Proper 24, Year A: Matthew 22:15-22
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
October 18, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the service, please visit this page.
“Whose engraving and inscription are these?” – Matthew 22:20b[1]
Welcome back to yet another week of stewardship season—that dreaded time each fall when churches ask their parishioners to pledge how much money they plan to give next year so we can set and manage our budgets effectively. Personally, I wonder if the people who compiled the Lectionary were thinking about that as they gathered and arranged our collection of Bible readings. It’s pretty convenient that Jesus’ instruction to “Give…to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”[2] just happens to fall in mid- to late-October.
On the surface, today’s Gospel looks like a fun little story about bumbled entrapment and clever evasion. Jesus has been making larger and larger waves in the Judean community, challenging the Pharisees to look beyond a literal observation of the Hebrew Bible and live into its generous spirit, and his ability to draw a crowd worried the Herodians that he would start an insurgency, resulting in the central government taking away their jobs or even destroying the region.
So this unlikely alliance of religious conservatives and secular progressives comes up with a plan to force Jesus into an impossible spot: either he’ll have to openly support the occupying Roman Empire, which would turn the common people against him, or he would have to denounce the government’s taxation, which could be punished as sedition or treason. Either way the situation went, Jesus’ would knock himself out of the picture, allowing both the Herodians and the Pharisees to go back to their status quo of courting power and defining themselves through their preferred secular or religious means. But Jesus surprises everyone, tricking the tricksters and turning the whole problem back onto their own heads.
The most obvious way we might boil down Jesus’ give-to-the-emperor/give-to-God statement is something like “pay your taxes and your tithes.” That’s pretty simple advice for those who can afford it, but it doesn’t really help anyone living payday to payday. Since most of Jesus’ followers would have fallen into the latter category, I suspect that he’s trying to offer us more than financial advice.
We can start to unravel the riddle by looking back at Jesus’ earlier question in this passage: “Whose head is this, and whose title?”[3] Our translation obscures it, but where we see the word “head” here, Jesus is using a familiar Greek word: eikōn.
We talked about this term back in July.[4] But four months is a long time to remember anything, especially with this year’s chaos, so to review, eikōn the same word that Paul uses in Romans when he talks about being “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son.”[5] In both Matthew’s story and Paul’s writing, the eikōn is the image that’s stamped into a coin, the engraving of the government official’s face that not only denotes authority but also subtly implies ownership. Despite the general population’s statuses as free or slave, as the top of the Roman heirarchy, the emperor essentially owned the economy, and his face on the coinage was a silent reminder of that every time you got paid or needed to make a purchase.
In the 3- and 200’s BCE, as the world increasingly adopted Greek as its common language, Jewish scholars wanted to ensure that younger generations would still have access to their ancient scriptures. Those scholars’ translation, called the Septuagint, was the most common version of the Hebrew Bible available in the First Century. It’s what the New Testament authors quote whenever they reference the Psalms or prophets. And in the Septuagint, the word eikōn shows up very early.
“In the beginning,” so to speak, Jesus would have encountered the word at synagogue any time a lector read the first chapter of Genesis, where God says, “Let us make humankind in our image [eikōn]…”[6] And it echoes again in the next verse: “So God created humankind…in the image [eikōn] of God he created them; male and female he created them.”[7]
I suspect that in today’s confrontation, Jesus is alluding to this primal Creation story, turning his exchange with the Pharisees and Herodians into more than just evading a sneaky trap. He’s flipping their—and our—entire understanding of life, challenging us down to the level of how the economy works. It appears our understanding of what’s valuable is completely unrelated to God’s.
On an everyday level, things drive our society and hold a majority of our waking attention. We spend most of our time worrying about the currency of “empire:” the coins in our pockets, the money in our bank accounts, and the advantages that those collections bring us. Money is basic to modern society, and you’ll notice that Jesus isn’t condemning it here. We live when and where we do, and we do need to be able to interact with our present reality. But how quickly do we turn to possessions to offer ourselves a sense of control and security in the face of an unpredictable world? We often gather more than we need, slipping beyond wisely preparing for the future to hoarding stuff we’ll never be able to use and sometimes don’t even want. Soon the objects, in their demand for continuing care, own us.
But God’s economy isn’t like ours. God’s economy doesn’t run on coins or precious metals or digital representations of money stored on a bank’s hard drive somewhere. It never runs on the desperation of the poor or offers even more power to the already privileged. In God’s economy, value isn’t found in jewels or in government-sanctioned pieces of paper. Nor is it found in the power those things represent. The things we long and live for—the things we even steal or kill for—hold no importance whatsoever. What we view as common is where God puts the most attention. What we ignore, misuse, or treat as expendable is what God views as precious. You don’t have to mine, mint, or print the currency of God’s kingdom. It’s almost never locked away in some vault, hidden from the view of all but the very wealthy. You only have to walk down the street, pick up a phone, or turn on a TV to find it. Some of you can just look beside you on the couch—because the currency of God’s kingdom is people, human life in all its wonder, mess, and frailty.
Precious metals may be difficult to procure, but they really aren’t all that rare, in a cosmic sense. We work hard to collect and process them, but stable metals rarely just disappear. And gems, though pretty, aren’t all that exciting either when you really think about it. As Michael once pointed out on The Good Place, diamonds are simply the most boring way to line up carbon molecules. We struggle to make them look more shiny and sparkly, but once they’re cut and polished, they stay that way pretty much forever. The same gold and gems that awed the ancient world still impress us today. That doesn’t mean I don’t love going to the Seattle Asian Art Museum. It’s super cool to see something that’s existed for thousands of years. Still, no matter what it’s made of, it simply exists. But what about the lives of the people who created those things, who invested their time, skill, and imagination in them, who offered one another these inert items as physical representations of their love or respect? The jewelry and carvings and coins still exist, but the people and personalities who crafted and cherished them are lost forever.
So what’s truly scarce: a material object that sits unchanging from generation to generation, or the generations who learned and grew and breathed and bred and then disappeared, passing completely from time and memory?
God isn’t impressed with your net worth. What’s valuable to God are the human lives around you—especially the forgotten ones: the abused, the discarded, the homeless, the helpless, and the weak. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is reminding us that from the very moment of birth, each and every person is revealed as God’s most precious possession. Before we draw our first breath, each of us is already stamped with God’s eikōn, God’s proud image—a mark of ownership and love that the world may do its best to mar or deface but that can never be erased or transferred.
Those of us who work here at Holy Cross appreciate your financial pledges—we fully recognize that we rely on your generosity to fund not only our church programs but also our salaries. In a tough and unpredictable year, making a pledge right now may look pretty scary. I get that.
But much as we appreciate (and need!) your pledges, there’s another kind of pledge I’d prefer you to consider this morning, one that is much more important to God:
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
I can’t tell you what specific actions to take to fulfill those vows—you’ll need to decide that for yourself. But I hope you’ll live in a way that honors and reflects the value of the true currency of the Kingdom of God. As you go through the days and weeks ahead, as you interact not only with friends and family but with outsiders and strangers, keep Christ’s question in mind:
“Whose eikōn and inscription are these?”
[1] My translation. | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Matthew 22:21b
[3] Matthew 22:21b
[4] http://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/2020/07/26/year-a-july-26-2020-proper-12
[5] Romans 8:29
[6] Genesis 1:26a
[7] Genesis 1:27 | The Septuagint compilation I’m using lacks the first appearance of “in his image” found in both Hebrew and English versions of this verse.