Written by J Punt
While my strongest passion is teaching the Bible to our kids, I love it when I get the chance to dig a little deeper into the text to share with the adults, too.
Right now, our kids are in the middle of a summer series on the Miracles of Jesus. But as I was preparing for them, I kept running across one of my absolute favorite miracle stories—one that you may have never even heard of, and one that is frankly quite a theological head-scratcher for adults and kids alike!
My hope is that this post gives you a small window into why we thought it was so important to focus on Jesus’ miracles specifically in a Waypoint Kids series. But more than that, I’m excited to give the broader congregation (whether you have kids or not) a chance to wrestle with a bizarre story that forces all of us to ask what it truly means to follow Jesus.
This is one weird Miracle! Before we dive into the miracle at hand, I want to take you back to the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel of Matthew. Before Jesus performs a single miracle, he is sent into the desert to fast for 40 days.
While he is starving, Satan approaches him with a proposition: Take that rock over there and turn it into a loaf of bread--he could’ve made it a lot harder by saying turn it into a CFA chicken sandwich, but he didn’t consult me for his tempting strategy, so he just goes with the bread--but Jesus declines. He is not going to perform a miracle—his first, no less, to benefit himself. That’s not the reason he came to earth. That’s not the reason he performs miracles. After all, the son of man came not to be served but to serve.
Instead, Jesus’ actual first miracle in Matthew is a massive healing spree. People are brought to him with various afflictions: severe pain, demon-possession, seizures, paralysis; and he heals them all. Most of Jesus’ miracles are like this: healing people, feeding people, delivering people from demonic oppression or even raising people from the dead.
But then, you get a miracle like this one in Matthew 17 that makes you want to scratch your head because it completely disrupts the pattern. Some temple tax collectors find Peter and confront him about Jesus paying the annual two drachma temple tax. Jesus matter of factly explains to Peter that as the Son of God, he is patently exempt. However, to avoid angering the temple worker, he tells Peter to go out to the lake, cast a line, and open the mouth of the very first fish he catches. Inside, he promises, will be a four-drachma coin—precisely enough to pay the tax for both of them.
There are few things that make this miracle a bit of a head-scratcher. First, it seems trivial: Out of all the world-changing things Jesus said and did that didn't make it into the final cut of the Gospels, did we really need a window into what is essentially Jesus and Peter making an annual trip to the DMV?
And second, it seems self-serving: At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus wouldn't conjure up bread to save himself from starvation. But now, he willingly performs a miracle just to get a tax collector out of his face without having to dip into the disciples' shared purse?
A Miracle Story or a Fairy Tale?
Let’s be honest, there’s a third reason why this miracle falls into the head scratcher category. This miracle doesn’t just seem like an event that breaks the normal laws of nature. It seems unnecessarily silly—like a scene that would take place in a kids book. Before stepping into my role as Kids Director, I used to be a second-grade teacher. Our very first reading unit every year was always fairy tales. This miracle feels like it would be right at home in those lesson plans. In fact, one of my favorite fairy tales as a kid was “The Fisherman and his Wife” by the Brothers Grimm in which a poor fisherman finds a magic fish that gives him whatever he asks for.
As smart, modern, rational people, do we really need to believe that Peter cast a line and hooked a fish that happened to have swallowed the exact amount of change needed for tax day? I usually don’t believe my friends' fishing stories until I subtract at least 50% from the reported length of the fish. This story easily dwarfs the most exaggerated fish stories I’ve ever heard. Because of this, many brilliant, modern scholars who claim to respect and value the Bible highly actually say no. As responsible adults on this side of the enlightenment and scientific revolution we don’t need to believe the fairy tale stuff to take Jesus seriously.
One of the most prominent of those scholars has had a long, famous, and influential career just a few miles from Waypoint church in UNC’s Religion Department. Dr. Bart Ehrman has challenged thousands of Christians through his classes, best-selling books, and popular podcasts to recalibrate how they view the historical Jesus and how they read the gospel. He calls himself a “Christian Atheist."
