Heads

Propers: The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 29), AD 2023 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.

When’s the last time that you truly paid attention to a coin?

A few months back, my wife and I decided to try out the ALDI in D.L., that new German grocery store chain that everybody’s been buzzing about—new to our area, anyway. And I was surprised to find that one there must rent a shopping cart for a quarter. Now, obviously that’s a pittance, a symbolic deposit incentivising customers to return their carts. And it works too; you don’t see them scattered about the parking lot like a Walmart.

But we checked out pockets, our car, my wife’s purse, the back seat, and darned if we could come up with a solitary quarter. I was chagrined to find ourselves so utterly destitute. Thus in my frustration I griped on social media: “This is 2023. Who the heck still carries cash? Who still carries coins?” Alas, my unsympathetic online friends found our situation inordinately amusing. Not one of them apparently had failed to bring along a quarter. I should’ve googled ALDI in advance.

Coins are funny little things, an unquestioned assumption of modern life, ubiquitous, perpetual. Yet in the grand scheme of things, they’re really rather young. Parts of the Bible are actually older than money. It all began with beer, of course, beer and fresh-baked bread. Some 12,000 years ago humans figured out that settling down and raising grain was worth our time and effort. A steady source of bread and beer soon produced abundance. This led to cities, professional administrations, writing and arithmetic, both for recordkeeping.

Civilization, in other words, all grew up around the farm. People would specialize, produce more than we needed, and then barter our excess for other peoples’ products. Yet this could prove inefficient, especially when dealing with large volumes over long distances. We needed a medium of exchange, something small and portable, yet universally valued. Alcohol was used a lot, but so were precious metals, gold and silver. They were rare and shiny, malleable and ductile, easily shaped into pretty things, plus they did not rust.

Initially temples were responsible for standardizing weights. Then some 2600 years ago, after the Torah was already written, King Alyattes of Lydia minted the first standardized coin. It was made of electrum, a natural mixture of silver and gold, stamped with the seal of the king as guarantor of its quality. And because it was the promise of the king, any shaving or clipping of the coin would impugn the royal honor, a crime against the throne. Have you ever heard the phrase “as rich as Croesus”? Well, Croesus’ dad invented money.

The power of this technology, and its propaganda possibilities, were not lost on kings. Suddenly everyone, across multiple continents, was carrying kingly coinly portraits in their purse. They would see the royal visage a dozen times a day, and the king could portray himself in any way he liked: handsome, powerful, virile, wise; as a conqueror, a philosopher, a god! So now our little pokes are filled with little golden gods, literal fistfuls of them, sifting through our fingers, a veritable pantheon in the palm of your hand, worshipped every day.

Our Gospel reading this morning pits Jesus against strange bedfellows indeed. Israel is occupied by the mighty Roman Empire, the greatest power the Western world had ever known. Herodians were those allied with the Roman puppet-kings, while Pharisees were the cultural hardliners whose religious and moral authority stemmed from their opposition to Greco-Roman norms. Collaborators on one hand, the resistance on the other.

They do not like each other, yet in the timeless spirit of my enemy’s enemy being my friend, they come together to trap Jesus betwixt Scylla and Charybdis. “You’re so great; you’re so smart,” they butter Him up. “Surely you can settle this between us. Tell us, Rabbi, is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not?” And here they think they’ve got Him. If Jesus says, “Yes, pay your taxes,” then the Pharisees will denounce Him. But if He says, “No, defy the emperor,” then the Herodians will arrest Him. Quite the sticky wicket.

This whole confrontation, mind you, takes place within the courtyards of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, during the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. He has just ridden into the city in triumphal procession, proclaimed by the people as King and Son of David. He has driven out the moneychangers, who profit off the poor, by exchanging pagan Roman coins for those acceptable within the Temple bounds. That’s the background for all of this—that and the fact that He’s going to be crucified in just a couple of days.

But not today. “Show Me the coin used for the tax,” He demands, and one of them brings a denarius, which is kind of funny, because they’re not supposed to have that in the Temple. They’ve just incriminated themselves. A denarius is a small silver coin worth one day’s unskilled labor. A good worker could expect about 300 denarii per year. Basically it’s a day of someone’s life fossilized in silver.

Heads would have Caesar Tiberius in profile, listed as Son of the Divine Augustus, the son of a god. And tails would show the goddess Peace, embodiment of the infamous Pax Romana, here strangely reminiscent of Tiberius’ mother Livia. It’s a graven image in a Temple that forbids graven images, a rival god in the Temple of a God who brooks no rivals.

“Whose image is this?” asks Jesus. “Caesar’s,” say they. “Then give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” He replies, “and to God the things that are God’s.” His answer so astounds them that they silently slink away. The Word has left them wordless.

It’s technically not a parable, but really it might as well be. Jesus’ answer works in layers, supporting multiple interpretations. On the surface it’s simply clever. His opponents try to trap Him in His words, yet He pins them by their own, a deft bit of verbal jiu jitsu. He also illustrates the complexities of living as a religious individual within or beneath a worldly power, a topic that St Paul and Luther would pick up at some length. How does one navigate the duties of earthly and heavenly citizenship, as a denizen of Two Kingdoms?

But even beyond these perfectly valid interpretations, there’s another more subversive level, at which we must acknowledge that while coins bear Caesar’s image, Caesar bears God’s. Caesar is a human being, after all, a son of Adam, made in the image of his Creator. What indeed belongs to him that is not first the Lord’s? It is the answer to that question, the answer to whose image we would bear, that silences Jesus’ opponents, that causes them to realize and thus examine their own divided loyalties. Money has a tendency to do that.

Who owns you? That’s really the question at hand. Any Roman from Jesus’ day would recognize a U.S. quarter in a heartbeat: the image of the Caesar, the eagle of the Legions. Only now the coins don’t claim a king to be the son of god; now the coins are the god. Mammon is the name given by the Bible to wealth as a god in itself, wealth that separates us from the true God. Mammon is all the stuff you own that ends up owning you. And it is so ubiquitous that we can’t even see it, the way that a fish never notices the water.

Everything in life is bought and sold. Everything’s a transaction, even and especially religion. The Church has wrestled wealth from the beginning, but only in America have we managed to turn advertising into a religion, and religion into an ad. The power of Mammon has only grown. It’s just an idea now, having transcended physical form. We mint modern coins from copper and nickel; they haven’t any value, except that we say that they do. Even coins have been replaced with pieces of paper and lines of code.

Lives are bought and sold with numbers on a screen: not just one day, like a denarius, but a lifetime of medical, educational, and residential debt. Don’t let it own you. Don’t let it  enslave you. Christ has freed us, forgiven us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Life cannot be bought or sold. Peace, joy, wisdom, love, these are of infinite worth. They cannot be earned, yet are given freely to all in His grace.

Your value is much more than what you earn or what you owe. We all bear the image of God, the image of Jesus Christ. And when the Christ has claimed you, nothing and no-one else can.

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

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