Render to God
Twenty Third Sunday of Trinity
Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.
The words that will serve as the basis of our meditation this day have been caused by the Holy Spirit to be written by the Apostle, the Evangelist St. Matthew. I reread these words:
"But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.’ And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said, ‘Caesar's.’ Then he said to them, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.’”
Thus far our text.
The ways of men are gray areas and blurry lines. We lie and we deceive; we manipulate and we sidestep. We hide huge things—or at least attempt to do so—and keep secret small, significant things, and we make up stories to keep them hidden. We give a gift or help a friend just so that we can get the reward, the boasting rights, so that we have a feather for our cap, a point of pride, a soapbox from which to boast. We'll earmark our giving, designate our funds, schedule trips on Sunday, skip Sunday school to have lunch with a friend, and ignore someone that just needs us to listen to them. We'll fill every moment of silence with our own words. We'll trap a friend in his words. We'll pray on our enemies just to catch them that once, to annoy them, to convict them, or even to get rid of them. Repent! The ways of God are a two-edged sword of Law and Gospel, and that sword always cuts clean.
But when it comes to pass, the “render unto Caesar” part is really the easy part. After all, President Washington's photo is printed alongside the name of the federal government on every single dollar bill; it was Caesar's inscription on the denarius. The “render unto God” part is the part that hurts. It's not so cut and dry for our hearts—not as cut and dry as the Word of God that bids us empty our entire lives, indeed to deny ourselves, deny our passions, deny our relationships and pride, our everything to lose our lives for God. Lose it, dear friends! Drop it! Stop building up for yourselves a life; instead, give everything away. We're not just talking about coins with inscriptions of royal heads of states or presidents of days gone by. God's not interested in paper and money and dollar bills and pounds and denarii or the like—He wants you. It's your life that will pay the bill. The debt is huge; only in the shedding of blood is there the forgiveness of sins, the Scriptures tell us.
The Pharisees, dear friends, are like us. Their question was meant to trap Jesus so that they could get rid of Him. They wanted to have something to boast about—the Pharisees and the Herodians to the Sadducees, perhaps, or even just to those walking down the road. They wanted to be rid of the One that kept showing them up. And they couldn't just ask their question; they had to precede it with the proper compliments to make Him comfortable to speak His mind. But they didn't know who they were speaking to. Butter Him up, they thought, and stroke His pride. But that is not the way God works—not then, not now, not ever. The Lord Jesus sees right through their deceiving ways. God is not mocked. “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesus, in His answer, was unexpected, simple, and at the same time quite impossible: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.” So, dear people loved by God, what does it mean? Everything belongs to God, so we should give everything to Him. So have we done it? Have we listened to our Lord? Have we given everything to God?
It isn't pretty. Our passions and our pleasures have stolen what is God's. We have taken what we have been made stewards over for ourselves, and we've wasted it all. Sure, Satan even helps us, but we are willing accomplices. The prince of deception fills our minds and mouths with lies and with crafty words. He does this so that we may try to trick God with our distractions. But God still will not be mocked. He will not be swayed by hypocrites that ask deceiving questions about abortion, living together outside of marriage, divorce, just war theory, or taxes. He will not be swayed by our inverted Sunday morning priorities, nor by where we have placed God's Word in our life. Just looking at us, He sees through our deceptions. He knows us; He knows our thoughts; He knows the evil of our hearts. What is that evil? It's pride—gifts given with expected return, not to mention all that Satan has supplied us: pompous, self-justifying lies, shallow excuses, deceptions, and the like.
Let us repent. These may be the ways of hypocritical men, but they are not the ways of God. For out of Christ's mouth comes the sword of the Word of God. It is a sword that cuts through all of the crud that is in us and that is us. It exposes us as we are, and left alone, we would surely die from the wounds inflicted upon ourselves. The Law of God always accuses (lex semper accusat), and it always cuts us down. It strips kings and priests of their armor and leaves us all vulnerable. Just hear the words again: “Give to God what is God's.” It is not the answer the Pharisees and the Herodians wanted, and it's not the charge we wish to hear either. “Give everything to God” is the blade of the sword laid against our throats. But only through that charge does God find us weak and dying on the ground—just the result of every law that we've ever heard. And weak and dying on the ground is the best thing of all for you and me. If we lay on the ground, God comes to where we are and gives us everything—everything He has.
It is His free gift of mercy and grace—God's undeserved, unearned, impossible love. His perfect Son, what we couldn't do and what we refuse to render, He gave completely. He has given it all to us. The great reversal, dear friends, has been played out: your sins, your death, your everything pried from your fingers, and Christ's forgiveness, His life, and His everything—the everything of His kingdom—given to you in return. What we could not do, what we cannot do, Jesus has done perfectly. Give to God what is God's: the price is the blood of man; the price is death, hellfire, death, enduring the wrath of God, the pain of God forsaking You, the agony of dying with the weight of the whole world's sin on Your shoulders. God said He came for the sin, and it must be rendered to Him, so give Him that too. This Christ has redeemed us, dear friends—lost and condemned persons.
This Christ has purchased and won us from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil—not with gold or silver or with Caesar's coin or the almighty dollar, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death. It was the sword of our sin that killed the only begotten Son of God. Everything that is God's was lost there on that cross on that Good Friday. Why? So that everything might be God's again—that we would be God's own and live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness and innocence and blessedness. Jesus rendered all that was God's so that you would be forgiven. This way—His way—is the way of life for us. And so, dear people loved by God, the debt—our debt—is paid. We are freed, and we are forgiven. Just as Jesus is risen from the dead, lives, and reigns to all eternity, so also will those who are baptized be alive to all eternity. Coming up from the water of your baptism, the Father counts us righteous. He counts you as one of His sons and daughters, marked by the cross both upon our hearts and upon our foreheads. He defends us against all danger and guards and protects us from all evil.
The Law has been satisfied by Jesus' death. His body and His blood is now our medicine of immortality, given by God out of His fatherly, divine goodness and mercy as He bids us even again today: “Come, eat; come, drink.” God knows us. He knows what we need, and He has given all of His riches and His kingdom to us. He's given us what we need, dear friends; it keeps us nourished; it keeps us forgiven. Thus He turns the gray areas of our life into the clear and precise liberty of heaven. He washes away blurry lines and lets us see the clear salvation of our God and the love of Jesus for you. “Render unto God what is God's” has been perfectly fulfilled in Christ. Thus He said, “It is finished.” Jesus has done all things well; He makes all things new—even you. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The peace that surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.