could just crouch down behind a pew of our own choosing, safe within holy walls of our own making, and watch God advance in power and might, then how our faith would soar, and everyone would know that God was there with us, on our side. Gazing blissfully at God’s front, we could perhaps even see into a certain and reassuring future.
In Exodus, God tenderly refuses Moses’ desperate-sounding request. God agrees to send forth God’s Goodness before Moses, allowing him to observe all of the marvelous bounties of the creation that God has made. God shows Moses, “the things that are God’s.” And then he tells him that, when it is time for the dangerous, powerful Glory to appear, Moses can stand right beside God, with the divine palm cupped protectively over him, so that he will not be harmed. But all that Moses will be allowed to see, is God’s backside. What does God’s back look like? Surely, the infinite God doesn’t even have a backside? The novelist Mary Russell has two of her characters discussing God’s back at the end of her novel, Children of God. Musing over our passage from Exodus, they posit that perhaps God’s back, instead of being a physical metaphor, is really about time. One character says, “Maybe that was God’s way of telling us that we can never know His intentions, but as time goes on … we’ll understand. We’ll see where He was: we’ll see His back.”[1] As a Christian, if I had to draw the holy space that is God’s back, I would draw a tiny baby whimpering in a manger in Bethlehem. Or a savior hanging as a victim on a Roman cross. Or the hope inside a mustard seed. But one thing is clear: God’s back, unlike God’s Glory, is not a place of thundering power. Recognizing its quiet strength in this world requires a big dose of trust in God’s goodness and mercy and wisdom.
Getting back to Jesus down at Occupy Wall Street, I wonder, then, if he might not just turn over the bill that the politician and the day trader hand him and make a comment on what is written on the back of our money: “In God We Trust.” If we ask Jesus which side he is on, he might well advise us truly to trust in what we have written on the back of our money. Do we live freely and generously, as if our trust is in God, the Creator of all that is? Does the use of our money reflect that trust?
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