Coin

Propers: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 29), AD 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Hard as this may be for us to imagine, the Bible is actually older than money.

Oh, there were always gifts of silver and gold and the like. Shiny metals make for quite convenient mediums of exchange. But in the biblical narrative, God’s people Israel did not encounter real money—real coins—until around the time of Exile, with the coming of the great empires of Babylon and Persia.

A coin was originally a set weight: so many ounces of gold or of silver. And that weight was guaranteed by the guy who minted the money, whose face and whose seal appeared on the coin itself. I know how much gold this is because the emperor says so. If anyone were to shave off a little bit of the weight, or to counterfeit a false coin altogether, well, you can imagine that the emperor wouldn’t take too kindly to that.

To falsify coinage was to impugn the ruler’s honor, to challenge his authority, and worse yet, to hit him where it hurts—right in the pocketbook. Money, for all intents and purposes, was sacrosanct. Honor, as they say, was no longer the currency of the realm, for indeed currency had become the currency of the realm.

Coins were also really good for propaganda. Think about it: everyone who trades, everyone who buys and sells, is carrying around these little coins, each with a miniature picture in profile of the person who’s in charge. For many people this might be the only portrait they ever see. And if you’re the guy minting the coins, then you can present yourself however suits your reign. You could be a hero, a philosopher, a conqueror—or even a god. Hey, it’s your coin.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is teaching in the Temple at Jerusalem, only days before His death. And His authority has been challenged throughout the preceding week by various groups who see Him as a threat: priests, scribes, &c. Today we encounter a pair of very strange bedfellows, the Pharisees and the Herodians, working together to entrap Jesus in His own words.

The Pharisees are a nationalistic and frankly holier-than-thou group who have no love for the occupying Roman army. The Herodians, on the other hand, are supporters of Rome’s puppet-king, Herod the Great. By rights these two should not get along, and outside of this particular context, probably hate each other’s guts. But both have a vested interest in taking Jesus down a peg.

“Tell us,” they say, with false sincerity, “is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” And you see, this is a classic Catch-22. If Jesus says, yes, it is lawful to pay taxes to the Roman Emperor, Caesar Tiberius, then the Pharisees will denounce Him as a collaborator, in the pocket of their Gentile occupiers. But if He says, no, don’t pay your taxes, the Herodians will get Him for treason, for undermining the authority of Caesar and inciting a tax revolt.

Instead Jesus replies, “Show me the coin used for the tax,” and they bring to Him a denarius. Now, a denarius is a little silver coin, often translated as “penny.” It represents one day’s wage for an unskilled laborer or a common Roman soldier. On one side is the face of Tiberius, second Emperor of Rome, adopted as the son of Caesar Augustus, who was in turn the adopted son of Julius Caesar. Around his face the denarius reads, “Son of the Divine Augustus”—the son, that is, of a god.

See, Romans had a tendency to deify dead Caesars, the same way that Egyptians deified dead Pharaohs, Greeks dead heroes, and Norse dead wizards. Tiberius is the son of a god, who will one day be worshipped posthumously as a god himself. The flipside of the coin portrays a seated woman—probably Livia, who was Tiberius’ mother and Augustus’ wife—arrayed as Pax Romana, the goddess of Peace. And around her are written the words Pontifex Maximus, which means High Priest.

Jesus holds up this coin and asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” And they answer—somewhat sheepishly, I imagine—“the Emperor’s.” For in truth, they shouldn’t have this coin at all. By Jewish Law, it is a graven image, a false idol. It is the picture of a pagan, foreign deity; of two of them, in fact, one on each side. No good Pharisee should possess such a thing atop the Temple Mount. There’s only one God here and only one High Priest, and He ain’t the Divine Augustus.

And now Jesus delivers that famous, cryptic line: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” And at this the Pharisees and Herodians, struck dumb by Christ’s response, slink away in silence, amazed. Now what do you suppose that means, “Render unto Caesar”? On one level it’s clever rhetoric, springing a trap upon those who would trap Him. Neither those who oppose the tax nor those who live by it can openly contradict what He’s said.

On another level, some have taken this as Jesus’ support for a separation of powers: the sacred and the profane, church and state. Pay the tax; render unto Caesar; be a good citizen by giving him back his coin. That’s what it’s for, after all. And this, I suspect, is a take that St Paul could mostly get behind. But it would sound rather odd coming from Jesus just days before His crucifixion for offending the religious and secular establishments—that is, claiming to be both God and King.

Still others have pointed out that while the denarius indeed bears the image of Caesar, Caesar himself bears the image of God—for he is human, made in God’s image. So the coin belongs to God after all.

But since these are the very questions which the Pharisees and Herodians used to try to entrap Jesus, they are almost certainly the wrong questions for us to be asking. What I find more poignant, and more applicable to our own circumstances, is their amazement—how they are struck dumb just by noticing an everyday coin.

To be clear, every Western empire since the fall of Rome has sought to be the new Rome: the Spanish, the French, the Russian, the British, and, yes, the American empire as well. If you don’t believe me, all you’ve got to do is take a trip down to D.C. Check out the Apotheosis of George Washington, rising into heaven as a god; or the statue of Olympian Lincoln presiding over devotees at his marble shrine; or just look at our cash, festooned with fallen Caesars and with Jupiter’s now-bald eagle.

Our coins no longer stand for a set weight of gold. Rather, they are fiat currency, which means that they’re worth whatever we say that they’re worth. And people will value our decree so long as we have the muscle and the gumption to back it up.  In other words, our money is based on faith. Its only grounding in reality is the world’s perception of our stability, our economy, and our military might.

And that’s our real religion, my friends. That’s our modern-day public cult: the Cult of Consumerism. Rather than put our faith in the person on the penny, or even in the penny itself, we now put faith into the very idea of money, of debits and credits, which mostly exist as ones and zeros on a screen. And yes, I know that money at its best can help us all to flourish. But the great existential conflict of our age—the holy war on which we were willing to bet the future of life on this planet—was a clash of economies, of communist vs capitalist, over who gets to control how we use cash. We risked nuclear apocalypse for that.

Now you tell me who our real gods are. Whose image and whose title have we inscribed upon our hearts? Theologian David Bentley Hart put it this way: “Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice.  God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the one truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag.”

And I know I am a hypocrite. I like to buy things; I earn a paycheck. Yet like the Pharisees and the Herodians, I too am struck dumb by my own idolatry, by my complicity in a system that puts a price tag on everything, and on every human soul. Money has been connected always to debt, and debt always to slavery. Coin, like fire, makes for an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

Thanks be to God, who reigns from the Cross and forgives us all our debts, both in this world and the next. Christ is ever pouring forth His own eternal life from out His wounded side, for the liberation and the resurrection of all that He has made. And this salvation cannot be earned. It cannot be bought or sold at any price that we could ever pay. It can only be given. And thanks be to God in Jesus Christ—His forgiveness is given here freely for you, and for us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.