He doesn’t believe God exists, so he doesn’t believe Jesus is God. However, he highly values what he refers to as the “way of Jesus” and claims to try to follow it as closely as he can. In fact, just a couple months ago he published a book called Love Thy Stranger: How Jesus Transformed Our Moral Conscience. And in this book, he contends for his interpretation of Jesus’ moral vision over what he identifies as increasingly self-serving and xenophobic movements within American culture and politics.
Bart Ehrman’s desire to follow Jesus’ teachings while rejecting his miracles is not a new strategy. In the mid-twentieth century, the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most influential interpreters of the modern era, made famous the practice of “demythologizing” the New Testament. Bultmann’s basic claim was that modern people do not have to accept the Bible’s ancient supernatural worldview in order to hear its humanitarian message. In this practice, you read the Bible by removing the “husk” of the ancient supernatural packaging that responsible modern adults just can’t accept to get to the “kernel” of existential philosophical teaching that we can still respect today.
So, Bultmann and the school of biblical interpretation in his wake might take a story like the one in Matthew 17 and say, let’s peel away the fishing for the coin which later Christians obviously made up, and focus on the teaching that remains. Jesus is gently pushing back on an opulent and extractive religious financial system, saying that there’s no legitimate obligation to pay the temple tax, but he’s also showing that you can be patient and strategic in the way you resist oppressive systems by paying the tax this time around.
So Much More than a Fairy Tale
Hopefully it doesn’t surprise you to hear that I am convinced the Rudolf Bultmann and Bart Ehrman style approach to this story is way off base. As we are teaching our kids this summer, Jesus' miracles are never just trivial magic tricks, and this one is no different. If we look a little closer, we'll see that this "weird" miracle is actually one of the most profound and revealing in the entire Gospel.
The secret history of the temple tax
To understand why, we have to dig deeper into this specific temple tax Jesus is asked to pay, and why Jesus says he doesn’t really have an obligation to pay it.
It’s important to note that this is as much of a tithe as it is a tax. This is a completely different situation from the famous story in Matthew 22 where the Pharisees try to trap Jesus with a Roman tax and he says, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Instead, the temple tax in Matthew 17 is a financial gift given to the priests of the temple in accordance with the Torah (what today is the first five books of the Old Testament). To see what's really going on, we have to flip all the way back to Exodus 30:11-16, where God outlines the purpose of this exact tax to Moses:
In Jesus’ day this practice lived on with Jewish men paying an annual temple tax that was worth about two days’ labor. Matthew wants to make sure we connect the dots, so he includes the exact amount requested: two drachma, which was the exact equivalent of that Old Testament half shekel.
Do you see what just happened? Religious leaders come asking Peter to pay the temple tax which is described in the law of Moses as an “offering to the Lord to make atonement for your lives.” And Jesus miraculously makes the payment for himself and for Peter. Jesus is paying the price of atonement. This is not a self-serving miracle, it’s a small preview of the great self-emptying sacrifice Jesus will make on the cross.
Caught on the Apostles’ Hooks
And Christians haven’t just seen this connection recently. From the earliest centuries of the church, believers recognized that something much bigger was happening in this moment. Early church leaders like Cyril of Alexandria, for example, clearly saw this miracle as a unique encapsulation of the gospel. For Cyril, Peter is the church, new believers are the fish that’s drawn in by the church, and the coin is the payment Christ makes that allows us to join in the community of the redeemed. Cyril beautifully writes, “It is just as if we have been caught out of the sea on the apostles’ hooks. In their mouths the fish have Christ the royal coin, which was rendered in payment of debt … for our soul and for our body.” (Simonetti, M., ed. (2002). Matthew 14-28 (p. 66). IVP.)
Cyril helps us see that this casual tax transaction has been transformed into the picture of the gospel.
