Paying Taxes

I have to confess that I took a certain amount of pleasure in watching the downfall of the evangelical preacher Ted Haggard. I have serious problems with people who try to tell other people how to live from the beginning, but the fact that he has been such an outspoken opponent of gay rights, and the fact that he was nailed for engaging in gay sex with a male prostitute just makes everything so much better. There was a reason that Jesus told us not to judge one another. It always comes back to bite you in the ass.

Jesus was always after the priests and scribes of his days for being hypocrites. At one point he referred to them as whited sepulchres, coffins, beautiful on the outside but with very gross and scary stuff within. That’s why they wanted him dead. And oh how they tried to trip him up too. Those priests and scribes were always asking him these legal questions trying to see if they could catch him saying something they could use against him, not unlike the Republicans and John Kerry. The difference is that Jesus never obliged them.

It all started when Jesus finally went to Jerusalem. Jesus sent his guys off to get him a donkey, probably knowing all the prophecies and all, and proceeded to ride into town while people laid palm branches before him calling him a king and calling out ” hosanna”, which means ” save us!” I’m sure he did this so boys in Catholic school could laugh at that story saying, ” Ha! Jesus rode into town on his ass! Ha! Ha!” This got the Jewish leaders very nervous because they knew how the Romans could be and they probably wouldn’t like the idea of the people proclaiming some itinerant teacher a king. That sort of thing could lead to a lot of pain and suffering, and could even endanger their own job security.

Then Jesus has to go to the temple and get all pissed off at the moneychangers there. You see, you couldn’t use Roman money in the temple because it had a likeness of Caesar on it and that is against the second commandment, so the temple had its own “Temple money”, you know, kind of like Monopoly Money, and people had to exchange money before entering the temple. Conveniently, there were little booths where people could change their money…for a fee. Jesus saw this and it pissed him off. He overturned all the tables and threw the moneychangers out. He said the temple should be a house of prayer, not a den of thieves. If the authorities were upset before, they were really pissed now. It’s one thing to piss of the Romans, but you don’t come between a church and its money. Now they were determined to catch him at something.  Here’s the bit in The Gospel According to Mark that tells the story:

“They came and said to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you are not concerned with anyone’s opinion. You do not regard a person’s status but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or should we not pay?’

“Knowing their hypocrisy he said to them, “Why are you testing me? Bring me a denarius to look at.’ They brought one to him and he said to them, ‘Whose image and inscription is this?’

“They replied to him, ‘Caesar’s.’

So Jesus said to them, ‘Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’ They were utterly amazed at him.” (Mark, Chapter 12)

So they ask him if it’s okay to pay taxes. Jesus tells them to bring him some money. He asks whose picture is that on the coin and they tell him Caesar’s. Jesus tells them to give to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar, and to give to God the things that belong to God. Okay, he ducked that bullet. Then they give him this highly unlikely hypothetical story about this woman who marries seven different brothers each of whom die. It was the Jewish custom for a guy to marry his brother’s widow should he happen to die. They ask Jesus which of the brothers will be her husband in heaven.

Personally, it seems a little suspicious to me that every brother she marries ended up dying. I would have been very nervous had I been brother number seven. Jesus answers them by telling them that they don’t really have a clue about what heaven is like. There is no marriage in heaven, he tells them. He obviously knew my first wife. These guys were trying to trip him up by asking about life after death. There was no official Jewish opinion on the life after death issue. The Pharisees believed in an afterlife, but the scribes did not. This whole marriage question was meant to ridicule the idea of a hereafter. Jesus retorts to them that they themselves refer to God as the God of Abraham, and Abraham was long gone. Jewish law said that God was a God of the living, not the dead. So, therefore, Abraham must be living. Score one more for Jesus.

Then one of the scribes asks what the most important commandment is. Jesus tells him, “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. And the second is you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” At this, the scribe (basically a lawyer) attains understanding and tells Jesus that he has spoken rightly. Jesus tells him that he is not far from the Kingdom of God. Nobody asked him anymore questions after that. And this is what always upsets me about so many “Christian” churches. They have so many rules, and they judge people by those rules.

There are plenty of churches that don’t allow drinking, don’t allow dancing, don’t allow make up, don’t even allow neck ties (although I’m sort of sympathetic to that one). There are churches that go after gays, that go after unwed mothers, that go after abortion clinics, that go after liberals, that go after just about anybody who doesn’t share their myopic view of God. You can’t get divorced. You can’t go into a strip joint. You can’t gamble. Some churches used to outlaw music. The Roman Catholic Church used to try to tell us what books to read and what movies to watch. They try to tell you how to pray and who to love. They tell you how much money to give and to whom you should give it. They make up all these rules, but Jesus only gave us two. Love God, and love each other. And those seem to me to be the ones most of these ” churches” seem to ignore. Bombing abortion clinics is sort of a funny way of showing the people inside how much you love them.

And what do those two commandments have in common? Love. That’s all. Just love. That’s what we’re supposed to do. We are supposed to love. Love God. Love ourselves. Love each other. And that doesn’t mean like. There’s some people that are mighty hard to like. Any parent will tell you they don’t always like their own kids…but s/he does love them. You don’t have to like somebody to love them. You just have to recognize that s/he is a child of God, just as you are. If we could only do just that. It’s kind of hard to kill people if you love them. It’s hard to cheat them or abuse them. If we could only teach ourselves to actually love this planet upon which we crawl, maybe we could quit making it uninhabitable.

And you know why Jesus said there were only two rules? Because you just can’t follow a bunch or rules, that’s why. Lao Tzu said it was laws that made criminals. Make a law, and somebody will break it, sure as shit. That’s why I take a certain amount of guilty pleasure in the downfall of guys like Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and now Ted Haggard. They spent so much time condemning people for breaking rules they couldn’t follow themselves. I have much more respect for preachers like the late Gene Scott, who lived a pretty wild life, but never pretended to live any other way, saying it was nobody’s business but God’s and his own how he lived.

And that’s just it. How you choose to live your life, what you do, and with whom you sleep (or not sleep, if you know what I mean and I think you do) is between you and God, whatever your idea of the divine creative presence in the universe might be. I am not here to judge you in any way. Frankly, I never could figure out why anybody would care what anybody else did as long as they weren’t hurting anybody. I can only judge you if I think myself better than you. And I know myself way too well to think that. I’m not better than anybody at anything. And if I think myself better than you, then how can I love you?

No, you are all too wonderful for me to think anything except how magical your very being is. I am proud to think of you all as friends. I hope Ted Haggard has learned from all this, but I doubt it. And in the meantime, here is God’s message for us all: Be good to each other and play nice. Amen.