Whose Image?

 

You know, since the pandemic, I don’t find myself paying in cash for things very often – really, only my Saturday tai chi class when it’s on. Most things get paid for by contactless debit card, except occasionally when we’re on one of our motorhome trips and somewhere doesn’t take a card. But that’s rare, these days – even my church has a device so you can make your offering by contactless if you like, although we’d rather people set up a standing order. You try standing at the front of the church holding a really heavy offering plate while the music group finishes their song!

Seriously, though, if you do have a coin available, take it out and look at it. And I shall repeat Jesus’ question: “Whose image is on the coin?” I suspect for most of you, assuming it is a British coin, the answer will be “The late Queen”, although some coins are now being issued with the King’s head on them. They also have wording round the sides saying who they are, and various letters, saying basically that this is the monarch and they are the defender of the Faith.
When I was a girl, in the dim and distant days before decimal currency came in, you certainly had the Queen’s head on the coins, but you also had coins dating right back to Queen Victoria. My father used to show us a coin and make us guess what year it was issued. If we got it right, we got to keep the coin. We seldom did, but it did make sure we knew the dates of 20th-century monarchs!

Of course, different countries have different things on their coins,
if you look at Euro coins, they have a different design on one side depending on which country issued them and on their value: some German ones have a picture of the Brandenburg gate, or a stylised eagle, for instance; Irish ones might have a harp. Those Euro countries which are monarchies have a picture of their monarch on them, as we would if we had joined the Euro, and because each coin is valid in every country, you can get a mixture with every handful of change!

This convention, of showing the monarch on your coins, dates back thousands of years, and was well-known in Jesus’ day. But unfortunately, this raised a problem for Jesus and his contemporaries, as the Roman coins in current use all showed a picture of the Emperor, and the wording round the side said something like “Son of a god”, meaning that the Emperor was thought to be divine.

You might remember how the earliest Christians were persecuted for refusing to say that the Emperor was Lord, as to them, only Jesus was Lord? Well, similarly, the Jews couldn’t say that Caesar was God, and, rather like Muslims, they were forbidden to have images of people, either. So the Roman coins carried a double whammy for them.

They got round it by having their own coins to be used in the Temple – hence the money-changers that Jesus threw out, because they were giving such a rotten rate of exchange. But for everyday use, of course, they were stuck with the Roman coins. And taxes, like the poll tax, had to be paid in Roman coins. You might remember the episode where Jesus tells Peter to catch a fish, and it has swallowed a coin that will do for both of their taxes. But that was then, and this is now.

Now, Jesus is in the Temple when they come to him – in the holy place, where you must use the Jewish coins or not spend money. “They”, in this case, are not only the Pharisees, who were out to trap Jesus by any means possible, but also the Herodians, who actually supported the puppet-king, Herod.

It’s totally a trick question, of course. They come up to Jesus, smarming him and pointing out that they know he doesn’t take sides – so should they pay their poll tax, or not?

If he said “Yes, pay your tax”, he would lay himself open to accusations of collaboration with the occupying power, of being a quisling and, perhaps worse from the Pharisees’ point of view, saying it was all right to have a Roman coin with the forbidden image on it.

But if he says “No, don’t pay it”, he would be accused of inciting rebellion, of being a terrorist. Either way, he will be in big trouble.

But Jesus has form for avoiding trick questions, parrying them with an answer that defuses the situation. And so in this case, he asks for a coin. I can imagine there was some confusion. Excuse me? In the Temple? Who was going to be brave enough to admit to having a forbidden coin in their pocket? Maybe they should just pretend they didn’t have one. But Jesus knew that they would be carrying them – after all, they had to trade with them in the market-place, whatever they may have done in the Temple. So he waits, and eventually someone, rather shame-faced, produces one.

Jesus pretends not to notice their embarrassment, takes the coin, looks at it on both sides, and asks, “Whose image is this?” Well, as if he didn’t know! Eventually one of them says “Caesar’s, of course”, perhaps in a “Didn’t you know that​​?” tone of voice.

And we all know what Jesus said next:
“Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar;
and give to God what belongs to God.”

