Give Him His Damn Money

No Laws, No Caesars

“Give to Caesar what is Caesar's. Give to God what is God's.”

I have often heard powerful men quoting these well known words of Jesus. They’re quite often used to demand servile obedience to power. Go to church on Sunday. Obey your political rulers and bow to your monarchs. God demands your piety. Rulers demand obedient citizenship. Life is thus divided between its different masters, who preside over different spheres of life. Do what you will with whatever is left besides.

The phrase is sometimes tipped in another direction, however. It is commonly used to defend the realm of Caesar against mischievous incursions on the part of God. I recall the conservative writer Peter Hitchens guffawing at activist clergy, and quoting the maxim above. Jesus, like all sensible Englishmen, refused to comment on politics since he was preoccupied with religion. Run along and pray your way to heaven! Caesar quotes Jesus to keep Jesus out of Caesar's business

Both of these sermonettes address a problem that plagued the beginnings of modernity. As Foucault notes, the Bible was at the root of all kinds of up-turning revolutionary chaos once it was translated into common tongues: the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Anabaptists, the Quakers and so on. It was necessary to quickly erect a wall of division between what was God's and what was Caesar’s. 

The Messiah—the anti-caesar—was certainly not inclined to steer clear of politics. Politics and religion were simply not different things in that world. Nor was the Messiah a model of servile obedience to powers that be. He was executed by them within a week of speaking the words above. So what to make of this enigmatic phrase?

The messianic idea in Judaism is inherently and absolutely political. A Messiah figure was a political liberator. Any decent Messiah would have adherents and opponents, depending on one’s position. A sure way of putting a Messiah figure in a tight spot, if one were so inclined, was to ask them an unanswerable question: “should we, then, pay taxes to Caesar?” This is a cheap trick. Nobody there thinks they should pay taxes to Caesar’s brutal military occupation. But nobody can say that you shouldn't pay taxes to Caesar, because if you do, you’ll be dead by sundown. Now your Messiah figure either shows no spine and loses credibility, or they speak their mind and die.

This Messiah figure had a quick wit and finds a way of unmaking the trap. 

“Show me a coin,” he says. 

Someone digs one out. 

“Whose face is that on the coin?” he asks. 

“It’s Caesar's,” they say.

We will return to the question of why this was a revealing moment for the people there gathered. First let's allow it to reveal something to us, in our contemplation of these four refusals: no debts, no masters, no law, no Caesars. In this scene the relationship between these things—their total involvement in one another—is gathered and manifest in this object, this single coin in the palm of a colonised hand. Money itself is, of course, strictly speaking, debt. Money is a token for goods that are owed. The more money one has, the more goods one is owed. As such, money delineates the law of property. What belongs to who, and who owes who what, are written in the language of money, the language of debt. And of course all laws hang on the guarantee of violence. The keeping of these laws of debt, are guaranteed by mastery and hierarchy. Specifically, the law of debt is guaranteed by Caesar, who literally has his face graven into the coins themselves. There is something quite fascinating about the unbroken continuity of this order. I expect many of us can reach into our pockets and find some currency with some person's likeness on it.

For the people gathered in the scene, this intersection of systemic subjections had what we might call today, religious significance. The face of this man moulded into the coinage that kept a violent system of law, debt, mastery and colonial taxation together, was against the religious commandment: “You shall not make a graven image…” It was an idol. The whole edifice revealed a structure of oppressive power relations, in which the powerful image of some Caesar was the linchpin. They considered this such a pronounced problem that they coined their own imageless currency to use in the temple, so that at least that sacred place remained undefiled. 

When Jesus asks the questioners if they have any money in their pockets, he is asking them something incriminating. “Are you not carrying idols to Caesar in your pockets?” Immediately the scene is awoken to the obvious, that the question is hypocritical. They have no grounds to accuse anyone of kowtowing to Caesar. All are enclosed against their will in this iniquitous and idolatrous power relation.

But then a new question emerges for all who find themselves in this circle of debt, mastery, law and sovereignty. Ecclesial history has possibly given a mis-impression, but in fact God has no desire to have God’s likeness printed on tokens of debt, and no desire to rule over that enclosing order with the threat of violence. This is not because God observes the English old-boys' ruling and obediently keeps out of politics. An almost unthinkable idea is here being spoken back into being—a politics outside the system of debt, law and mastery. 

Silvia Federici describes the sad meeting of these worlds in her brilliant book Caliban and the witch. At the time of the English enclosures, there was a process of monetising work. Communities who subsisted together, without money, in the weave of community and land, found themselves evicted from the commons. Then they were invited back to work as wage-labourers. Those who used to find the stuff of life in direct relationship with the abundance of the earth, found themselves instead working for a stack of coins, each with the face of some ruler on it. They themselves were enclosed into a system that would mediate and manage their relationship with the world, since they themselves could not be trusted to manage their own lives. They were encircled into a system of debt, mastery and law, which turned them into biological farming machines employed to increase somebody else's wealth and power.

It is the utopian province of the Messiah to announce that there is a life to be lived on the earth, apart from that world of debt, law and mastery. So let Caesar have his damned money. You can’t eat money. There is another economy: an ecology of pistis, of goodfaith: a web of creaturely relations, reciprocity, and direct unmediated life, shared together with all our relations. A life without Caesar's faced printed all over it.