Bible reading: Matthew 22:15-22.

I don’t really know Crickhowell. I’ve driven through it on the main A40 and crossed its famous old bridge, allegedly the longest stone bridge in Wales; but I’ve never stopped to look around. However the town has won the “Best High Street in Wales” award more than once, and it’s regarded as a desirable place to live. According to its tourism website, “Crickhowell is a picturesque town nestling in the beautiful Usk Valley and lying to the south of the Black Mountains, the eastern range of the Brecon Beacons National Park, Bannau Brycheiniog. The town and surrounding villages have attractions that are enticements for all visitors to this wonderful corner of Wales”. I’ll take their word for it!

I suspect that Crickhowell is one of those places which likes to get on quietly with life. But it did hit the headlines in a small way in 2015 when some of its traders including a salmon smokehouse, a coffee shop, a bookshop, a bakery and an optician, declared that they were going to take advantage of some fiscal loopholes often exploited by multinational companies; in short, they were going to reduce their tax burdens by “going offshore”. The traders had no intention of breaking the law: in fact they discussed their plans with HMRC. Their aim was simply to show how small businesses were creaking under the weight of taxes they could not avoid, while giants such as Caffe Nero and Amazon with sales running into billions of pounds paid little tax or even none at all. That seemed so unfair.

The promoters of this scheme hoped that businesses in other places would join them to form an unstoppable crusade against unfair taxes. But, despite a BBC TV programme being made about it, that never happened. The idea was simply too complicated for small traders to handle, and after a couple of years the “Fair Tax Town” movement fizzled away. The folk behind it continued to hope that others might take it forward, but I don’t think they ever did. Last year, meanwhile, Amazon’s main UK division paid no corporation tax for the second year in a row; in fact it received a tax credit of £7.7m to invest in infrastructure, including robotic equipment at its warehouses.

Tax was a big issue in Jesus’ day, as Israel was not a free state but one under Roman occupation. The Roman government levied three taxes: there was a ground tax, paid partly in kind and partly in money, at the rate of one-tenth of the grain and one-fifth of the oil and wine which a person produced; there was an income tax, which amounted to one per cent of one’s income; and there was a fixed-rate poll tax, payable by every male from the age of fourteen to sixty-five and every female from twelve to sixty-five. It was this poll tax of one denarius, the equivalent of a day’s wage for a working man, which was particularly detested by the Jews. For this tax, instituted in the year 6 AD, was a constant reminder that Rome was the boss and the Jews were the underdogs. It was unpopular and contentious (although the Herodians, supporters of the puppet king Herod Antipas, favoured Roman taxes); in fact it had led to periodic revolts and riots.

So, when Jesus was asked whether it was licit to pay taxes to Caesar or not, he was placed in an impossible situation, especially as his questioners were carefully selected disciples of both the pro-Jewish Pharisees and pro-Roman Herodians. He knew he wasn’t being asked a simple request for information, but a loaded or trick question; any answer he gave would, it seemed, get him into trouble, which was the whole point of the exercise. The Pharisees and Herodians were poles apart politically, but both saw Jesus as an awkward thorn in their side, who needed to be removed.

For if Jesus said that he opposed the tax, he would be immediately marked out as a nationalist rebel dedicated to overthrowing the Roman powers. This would have made him popular among the radical Jewish Zealots, perhaps even the Pharisees, but it would have also led to him being arrested and handed over to Pilate, the Roman Governor. Conversely, if Jesus said that the tax should be paid, then he would be branded as a traitor to the Jewish cause; and, moreover, someone who was disobeying the Second Commandment because every coin had a picture – a “graven image” – of Caesar stamped upon it. Jesus’ classic answer, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” was as brilliant as it was unexpected. No wonder it left everyone speechless.

So what does this deliberately ambiguous answer say to us – apart from demonstrating that Jesus was a quick and clever thinker! Some folk think that it shows Jesus keeping himself above politics, and that Christians should do the same (but of course many Christians have got very involved in politics, from right-wing Trumpists to radical South American revolutionaries.) Other interpreters claim that the story’s real point lies in the way Jesus avoided giving a direct answer: he didn’t lay down the law or tell people what to think, but made them work things out for themselves. Indeed, what Jesus said could have sustained a lively market-place debate for hours, long after he and his questioners had left the scene. Yet other people think that the story shows how Christians have dual loyalties, to God in spiritual matters and to the state in temporal ones. That’s what we’ll now explore.

For the story does show us that Christ’s followers are members of two communities: ordinary human society and the Kingdom of heaven. We are, at one and the same time, under the authority of God and the authority of our earthly government. This can lead to tension if we find ourselves in situations which force us to decide which allegiance is the more important. Although we don’t often have to think our way through such dilemmas, they have been a massive problem for some Christians down through the centuries. This came to the fore during the pandemic when some churches – wrongly, in my view – defied the Government’s edict to close their buildings, insisting that the Bible’s command to gather for worship was God-given and trumped the rules that had been set by lawmakers who were mere humans. This seems very different from the situation in Communist countries whose governments weren’t just tyrannical, corrupt and unjust but also committed to restricting and ultimately abolishing religion altogether.