But what do you think he meant? He had avoided their trap, of course – answering their question without really answering it. But was he saying we need to keep our Christian life separate from the rest of life? God forbid, and I mean that! If our commitment to God means anything at all, it should be informing all we do, whether we are at worship on Sunday or at work on Monday, or out at the pub on a Friday! There is a crying need for Christians in all walks of life; whether we are called to be plumbers or politicians, bankers or builders, retired or redundant! Wherever we find ourselves, we are God’s people, and our lives and values and morals and behaviour need to reflect that.

So what is Jesus saying? It’s about a lot more than paying taxes or not paying them. It’s not about whether we support our government or whether we don’t. We know from Paul’s letters that in the best of all worlds, Christians should pay their taxes and live quietly under the radar, exercising their democratic right to vote and not taking part in violent overthrow of a legitimate government. Doesn’t always work like that, of course, but by and large. We must, of course, protest when it is necessary and stand up for what is right. We need to stand against the system when it acts in ways that are manifestly not God’s ways – when people are left reliant on food banks, for instance, because it has become so complicated to get the benefits they deserve. When migrants are housed in sub-standard accommodation and given mere pennies to live on, forbidden to look for jobs, while it takes weeks to process their applications to stay. And so on. You know as well as I do where the sticking-points should be. But by and large, we should live peacefully under the law, cast our votes when we are asked to do so – that one is very important – and pay the taxes we owe.

Maybe the clue is in that word image – eikon. For are we not told that we are made in the image of God? If our picture were on a coin, it would say round the side “A child of God”– not, as for the Caesars, meaning that we are gods ourselves, but meaning, quite literally, that we are God’s beloved children. We’re also told that we are made in the image of God. So maybe a coin with a picture of one of us on it would be an image of God?

Sure, sometimes God’s image gets marred and spoilt, when we go astray. I’ve seen coins that have been buried in the earth for years, and they go all tarnished, and sometimes, if they’ve been there for centuries, they build up an accretion of gunk round them to the point that you can’t possibly tell what they are. And sometimes people go so far astray that you can’t possibly tell that they are a beloved child of God! But, of course, they are. And just as coin collectors – numismatists, I think they are called – just as they can gently clean off the years of accumulated gunk from an old coin that has been buried, so God can cleanse and restore a person who has gone astray, even for many years. Nothing, Jesus tells us, is impossible with God!

Maybe Jesus is saying that this is not an issue to divide people – Caesar gets what belongs to him, which is the coin, and God gets what belongs to him, which is us! No need to choose – you don’t have to be either a quisling or a resistance worker. We don’t separate what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God – we give ourselves to God, and the rest follows!

It was over fifty years ago this week that I first consciously said “Yes” to God;
and yes, that does make me horrendously old! But the more I go on with God, the more it seems not only possible, but also sensible. You see, God created us in His image and likeness, and not only that, but God redeemed us through Jesus, and empowers us, by the Holy Spirit. So yes, we do owe God our very being – we are created by him, and without him we wouldn't exist. It's not so much that we owe him the duty of giving ourselves back to him – we do, of course, but we know that! It's more about not being able to fulfil our potential on our own. We are made in God's image, but unless we allow God to indwell that image, to empower it, we will never really fulfil our potential as human beings. So we owe it to ourselves, almost as much as we owe it to God, to say “Yes” to him, to open ourselves to Him.

So we are made in God's image, and as such we owe it to both God and to ourselves to give ourselves back to God. But we also owe it to God and to ourselves to make sure that our image reflects God.

We owe it to God and to ourselves to make sure our image reflects God.
In a book that I love, and have read so often I practically know it off by heart, a child is taken to Versailles and sees the king, and her rather sleepy reaction at the end of the evening is, “He is just like on the coins!”
I wonder whether anybody would recognise God after having seen us.
Would they say, “He's just like on the coins”? We, by the way, will probably never know whether they would or not – it’s not given to us to know. But when we are committed to being God’s people, as individuals and as churches, God shines in and through us to attract others. And when they find him, maybe they think “He’s just like on the coins!” Amen.