What Would Jesus Do?

The question is a sincere albeit elementary way of attempting to determine the morality of something. Equating Jesus to God justifies his thoughts and actions as the moral way. We, of course, have no empirical means of knowing what Jesus would have done in any number of situations and are left with scriptural accounts that were not written as factual reports but rather as apologetic treatises. On this day of tea parties in protest of taxation, the “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” response found in Matthew 22:21 would seem reasonably clear, until we stop to consider what is truly being proposed. It is difficult to imagine that Jesus was in a high tax bracket, even though he lived in an empire that perhaps exceeded even the United States in its taxation. Indeed, if taken seriously, the latter part of Jesus’ answer points in the direction of owing nothing to Ceasar if everything is understood to belong to God. But to render “unto God the things that are God’s” doesn’t allow for the hording of that which is not given to the State. I have no objections to paying the taxes I paid today, but I have serious arguments with how they are being used. To truly give to God what is God’s is tantamount to a vow of poverty, a revolutionary new understanding of submitting my all in confidence that I will be cared for as are the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. The next time you hear a “Christian” protesting taxes, ask why it didn’t go to God in the first place.