I don’t think that the Bible gives us any mandate for opting out of our civic responsibilities. In a passage of the letter to the Romans, Paul suggests that the secular authorities have been set in place by God so ought to be obeyed. He makes it quite clear that Christians have no remit to stop paying their proper taxes, even though they believe that their ultimate citizenship is in heaven. After all, the rubbish still has to be collected on Friday mornings! And I think what Paul says here reflects the fact that he was a good Roman citizen, committed to law and order – even though he was both a Jew who must have disliked the power of the Roman Empire and a Christian who considered any suggestion of Caesar being divine as blasphemy of the first order.

Of course there have been Christians who, for reasons of conscience which may seem strange to us today, refused to pay their taxes and were willing to face the penalties. The 1902 Education Act effectively meant that Anglican schools were being financed from local rates. Many Nonconformist Christians felt that this was wrong, nothing less than a ploy by the Church of England to indoctrinate children in a type of Christian teaching, particularly Anglo-Catholicism, from which their parents dissented. The cry went up: “Rome on the rates!”, and many decided to avoid paying the precept which applied to education.

The first protesters were taken to court in early 1903; bailiffs were sent to their homes to seize goods that wouldto pay the amount owed to the local authority. These could be of great variety: in Coventry, for example they included bicycles, a microscope, a gold watch, a half-plate camera and (from a minister) an “Alphabetical Arrangement of the Words in the Hebrew Talmud, translated into German” which I can’t think would have sold for much! The bailiffs often took silver teapots as they were portable and reasonablyfairly valuable; indeed, some protesters kept one on the mantelpiece for that very purpose. John Clifford, the famous Baptist minister who led the whole protest and appeared in court 41 times, was more original: he set aside some silver trowels which had been given to him at chapel stonelayings – and bought them back again afterwards.

This all sounds quite jolly, but some protesters were gaoled for between seven days and three months, which would be very trying for respectable Christian men. The three years of this so-called ‘Passive Resistance’ movement saw 70,880 summonses, 2568 auctions and 176 imprisonments. The Nonconformists’ grievance received ample publicity, yet they ultimately failed to change Government policy.

I don’t know if any of us have ever thought of withholding taxes. That could be for several reasons: we might disagree on the Government’s policy on nuclear weapons, we might feel that we shouldn’t be paying for projects which don’t benefit our part of Britain or Wales (yes, I am thinking of HS2), we might consider that the Council was frittering its money irresponsibly on vanity projects when it ought to be repairing the roads (who here is in favour of the Canal Quarter project?), we might even feel that there is too much waste or even corruption in the system, with our hard-earned cash being pocketed by the cronies of the powers-that-be. Yet, while we all want to see our taxes used well and definitely should voice our concerns, I’m not sure that we should refuse to pay them unless we have very firm moral grounds for doing so. After all Jesus had every reason to say, “On no account pay those accursed Roman taxes!” but actually said the exact opposite.

But is it ever right to take strong action against unfair taxation? The Rebecca riots of the 1840s were a series of protests by tenant farmers in West Wales who paid tolls to use the turnpike roads. These were a big expense for small farmers who needed to take produce to market and collect lime fertiliser. The tolls could amount to five shillings for moving a cart just eight miles. And this wasn’t the only reasons for discontent at the time: there had been several years of poor harvests; landlords who were seeking to merge smallholdings into larger, more profitable farms; population growth meaning greater competition for scarce land and jobs; the passing of the Poor Laws which forced the able-bodied poor into workhouses – all accompanied by a huge gulf between the wealthy English-speaking gentry and the ordinary, largely Welsh-speaking, ordinary folk. Something had to give.

During the riots men disguised themselves as women, destroyed toll gates, and tried to burn down a workhouse. As time went on, the disturbances became larger and more violent. A tollkeeper was killed and marines and troops were called in. Eventually the authorities suppressed the riots, arresting some of those involved and sentencing them to transportation. But things were changing, right across Britain. Turnpike trusts became more tightly controlled and the new railways made transport easier. People could more easily move to find work and this helped reduce the pressure on jobs in rural areas. The ending of the Corn Laws in 1846, and attempts in 1847 to make the Poor Laws less cruel also played their part. So had the rioters won, and were their riots justified? What would Jesus – who, as we know, was against both violence and injustice – have done? I don’t know.

Well, it’s a long way in both distance and time between Jesus being shown a coin in Jerusalem and rioting farmers in West Wales! I’m sure that none of us enjoys paying our taxes, and that we all get very angry when we see big businesses and rich individuals wriggling their way out of doing so through tax avoidance schemes, and depriving the Government of much-needed cash. Christians may sometimes need to think about their civic duties and may – very rarely and never for selfish reasons – conclude that they must obey God rather than the State. But we can’t opt out of our civic duties to society we don’t like them, nor can we say, “I don’t have to bother with such matters because I’m on my way to heaven”. Jesus would not have agreed!