Election Season and the Politics of Jesus

The signs are up. The ads are running, the mailers are in the box, and every screen in the country has been sold to somebody running for something. Midterm season. If you believe the television, this November is the most important election of your lifetime, and so was the last one. The country is at a crossroads, we’re told, every two years, at a crossroads.

And into a pulpit in an election year somebody has to say something, because the pew is tired. Tired of being sorted, tired of being sold, tired of churches that sound like campaign offices with a cross on the wall. So here is the text I want to give you. Let me be honest about what it is: it’s about a head tax under an occupation, not a ballot. There was no ballot in first-century Galilee, no candidates, no booths. But the principle underneath his answer transfers whole, and it’s better than anything the pundits have come up with since.

The Trap

Mark 12. The Pharisees and the Herodians team up to ask Jesus a question. The teams matter. The Pharisees despised Rome. The Herodians were built on cooperation with it. These two groups agreeing to walk into the same room is a sign of how badly they wanted this question answered. And the question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?”

It was a perfect trap. If Jesus says pay the tax, he’s a Roman collaborator, and the crowd that hopes he’s the Messiah turns on him. If he says don’t pay, he’s a rebel, and Rome handles rebels without trial. There is no safe answer, which is why they chose it. They even opened with flattery, “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion,” which is the politest thing a lynch mob ever said.

Jesus asks for a coin. Notice, he doesn’t dig in his pocket. Mark never says he couldn’t have; the likeliest read is that he makes them supply it, and the irony is perfect: the men scandalized by Caesar’s face have been carrying it into the temple courts in their robes the whole time. Then he holds it up. “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” The word for likeness is the Genesis word, image. And look at the coin itself: the inscription around Tiberius’s face called him Son of the Divine Augustus. A divine claim, stamped on the money in his hand. They say, “Caesar’s.” And Jesus gives the answer that has outlived every empire that ever tried to trap it: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And Mark says they marveled.

No Emperor Is Ultimate

Here’s what the answer actually says, and it cuts in two directions, which is why everybody got quiet.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Jesus does not say withdraw. He doesn’t tell his people to hide in the hills until the empire collapses. The coin exists in Caesar’s economy; pay the tax it carries, and pay it without losing your soul over it. Christians are not called out of the world. We vote. We serve. We pay for the roads and the fire department, and where the conscience permits, even the government’s wars, and we do it without pretending a ballot is a sacrament.

But the second half is the engine of the whole sentence, and it’s aimed at Caesar. “And to God the things that are God’s.” And what bears God’s image? Genesis 1. The man does. The coin bears Caesar’s face; give the coin to Caesar. You bear God’s image; give yourself to God. Caesar gets currency. God gets you. And once you hear it that way, the limits are unmistakable. Caesar may tax the coin. Caesar may not have the man. No emperor, no party, no platform, no flag ever gets the worship, the conscience, or the ultimate loyalty of a human being made in the image of God. The early church died rather than give it, and they sang on the way.

That’s the politics of Jesus, and it is a scandal to every side, and I want to wound both sides honestly, because both sides keep trying to sign him up. To the left, he refuses to make the state the savior, because the state cannot atone. It cannot forgive, and every government that promises heaven on earth has ended up delivering a road to the other place. And to the right, he refuses to baptize the nation, because the nation is not Israel and never was; the covenant is not with a flag, and the church has not replaced anybody, but the kingdom of God is not the United States with better hymns. A love of your own place and your own people is a good and human thing; what it may never become is a god with a flag on it. And hear me say the third thing too, because it’s the one aimed at us: the quiet temptation at our own door isn’t socialism, it’s accommodation. It’s drifting along with a culture that has made up its mind about the unborn, about the body, about what a conscience is allowed to keep, and never noticing that the drift happened in church. Jesus’ politics cuts at that one hardest of all. Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof.” That includes the ballot boxes, the courthouses, and every marble building in every capital. They’re all borrowed. Their tenants change. Their leases expire.

But Here’s the Mirror

Now the mirror, and this one is going to be uncomfortable in both directions, which is how you know it’s honest.

The church in this country has spent a generation letting the parties do our Bible interpretation for us. Whatever the platform says about the poor, we find a verse to match. Whatever the tribe has decided about the stranger, we discover the same thing in Romans. And we call it conviction, but the give-away is the direction of the traffic. Scripture is supposed to form the believer. In too many churches, the party forms the believer, and scripture gets recruited as staff. If your reading of Jesus just happens to line up perfectly with your voting record, down every line, you didn’t study the text. You memorized the talking points with a concordance.

And the mirror turns the other way too, because this church is not exempt from the mirror opposite: contempt. The believer who has decided the other half of the country is trash has already broken the commandment about the image of God, and no November result can make that righteous. Your neighbor across the aisle is not your enemy. And she isn’t your project, either. She’s your neighbor, whom the law commands you to love as yourself, and the pew she sits in and the one you sit in get washed in the same blood, and the table of the Lord does not have party caucuses.

Here’s the grace that holds a sermon like this together so it doesn’t leave us either cynical or combative. Our citizenship, Paul says, is in heaven, “and from it we await a Savior” (Philippians 3:20). And know where he wrote that: Philippi, a Roman colony, whose residents were proud of exactly that, people who got to say they were Roman without living in Rome. He’s talking to people who know what citizenship means and takes the word away from the empire. He doesn’t say our citizenship is in heaven so we may ignore the earth. He says we vote, speak, and serve as sojourners, people whose home is elsewhere and whose passports are from a kingdom that cannot fall. A sojourner can engage his temporary town with real love and zero desperation, because his hope doesn’t ride on the returns. And let me add one sentence, because zero desperation is not zero urgency. Sojourners love the town they’re passing through, and some of our neighbors are in real danger whatever the returns say; the urgency of loving them doesn’t wait for a winner to be declared. Whatever happens in November, the Savior is not up for election, the gates of hell will not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18), and the election that decided your eternity was decided two thousand years ago outside a city wall.

So What Do We Do?

Vote, and vote like a sojourner. Take the real thing into the booth: not the platform, the Sermon on the Mount. Measure every candidate against the actual words of Jesus: how they speak of the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, the unborn, the truth, the liberty of the conscience. Let the scores fall where they fall, on both sides, and if one side racks up a clean sheet, you measured with the wrong ruler. The day the church can only endorse a party is the day we’ve traded the birthright for a bumper sticker.

Refuse the sorting. This season, practice one stubborn act of fellowship with a believer who votes differently than you. Not to split the difference. Because the table of the Lord is bigger than the platform, and somebody’s politics are always going to be wrong, and it’s better to find that out across a covered dish than across a picket sign. And a word to the comfortable half of that arrangement: for some folks in this room, fellowship across that divide costs more than a covered dish. If a position in this campaign touches your family’s safety or your standing in this town, the burden of the bridge isn’t all yours to carry. The rest of us carry it with you, starting by making this room safe to be honest in.

Guard your inputs. If the voices forming your soul from Monday to Saturday are all from one camp, then your faith is being discipled by people who have never once prayed for you. Read your Bible more than your feed this season, and I promise the difference will show.

And render to God what is God’s, daily. Caesar gets his coin, fine. But the conscience, the worship, the love of the enemy, the care of the poor, the truth at cost, those were never on his invoice, and he knows it. The image of God on your life is not up for a vote. Give it where it belongs.