A Bold Claim
Now, lest you think Cyril and I are reading too much into what is a simple, minor tax interaction, let’s consider Jesus' words that make up the immediate context of this miracle. After Peter enters the house to tell Jesus about the temple worker, Jesus beats him to the punch, casually displaying divine knowledge by responding to Simon Peter before Peter even got the chance to tell about what had happened. Jesus asks him, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their children or from others?”
When Peter answers, "From others," Jesus delivers the punchline: “Then the children are free.”
Do you see what Jesus is claiming here? He’s not just saying, “O the temple system has become a bit corrupted, so our temple tithe wouldn’t be put to great use anyway,” … or “I’m a rabbi which is like a priest, so I should probably be exempt.” Jesus’ claim is several magnitudes bigger than that. He explains that kings don’t make their own children pay taxes. But in this conversation, they aren’t talking about an earthly palace; they are talking about the temple—and God alone is the King of the temple. So if Jesus is claiming to be free of the temple tax on these grounds, it means he is claiming to be the Son of God. This is not a trivial claim and it's not a trivial miracle.
To make the case even stronger, we have to look at what happens immediately before the fish story. In verses 22 and 23, as the disciples are gathering in Galilee, Jesus explicitly tells them how his time on earth will end: “‘The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised.”
Matthew intentionally placed Jesus’ prediction of his death, burial, and resurrection right before this quirky miracle. When you put it all together—Jesus’ clear claim about his identity, the Old Testament purpose of the atonement tax, and the looming shadow of Golgotha—the conclusion is inescapable. The coin in the fish that Jesus provides is a picture of so much more. It’s a picture of the atoning work of crucifixion.
Liar, Lunatic, or LORD:
Hopefully, you’re starting to see some major cracks in the approach of Christian moralists like Bart Ehrman and Rudolf Bultmann. They want to preserve and admire Jesus’ moral teachings because they can’t deny their spiritual resonance, but they also want to stop short of calling Jesus Lord and God.
This interaction between the temple worker, Peter, and Jesus is a perfect example of why that project falls apart. You could learn from an artist or a philosopher who uses exaggeration, analogy, and even outright fiction to make general ethical principles. The Greek poet Aesop, for example, can teach us about the importance of patience through the story of the tortoise and the hare. But you can’t learn from a teacher whose central claim is that he is the Son of God.
Jesus does not need to pay a tithe to God because He is the Son of God. He will however, pay the atonement offering on our behalf through his life, death and resurrection. And if you can believe that message Jesus has for us in the story—that he has the power and authority to pay for the sins of the world—it’s not much of a leap to also believe that he can produce a fish that has swallowed two coins.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously made the case that when you consider the many things Jesus is recorded as saying throughout the four gospels, there are only so many categories we can put Jesus in. At various times Jesus claims to forgive sins; he claims to have always existed; he said he would judge the world at the end of time. With this in mind, Lewis says:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus saidwould not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
A Blessed Irony
And now we have arrived at the great irony of this story.
In verse 27, Jesus tells Peter to get the coin and make the payment “so as not to offend” the temple worker. But this is of course right after Jesus has said quite possibly the most blasphemous, offensive words a temple worker could ever hear.
The temple worker approaches Peter because he’s suspicious of Peter’s Rabbi, Jesus, violating a minor rule in the law code. He wouldn’t have even imagined a violation on par with the outright blasphemy Jesus says!
To put this in a modern context, imagine a guest preacher comes to Waypoint on Easter Sunday. Before the service, he takes great pains to tell the parking team that he doesn't want to offend anyone or demand special treatment. He insists on parking far away and taking the shuttle, just like the members are asked to do. But then, he walks up to the pulpit, grabs the microphone, and preaches a message claiming that he is actually the fourth member of the Trinity—God’s second son, born co-equal with Jesus.
That’s the same irony taking place in Matthew 17. Jesus “doesn’t want to offend” with his actions in the moment here, but the subtext of the story is a MASSIVE offense to the political and religious systems of his day. And this is precisely what Matthew wants us to see.
