“Capon’s Take On the ‘End of Religion’”
from Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: paradox, outrage, and vindication in the parables of Jesus
by Robert Farrar Capon
Matthew 17:24-27 “The First Parable of Grace”
24When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter and said, “Does not your teacher pay the tax?” 25He said, “Yes.” And when he came home, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their sons or from others?” 26And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. 27However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”
Capon writes: (footnotes are not in the original)
The general thrust of my treatment of the coin in the fish’s mouth—and especially of Jesus’ words, “then the children are free”—is to interpret the whole passage as a proclamation of the end of religion. To me, the episode says that whatever it was that religion was trying to do (the religion of the temple in particular and, by extension, all religions everywhere) will not be accomplished by religious acts at all but in the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection. As I said, that perception seems to have been so liberating to Jesus that he allowed himself the frivolity of this very odd miracle indeed. But beyond that, it is also (or at least it should be) radically liberating to everyone.
The entire human race is profoundly and desperately religious. From the dim beginnings of our history right up to the present day, there is not a man, woman, or child of us who has ever been immune to the temptation to think that the relationship between God and humanity can be repaired from our side, by our efforts. Whether those efforts involve creedal correctness, cultic performances, or ethical achievements—or whether they amount to little more than crassly superstitious behavior—we are all, at some deep level, committed to them. If we are not convinced that God can be conned into being favorable to us by dint of our doctrinal orthodoxy, or chicken sacrifices, or the gritting of our moral teeth, we still have a hard time shaking the belief that stepping over sidewalk cracks, or hanging up the bath towel so the label won’t show, will somehow render the Rule of the Universe kindhearted, softheaded, or both.
But as the Epistle to the Hebrews pointed out long ago, all such behavior is bunk. The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins, nor can any other religious act do what it sets out to do. Either it is ineffective for its purpose, or the supposedly effective intellectual, spiritual, or moral uprightness it counts on to do the job is simple unavailable. The point is, we haven’t got a card in our hand that can take even a single trick against God. Religion, therefore—despite the correctness of its insistence that something needs to be done about our relationship with God—remains unqualified bad news: it traps us in a game we will always and everywhere lose.
But the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is precisely Good News. It is the announcement, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, that God has simply called off the game—that he has taken all the disasters religion was trying to remedy and, without any recourse to religion at all. Set them to rights by himself. How sad, then, when the church acts as if it is in the religion business rather than in the Gospel-proclaiming business. What a disservice, not only to itself but to a world perpetually sinking in the quagmire of religiosity, when it harps on creed, cult, and conduct as the touchstones of salvation. What a perversion of the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) when it takes the news that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8), and turns it into a proclamation of God as just one more insufferable bookkeeper.
I realize this is a long fetch from the parable of the coin in the fish’s mouth, but I make no apologies. In fact I end with something even farther fetched. The Messiah whom Jesus’ contemporaries expected—and likewise any and all of the messiahs’ the world has looked to ever since (even, alas, the church’s all-too-often graceless, punishing version of Jesus’ own messiahship)—are like nothing so much a religious versions of “Santa Claus is coming to town.” The words of that dreadful Christmas song sum up perfectly the only kind of messianic behavior the human race, in its self-destructive folly, is prepared to accept: “He’s making a list; he’s checking it twice; he’s going to find out who’s naughty, or nice”—and so on into the dark night of all the tests this naughty world can never pass. For my money, what Jesus senses clearly and for the first time in the coin in the fish’s mouth is that he is not, thank God, Santa Claus. He will come to the world’s sins with no lists to check, no tests to grade, no debts to collect, no scores to settle. He will wipe away the handwriting that was against us and nail it to his cross (Col. 2:14). He will save, not some minuscule coterie of good little boys and girls with religious money in their piggy banks, but all the stone-broke, deadbeat, overextended children of this world whom he, as the Son of man—the holy Child of God, the Ultimate Big Kid, if you please—will set free in the liberation of his death.
And when he senses that… well, it is simple to laugh. He tacks a “Gone Fishing” sign over the sweatshop of religion, and for the debts of all sinners who ever lived; he provides exact change for free. How nice it would be if the church could only remember to keep itself in on the joke.
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