Sacred Silence

The chief priests and scribes had a crafty question for Jesus: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor? If Jesus said yes, then he would be subject to criticism for paying homage to a political figure. If he said no, then he could be prosecuted for defying the power of the emperor. It seemed as though they had cornered him with an unanswerable question.

Jesus evades the trap by showing that the currency of the realm bears the emperor's image and so can be given (or, if you prefer, given back) to the empire. Give the emperor's things to the emperor, give God's things to God. It is a brilliant reframing of an unacceptable binary choice into an acceptable one. The story has much to teach us--not just about how we view the relationship between our faith and the world as we find it, but about how we analyze the difficult choices that often confront us.

But I think that the story offers other lessons as well. Consider, for example, the response of the chief priests and scribes after Jesus answers their question: "and, being amazed by his answer, they became silent." This seems to me a pregnant silence, indeed.

There are occasions when God's grace or love or blessings keep us from silence: we must speak out; we must cry aloud; we must praise and celebrate. But there are other occasions when we are so moved that speech fails us altogether: we cannot describe what we have experienced; words are inadequate; we must be quiet and still. These occasions have something in common: we often find ourselves in the midst of them when we have made ourselves open to God's presence and influence in our lives.

What I love about this story, though, is that a silence-inducing amazement comes not to Jesus's disciples--but to his critics; not to the true believers--but to the skeptics. It comes in the midst of doubt, intransigence, and resistence. It comes at a singularly unlikely moment to a singularly unlikely audience.

It is tempting, perhaps, to focus on the priests and scribes and to shake our heads in judgment over how they missed such a signal opportunity to see the truth. But it seems to me that the more interesting project is to use this story to focus on our own struggles. And this is a particularly appropriate project for the self-reflective season of Lent.

The final line of this story tells us that God can amaze us--any of us, all of us--to the point of stunned silence even when we are not feeling particularly open to it. Even when we are assailed by our own doubt, intransigence, and resistence. Even when we think the unanswerable questions of life have worked our faith into a corner from which it could not possibly escape.

Amen.