It’s not Jesus' actions that are offensive.
It’s his very identity.
Jesus’ identity as the Son of God and only true redeemer of the world is inherently offensive to a world that would rather have no LORD at all.
The Ultimate Scandal
When Jesus says in verse 27 that he doesn’t want to “offend.” The word he uses is σκανδαλίσω which is where we get the English word, scandalize. It literally means to cause to trip or to stumble. This is the same word Paul uses in Romans 9 when he quotes the prophet Isaiah and calls Jesus the great stumbling stone. As Paul explains, the Israelites had been pursuing faithfulness to the law, but when Christ came, he lived the life of perfect faithfulness to the law that none of us ever could. Christ announced that salvation was not ultimately through the law but through trust in the God-man who perfectly fulfilled it for us. In this way, Jesus causes many to stumble who can’t bring themselves to accept that inherently confrontational message. Paul writes:
What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue
righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; 31 but the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. 32 Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone. 33 As it is written:
“See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall,
and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.”
Israel had been pursuing righteousness through the law that God had given them. But Jesus’ very presence announces that the terms have changed. In other words, Jesus is claiming that the very path to salvation religious leaders had been following has shifted. The road no longer points to adherence to the law through one's own best efforts, but it points to and through Christ.
Now, the temple worker in Matthew 17 doesn’t actually hear Jesus’ dramatic claims at this moment, because he only spoke to Peter directly in this passage. But later, Jesus will speak these apparently blasphemous claims to the religious leaders directly.
And honestly, by ultimately deciding that Jesus had to be executed, those religious leaders demonstrated that they understood Jesus’ message much better than Christian moralists do today. They understood the high stakes. This man, Jesus of Nazareth, claims to be the literal Son of God. As such, he should either be worshiped or completely rejected, denounced, and silenced.
The text asks a penetrating question.
And that brings us to the incredibly sharp, challenging application at the heart of Matthew 17. It forces us to look in the mirror and ask:
Do the religious leaders who murdered Jesus on a cross understand Jesus’ message better than you do?
In other words, some of us want Jesus as a teacher—but not as Lord. And that is not a choice he gives us. When you consider the priorities that are represented by your life as it stands today, the question is not “Do my habits show at least a vague resemblance to the kindness and gentleness Jesus preaches.”
The question is this:Do the priorities of your daily life reflect that you actually believe Jesus is the Son of God?
The one who lived, and taught, and healed, and ultimately died a criminal’s death—Do your priorities reflect that He is the Lord of the world…
and the rightful Lord over every resource you have and every minute of your life?
Let’s resist the status quo
I want to acknowledge a specific temptation that is crouching at the door of our church family, just due to the common life cycle of an American church congregation.
Waypoint was planted about13 years ago. We are well-past the high-energy “church plant” stage, when it's much easier for every member to walk in a deep sense of zeal, sacrifice, and purpose to bless the triangle and bless the nations. As time goes on, it becomes dangerously easy for any congregation to slip into becoming another status-quo, comfortable medium-sized church.
It’s easy to just become a comfortable, friendly place for families who feel like our size, our worship style, our programs and our vibes are a good fit for them. A place where they can build a close community and maybe even help develop a strong ethical foundation for life.
But we are not called to be a church who views Jesus a good role-model, a nice mascot, or even the greatest teacher that has ever lived. We are called to view Jesus as the one who has paid the ultimate, costly price for our bodies and souls. We are called to be a church that views Jesus as the one to whom we owe absolutely everything.
The Gospel in Waypoint Kids
“See, I lay in Zion a stone that makes people stumble,” God says, “and a rock that makes them fall and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.” (Romans 9:33)
This is why we don’t just teach our Waypoint kids that Jesus wants them to be nice and share their toys. We want to teach them about his miracles–the signs and wonders that reveal Jesus is God. We’re aiming to build the faith foundation in the next generation that rejects the status quo and follows Jesus with everything they have.
