The heading on this week’s passage in the NIV is “A Warning Against Hypocrisy” but the way the headings and the lectionary readings are arranged, we miss out on the strong denunciations of the Pharisees and teachers of the law as hypocrites.

In comparison to verses 13 onward, verses 1-12 are pretty mild and actually seem to be focused on something else entirely.

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

“Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.

“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Matthew 23:1-12

So that first bit about the teachers of the law and the Pharisees not practicing what they preach points out hypocrisy. But then the passage goes on and the rest of it seems to be more focused on hierarchy than on hypocrisy.

It feels like the most common modern response to a hypocrite is not to tell them to start practicing what they preach, but instead to tell them to stop preaching what they won’t practice or to tell others that they aren’t worth listening to. That’s not what Jesus does here. He tells his followers to continue to follow the teachings of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law despite the fact that those teachings amount to “heavy cumbersome loads” that the teachers of the law are not willing to carry themselves.

And then, almost as if in contradiction to that instruction, Jesus tells his disciples not to participate in the hierarchies that (he claims) the Pharisees and teachers of the law value so much.

Well. That radically flattened religious hierarchy where all are siblings and no one is the teacher or the pastor or the reverend or the elder or the father…Does that look like your church? Sure doesn’t look like mine.

Are we back at hypocrisy again? Or is this simply an inevitability of the current scale of the movement Jesus began? Is a worldwide organization even possible where all members are equal? How would such an organization mediate disputes among members? How would they protect the vulnerable? Disciple newcomers?

Perhaps my imagination just isn’t good enough, but I can’t see how this flat structure scales up beyond a hyper-local group of a dozen people or so, maybe 50 tops. And that kind of limited group sits in direct opposition to the gospel message that all are welcome.

Students and teachers, recognise that there’s more than one reason for no one to ask any questions.

Maybe the whole class understands! That would be great. Except that it means everyone’s been wasting time at a lecture no one needs.

Or maybe no one understands even well enough to formulate a question.

Maybe the responses to previous questions have not resulted in greater understanding, but rather in more confusion.

Or maybe the responses have even been hurtful, or the kind of inflammatory statements that it’s not wise to speak aloud.

This week’s passage says that no one dared to ask Jesus any more questions. Why is that?

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

“The son of David,” they replied.

He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says,

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
    “Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
    under your feet.”’

If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?” No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.

Matthew 22:34-46

Modern Christians commonly interpret the lack of further questions as an indication Jesus won the argument. His responses were so compellingly correct that everyone was stunned into silence, but that’s not what usually happens when someone makes a clear and compelling argument to an audience that’s paying attention. Present exciting new information to a group of people and, if they’re paying attention and understand, there will be questions. Lots of them.

A teacher whose class doesn’t ask any questions has failed.

From my perspective, as a Christian living in the year 2020, I don’t see the controversy here. I mean…Loving God with all my being and my neighbour as myself is hard, but at least it’s a straight answer.

Jesus is known for giving twisty half answers, or answering the question no one asked, but this time…This is a real answer to (as far as I can tell) the actual question being asked. The laws he cites are even actual references to documents that the people asking the question were probably familiar with.

Even when Jesus asks his questioners what is apparently intended as a trick question and they fall for it, the incident reads as friendly sparing between colleagues with different perspectives — bringing up again the details of an old argument as banter– rather than some huge victory on Jesus’ part.

So why the sudden lack of questions? As Christians, we read this as a success but…Was Jesus just written off as irrelevant by the gatekeepers of his day?

So this week’s passage we have this little anecdote about paying taxes.

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”

But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

Matthew 22:15-22

I don’t really know enough about the politics of the time and place that this anecdote originates from to really understand the significance of this question and it’s answer. Why was this question a trap? Who were the various factions involved and what were their opinions on the matter? What was the significance of paying the tax? Or not paying it?

Not sure. Too lazy to do any in depth historical research. So I’m going to think in a different direction.

What belongs to Caesar? What belongs to God?

What belongs to the Empire? What belongs to the Creator?

My religious tradition has come down on the side of saying everything belongs to God. There’s even a reasonably well known quote from a reasonably well known theologian to cite.

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine! ‘

Abraham Kuyper

This quote is often used to suggest that our whole lives, but especially secular employment and financial decisions, are a part of Christian religious practice rather than something that can be kept separate.

Ok. But where does that leave Jesus’s solution to the whole taxation problem? Or the problem of what we owe the empires of the world we live in more generally? If everything is Christ’s, rather than Caesar’s is there anything left to “Render unto Caesar”?

I voted in an election this week. My religious convictions came with me into the polling place, but the government that will be formed when the ballots are counted is secular. More than that, the governments in my country grew out of colonization. It’s a settler government, Empire with everything that implies.

Is my vote a civic duty? Caesar’s to be given to Caesar?

Or is it a part of my religious practice? Christ’s to be given to Christ?

Can it be both?

Last week, I cheated and wrote about the Psalm rather than the Gospel reading, but here we are again with yet another very pointed parable so I think we’re going to have to go back and talk about the last 3 weeks of readings all over again.  Just to tie it all together, let’s start at the beginning of  Matthew 21.

• Jesus arrives in Jerusalem with a mob.  They’re singing and shouting and making a big deal of Jesus’ royal lineage and threatening a great deal of political instability and suffering for everyone if they decide to hold a revolution and crown Jesus king.
• Jesus goes straight to the temple and cleans house. He throws out the moneychangers and the vendors, disrupts some people’s comfortable income, makes them feel guilty, and causes a scene.
• The chief priests and Pharisees ask who he thinks he is. He refuses to answer but tells several parables.
  • The parable of the two sons where he describes his questioners as disobedient son.
  • The parable of the tenants where he compares his questioners to tenants who kill the person who comes to collect the rent.
  • And then there’s this week’s (rather odd) parable. Now they’re fools who disobey the king when all they had to do was put on some nice clothes and show up at a party.

So… That’s a lot.

But I think it’s useful to pay attention to how it all fits together.

All of this is Jesus still answering the question about who he is and why he thinks he can just waltz in and start making changes.

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This record of Jesus interactions with the Pharisees can be tricky. They were clearly at odds with each other, and there’s a real temptation as a Christian to amplify that conflict. It’s easy to paint the Pharisees as a caricature of power hungry legalism or as the embodiment of hypocrisy.

But the Pharisees, actually had more in common with Jesus than we remember. I’m no expert, but as I understand, they were all about expanding Jewish religious practice and offering ordinary people a larger place in it. A place that didn’t need to be mediated through the priests at the Temple in Jerusalem.

Some people argue that Jesus himself was a Pharisee, and the argument we witness here was occurring within the movement rather than between two competing movements.

When the Temple was destroyed, the Pharisees became the predominant thread of Jewish thought and practice. Modern Jews trace their history to them.

And hopefully you can see what makes these parables tricky by now. If we accept at face value all of those negative characterizations of the Pharisees in these stories, how do we understand and interact with modern Jews? (Badly. Often the answer is badly.)

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Another way we often read parables is to look for how they apply in our own lives. That can be hopelessly cheesy, and naive but sometimes has value.

Provided we put ourselves in the correct role in the story.

For myself, I am a privileged religious insider. The only role for me in these stories is that of the Pharisee.

Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.

“Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’

“But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

“Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless.

“Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

“For many are invited, but few are chosen.”

Matthew 22:1-14 (NIV)