Foreigner
Jesus is announcing to mankind that he is interested in our history, that He has chosen to take on the burden of our individual and collective salvation. He also reveals the evangelical procedures for well-being and liberation which will lead Him to a violent conflict with the elders of the people, the priests of the temple. He explains that He intends to accept - out love for us - even a violent, mortal response. And precisely as He is explaining how He will accept - out of tenderness and compassion, out of love for us and obedience to the Father - all of the evil, hate, humiliation, ridicule and torture that He will be subjected to. He also reveals that He will raise up from the dead and the empirical fact of being God, the Lord of Life itself. Jesus is announcing all of this to humanity and a legal representative of the temple, a tax collector, a religious administrator asks Jesus to pay taxes. Jesus is announcing and revealing to the world with what love and limitless dedication He is taking care of our salvation and of reharmonizing our life because we are His beloved children and at the highpoint of the scene we ask Him to pay taxes.
Jesus points out that the kings of the earth take taxes from foreigners and not from their children; it was thus a tax that stigmatized a foreigner, a foreigner par excellence, a foreigner to all of history, so He might as well leave it to the stomach of fish to pay the tax. Among other things, and it is not a coincidence, the tax they were talking about was a temple tax. In an elegant but unequivocal way Jesus affirms that He, the Lord God is treated as a foreigner precisely by the temple, the religious heart of that time. And now, just as then, the religious hierarchy treated Jesus as a foreigner, so Jesus one day will estrange himself completely from the temple and the religious hierarchy.
Asking a tax, a temple tax from the host of the House. Quite embarassing for even the most elementary forms of life as well as for all living creatures and for the entire Universe. Over time, due to our violence and stupidity we ourselves have become foreigners to life and to the universe, to nature and the planet, not in harmony with ourselves and out of axis with everything so foreign that life itself is about to ask us to pay a tax: a tax of cosmic dimensions. We should ask ourselves what fish will be able to help us pay it.