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.

What Belongs to God - a sermon for Freedom Sunday

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Please note that although this starts off the same as the sermon preached on this Sunday in 2011 and 2008, it finishes very differently.

Has anybody got penny on them? Or even a pound coin? Okay, whose picture is on the front of it?

We’re used to our coins, aren’t we – we barely even notice that they have a picture of the Queen on one side, and a few odd remarks in Latin printed round the picture. They basically say Elizabeth, and then DG, which means by God’s grace; Reg, short for Regina, means Queen, and FD means Defender of the Faith – a title, ironically, given to Henry the Eighth when he wrote a book supporting the Pope against the Protestant Reformation, long before he wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon and had to leave the Catholic church.

When I was a little girl, though, before decimalisation, coins were even more interesting, as they didn’t all have pictures of the Queen on – the old shillings, sixpences, florins and half-crowns had often been issued during the reign of George the Sixth and pennies were often even older – it was not unusual to find penny that had been issued during the reign of Queen Victoria, even! My father used to make us guess the date on the coin, based on which reign it was, and if we were right we got to keep it. Not that we ever were right, so it was a fairly safe game for him, but it made sure we knew the dates of 20th-century monarchs!

Different countries have different things on their coins, of course; if you look at Euro coins, they have a different design on one side depending on which country issued them: the German ones have a picture of the Brandenburg gate, Austria has a stylised eagle; the Irish ones have a harp. Those Euro countries which are monarchies have a picture of their monarch on them, as we would if we joined the Euro, and the Vatican City ones have a picture of the Pope! I don't know what the newer Euro countries, like Estonia and Poland have, but it wouldn't be impossible to find out! That might be a nice game to play with my grandsons when they are a little older, perhaps – but they would learn them too quickly, I think.

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.

The question is a total 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 says, yes you must, then he’ll be accused of saying it’s okay for people to have coins with forbidden images; it’s okay to be Romanised; it’s okay to collaborate with the occupying power. And if he says, no don’t, then he’ll be accused of trying to incite rebellion or terrorism.

So Jesus asks for a coin. I expect it was the Herodians who produced one – the Pharisees would probably not have admitted to having one in their pockets, even if they did. And he asks whose image – eikon, the word is – whose image is on the coin? And they said, puzzled, Caesar’s of course, whose else would it be?

And we all know what he said next: Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar; give to God what belongs to God.

It’s kind of difficult, at this distance, to know what he meant. 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 more than paying taxes or not paying them. It’s not about whether we support our government or whether we don’t.

I think he’s saying that there doesn’t have to be a conflict. The image of Caesar is on the coin – but we, we are made in God’s image! If we were coins, the writing around us would say “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. There isn't really any difference between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, because, ultimately, everything belongs to God.  Even the holy people, the Pharisees, had to use these coins when they went to the market.  There isn't really much difference.

Yes, we need to be good citizens – both Jesus and Paul make that clear, one way and another. And yes, that includes voting as and when we're entitled to do so, and paying such taxes as we rightfully owe, but it also includes making a fuss when things aren't going as they should.

For instance, why do we still need food banks and soup kitchens? I think it's disgraceful in this day and age, and I emailed my MP about it; of course I only got back the vague sort of answer that if and when his party came to power they would Do Something About It – I'd really like him to be asking Questions in the House every week or so to find out what the Government is doing about it.

And maybe we should be writing to him – or her, if you're up this end where it's Kate Hoey, rather than down my end where it's Chuka Umunna – about traffiking. As I said at the start of the service, we've been asked to think about that today, as yesterday was World Anti-Traffiking Day.

We've all read horror stories about people who came over here in all good faith, thinking they were going to be found a sensible job and somewhere to live, and then they found themselves enduring slavery, and worse than slavery. There was even a case here in Brixton, not just so long ago. And the people involved are afraid to get help, as they are here illegally, and may well have fled very difficult situations in their home countries. The people who offered to “help” them, quote unquote, were preying on their fears as much as on their hopes.

There was the case of the Chinese cockle-pickers, some years ago, in virtual slavery up in Morecambe Bay, who were forced to work when it wasn't safe and were drowned.

We have all read stories about girls forced into prostitution, and so on. And I have a horrible feeling that these ones are only the tip of the iceberg. We must and we will pray for these people, obviously, but also, if you even suspect anything like that is going on near you – report it! If you don't want to go to the Police, I'm sure Anti-Slavery International or Stop the Traffik would help – in fact, I recommend a visit to their websites as there is a lot of information on there, including ways in which we can help.

You see, there isn't really much difference, is there, between giving to Caesar what is Caesar's, and giving to God what is God's. These poor people are, each and every one of them, someone for whom Christ died. Someone who God loves so impossibly much he couldn't love them more. I'm sure God's heart breaks when one of his beloved children is sold into suffering, raped, beaten, overworked, not paid at all.... and I'm afraid it happens rather more frequently that we would like to admit it does.

