Rites of Passage

There were days of wild excitement, so exultant they steered themselves into the pages of history. Imprinted on a past, resonating into the future.

The crowds celebrating their new king. The wild relief after the long days of war. His general, his lover, spectacular on horseback. 

The crowds cheered and cheered. Already, after the parade, the commoners were breaking open the barrels. 

He, too, was caught on this extraordinary wave.

In Oak Flats, that place he had never been, on the far side of the Earth, in humble circumstance, no courtiers, no celebration, no petitioners, he watched as an Earth mother, a biological parent, slipped into her final days. 

Bless You My Daughter: Go In Peace. Suffer No More.

Whatever he thought of their false gods or misinterpretations, none of these things mattered. Matters of doctrine. Really?

When the power is all around you, before you?   

"I cannot in all conscience leave this situation," he said, as the air breathed around them. 

Humble. But he had no need to learn humility. 

At the local Oak Flats swimming pool an old lawyer who had done a lot of government work engaged him in conversation: about the book Conversations With God. The Word. That there were those who believed that Christ was already here, that the second coming was now in process.

It was an unusual conversation for the changing sheds of Oak Flats. He had been watching as big girls flirted with a dumb as dog shit bloke; thank God the chlorine stripped their smelly flesh. To steal a line: obesity ravaged the underclass as assuredly as typhoid had ravaged their forebears.

The lawyer crossed his legs; settled in for that surprising chat.

There was no such thing as coincidence.

He, the lawyer, recounted those common tales. Didn't I tell you, you are all Gods? 

But of course there was so much genetic debris in this mewling species that it wasn't specifically true. Not everyone would come back. Few had the capacity to understand. The Bog Irish, or more precisely the local Australian equivalent, drank at the local pub, let their sprawl of kids lick beer off their fingers, became moronically drunk, talked crap for hours on end. The women had all had several children by the time they reached 20. None of them possessed what he would call a physical charm. 

In the changing sheds he started the usual rave. Christ, Buddha, so distrusted the publishing technologies of their time they wrote down not one word. 

Although there was the probably apocryphal story of Christ bending down to write the word "Love" in the sand. 

Love, the world is love, God is love, Christ was all about love, the man expounded.

But for him that simply wasn't true. All of his images from those eras were of war. 

Born fighting. Birthed fully armed. 

The loss of his favourite General, his only ever true love, had curdled his heart down into the current century. He was not a cruel man, but he would not die at their hands. 

There was blood on everybody's conscience. He could still hear those cheers, that wild exultation, in this far place, on this beloved planet, as the voices of the trees swirled in the gusts of wind.  

"I can see the old hierarchies falling," Jacquie, the woman who did cheap haircuts for $10 a pop, had said earlier, at the side of the pool as they swapped pleasantries and all around them mundanes endured their own quiet lives. She had a tendency to make psychic forecasts, believing she had the gift; the gender of his coming grandchildren, the shape of the year ahead.  

Indeed, the times were riven, and the gods were angry. 

No, it was not about love. 

In a land and a time of entwining circumstance; a popular remix played over and over: "What's love got to do, got to do with it?"    

THE BIGGER STORY: 

RENDER UNTO CAESAR

II. THE HISTORICAL SETTING: THE UNDERCURRENT OF TAX REVOLT

In 6 A.D., Roman occupiers of Palestine imposed a census tax on the Jewish people. The tribute was not well-received, and by 17 A.D., Tacitus reports in Book II.42 of the Annals, "The provinces, too, of Syria and Judaea, exhausted by their burdens, implored a reduction of tribute." A tax-revolt, led by Judas the Galilean , soon ensued. Judas the Galilean taught that " taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery ," and he and his followers had " an inviolable attachment to liberty ," recognizing God, alone, as king and ruler of Israel. The Romans brutally combated the uprising for decades. Two of Judas' sons were crucified in 46 A.D., and a third was an early leader of the 66 A.D. Jewish revolt. Thus, payment of the tribute conveniently encapsulated the deeper philosophical, political, and theological issue: Either God and His divine laws were supreme, or the Roman emperor and his pagan laws were supreme.

This undercurrent of tax-revolt flowed throughout Judaea during Jesus' ministry. All three synoptic Gospels place the episode immediately after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem in which throngs of people proclaimed Him king, as St. Matthew states, "And when he entered Jerusalem the whole city was shaken and asked, 'Who is this?' And the crowds replied, 'This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.'" All three agree that this scene takes place near the celebration of the Passover, one of the holiest of Jewish feast days. Passover commemorates God's deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and also celebrates the divine restoration of the Israelites to the land of Israel, land then-occupied by the Romans. Jewish pilgrims from throughout Judaea would have been streaming into Jerusalem to fulfill their periodic religious duties at the temple.

Because of the mass of pilgrims, the Roman procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, had also temporarily taken up residence in Jerusalem along with a multitude of troops so as to suppress any religious violence. In her work, Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, Ann Wroe described Pilate as the emperor's chief soldier, chief magistrate, head of the judicial system, and above all, the chief tax collector. In Book XXXVIII of On the Embassy to Gaius, Philo has depicted Pilate as "cruel," "exceedingly angry," and "a man of most ferocious passions," who had a "habit of insulting people" and murdering them "untried and uncondemned" with the "most grievous inhumanity." Just a few years prior to Jesus' ministry, the image of Caesar nearly precipitated an insurrection in Jerusalem when Pilate, by cover of night, surreptitiously erected effigies of the emperor on the fortress Antonia, adjoining the Jewish Temple; Jewish law forbade both the creation of graven images and their introduction into holy city of Jerusalem. Pilate averted a bloodbath only by removing the images.

In short, Jerusalem would have been a hot-bed of political and religious fervor, and it is against this background that the Tribute Episode unfolded.

III. THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF THE TRIBUTE EPISODE

The Gospel of Matthew states:

[15] Then the Pharisees going, consulted among themselves how to insnare him in his speech. [16] And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying: Master, we know that thou art a true speaker and teachest the way of God in truth. Neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. [17] Tell us therefore what dost thou think? Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? [18] But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? [19] Show me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny [literally, in Latin, "denarium," a denarius]. [20] And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and inscription is this? [21] They say to him: Caesar’s. Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s. [22] And hearing this, they wondered and, leaving him, went their ways. Matt 22:15–22 (Douay-Rheims translation).   

If Jesus says that it is lawful to pay the tribute, He would have been seen as a collaborator with the Roman occupiers and would alienate the people who had just proclaimed Him a king. If Jesus says that the tribute is illegitimate, He risked being branded a political criminal and incurring the wrath of Rome. With either answer, someone would have been likely to kill Him.

Jesus immediately recognizes the trap. He exposes the hostility and the hypocrisy of His interrogators and recognizes that His questioners are daring Him to enter the temporal fray of Judeo-Roman politics.

But by His enigmatic response, did Jesus really mean for His followers to provide financial support (willingly or unwillingly) to Tiberius Caesar — a man, who, in his personal life, was a pedophile, a sexual deviant , and a murderer and who, as emperor, claimed to be a god and oppressed and enslaved millions of people, including Jesus' own? The answer, of course, is: the traditional, pro-tax interpretation of the Tribute Episode is simply wrong. Jesus never meant for His answer to be interpreted as an endorsement of Caesar's tribute or any taxes.