One of my favourite books is called These Old Shades, and in it, a child character is taken to Versailles, where the King is holding court. And on the way home, the child says, “The King was lovely, just like on the coins”. I often wonder whether, if we were an image on a coin, people would recognise us. Perhaps, if we are whole-hearted about giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God, and recognising that really, there's very little difference, maybe they would. And in the meanwhile, let's do what we can to stop the injustices of our modern world. Amen.

What belongs to God

Has anybody got penny on them? Or even a pound coin? Okay, whose picture is on the front of it?

We’re used to our coins, aren’t we – we barely even notice that they have a picture of the Queen on one side, and a few odd remarks in Latin printed round the picture. They basically say Elizabeth, and then DG, which means by God’s grace; Reg, short for Regina, means Queen, and FD means Defender of the Faith – a title, ironically, given to Henry the Eighth when he wrote a book supporting the Pope against the Protestant Reformation, long before he wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon and had to leave the Catholic church.

When I was a little girl, though, before decimalisation, coins were even more interesting, as they didn’t all have pictures of the Queen on – the old shillings, sixpences, florins and half-crowns had often been issued during the reign of George the Sixth and pennies were often even older – it was not unusual to find penny that had been issued during the reign of Queen Victoria, even! My father used to make us guess the date on the coin, based on which reign it was, and if we were right we got to keep it. Not that we ever were right, so it was a fairly safe game for him, but it made sure we knew the dates of 20th-century monarchs!

Different countries have different things on their coins, of course; if you look at Euro coins, they have a different design on one side depending on which country issued them: the German ones have a picture of the Brandenburg gate, or a stylised eagle; the Irish ones have a harp. Those Euro countries which are monarchies have a picture of their monarch on them, as we would if we joined the Euro, and the Vatican City ones have a picture of the Pope! That might be a fun game to play with my grandson in a few years’ time - guess which country this euro-coin comes from, and you may have it. Assuming, that is, that the Euro survives its present crisis, but that’s another story.

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 moneychangers 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.

The question is a total 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 says, yes you must, then he’ll be accused of saying it’s okay for people to have coins with forbidden images; it’s okay to be Romanised; it’s okay to collaborate with the occupying power. And if he says, no don’t, then he’ll be accused of trying to incite rebellion or terrorism.

So Jesus asks for a coin. I expect it was the Herodians who produced one – the Pharisees would probably not have admitted to having one in their pockets, even if they did. And he asks whose image – eikon, the word is – whose image is on the coin? And they said, puzzled, Caesar’s of course, whose else would it be?

And we all know what he said next: Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar; give to God what belongs to God.

It’s kind of difficult, at this distance, to know what he meant. 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 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.

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.

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. But even that gunk can be cleaned off, with care – and you’ve all seen those Cillit Bang ads where he dips a penny into the fluid and it comes up bright and shiny again!

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!

Is it, then, about possibly owing a small amount of money in tax, but owing God a far greater amount – our very being? Yes, that is definitely part of it. It was, I think, forty 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. There's a wonderful book by an author called Georgette Heyer, I don't know if people read her much these days, but this book is called “These Old Shades”, and in it, one of the characters – 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”?

The thing is, we do mar God's image in us – I mentioned earlier how coins can be so covered in the gunk of ages as to be unrecognisable. But coins can be cleaned – again, remember the Cillit Bang ad. Our prayer of confession today was one of the alternate Anglican ones, which I have always loved for the words “We have wounded your love and marred your image in us.”
This, for me, reflects the fact that we are made in God's image, and that sometimes that image gets distorted.

I am well aware that this sort of thing is apt to make us all feel guilty, apt to make us feel we must be terrible Christians, and so on. But that's so not what I want to do here. After all, there are plenty of other ways of distorting God's image – look at the Pharisees, for instance, who tried to turn God into a set of rules and regulations. Or in our own day, look at some of the more extreme Christian sects in the USA who want to preserve unborn children at all costs, including the mother's right to her own body. Or that church that proclaims that God hates gays.

Yet all of those are following God to the best of their ability. Yes, they have got things tragically wrong. Yes, they are distorting, marring, God's image in them. But they are not, I think, any more evil than you or I are. And God will, I pray, help them find their way back.

Because that, in the end, is what God is all about. God minds far more about our relationship with him than we do! We wander off, we get lost, marring God's image in us, distorting Christianity into something very much less than it is – oh yes, I've been there and done that – and yet, every time, the Good Shepherd pulls on his Barbour and his Wellies and goes looking for us to bring us back into the fold. We don't have to do it ourselves. Indeed, it's when we try that the distortions are apt to happen. We just need to be open to allowing God to keep us clean and polished and ready for action!

The coins that bear Caesar's image on them need to be given to Caesar. But the coins that bear God's image – we ourselves, each and every one of us who names the name of Christ as Saviour and as Lord – those coins need to be given to God, reflecting His glory, and allowing Him to work in our lives to make us more and more like Him, and more and more the people He designed us to be. Amen.