Sermon, Oct 18th
In Jesus’ final-week teaching, the Pharisees and Herodians try to trap him with the question of paying taxes to Caesar. Jesus exposes their hypocrisy…
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As I was preparing to preach this morning, I was reminded of a deacon named Laurence who lived in the Third Century after Christ in Rome. He was arrested by the Romans during one of their crackdowns on the church, and the other clergy he worked with at the time were beheaded. But he was kept alive because, as a deacon, he was responsible for keeping the money of the church. So the magistrate gave him three days to surrender all the wealth the church had or else he would die. On the third day, Laurence brought the magistrate outside to the courtyard, where he had assembled all the beggars, widows, lepers, people unable to walk and the mentally ill people from the church. He said to the magistrate, “This is the church’s wealth.”
I mention this because Jesus also is in conversation with people who have a similar misunderstanding about what Jesus was doing in his ministry and about what really matters to God and the value that he places on his people.
Jesus continues to speak in parables during the final week of his life, and as he says elsewhere, when he teaches in parables they will not be understood by those who come with their own agenda or bias about the Kingdom of Heaven.
In V.15 we see that the Pharisees have now clued in that Jesus is talking about them in his parables, and they begin to respond. They decide that since he likes talking so much, they should try to trap him in his own words.
V.16
Teacher, we know that you are sincere and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.
The Pharisees disciples say to Jesus, we know that you are true, and that you teach God’s ways truthfully
You don’t make anyone such a concern for you that you avoid telling the truth
A good teacher is not concerned about individual cases and just tells the truth whether people like it or not or it hurts. The opposite of this, is someone who claims to care about the truth, but will change their tune if someone important or terrifying wants them to say something else. They intend to test whether Jesus is really as committed to the truth as he seems.
“So they said to him, what do you think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
What they are asking this: since we are ruled by the Romans, that idolatrous and brutal people, would God really think it is okay for us to support that system by paying taxes? Caesar puts himself in the place of God; shouldn’t we only give money to the true God in heaven?
And their test here for Jesus is this: we know you are so bold to contradict and try to teach our religious professionals about God; but do you have the same courage about calling out Caesar and the Romans who actually have the power to take away your life?
They were expecting him to fold and to say something that would compromise his values. They wanted to expose him as just another pragmatist who pretended to have higher motives. They wanted him to reveal himself to be no different and no better than them.
V.18
Jesus knew their evil intent. He said, “Why are you testing me, you hypocrites?”
Jesus saw straight through them – they weren’t interested in the truth or in learning from him. Their supposedly respectful and admiring introduction, was not sincere – they were just trying to expose him as a hypocrite. They were saying, “All the crowds are following you and listening to you because they think you are better than us. But deep down you are just the same as us: we all want power; you are just pretending you have higher motives whereas we are honest about what we’re about.”
They also seemed to think that Jesus was really just in it for the money. He was just trying to get the masses on board so he could unveil his real agenda: to reorganize the economic system for the benefit of himself and his close followers. “No one,” they say, ”goes out there to help all those poor, sick people unless they want to use it for their advantage.” In their mind, Jesus was just trying to build up a brand of caring for the poor that he could leverage later on for money.
The Pharisees see it as their duty (and as a public service) to call Jesus out on his hypocrisy. But he throws it back at them.
He said, “Show me the coin for the tax.” They showed him a denarius. He said to them, “Whose image and inscription does it have?” They said, “Caesar.”
It is the same with our bank notes and coins. Our $20 bill features the image Queen Elizabeth II (and come February it will feature King Charles III) and the signature of the governor and deputy governor of the Bank of Canada. It is their authority that gives the money its value, and we owe them for the privilege of using it. And for that reason they have the right – through taxes – to a say in how we use it. If they decide that they want us to spend money on garbage collection or road maintenance rather than on a new and expensive pair of shoes or risky trading on the stock market, they have the right to do that.
We may not agree with how they use the proceeds of our taxes or how much they are charging us (and I know this is on many of our minds as we are in election season here in Toronto), but the reality is, the money in our wallets does not belong totally to us.
If Jesus came in (as many people still imagine he did) with an agenda to overturn the economic order, then he would have spent his time at the nearest Roman outpost stirring up trouble until he got some attention. But if that were the case, Jesus would have spent all his time on that, and would have had no time for ministering to those affected by the misuse of the financial system. He would have to spend all his time getting power and control over people and the world system, and would have no time or kindness to give away to the needy. We can see clearly from how he actually spent his time what really mattered to him.
Then he said to them, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar; and give to God what belongs to God.”
Jesus did not want to take control of administering the financial system – he was happy to leave that to the professionals. He did not want his image and signature to be on every coin in the Roman Empire. He came into the world to claim what already belonged to him, the people on whom his image and signature already appear. In Genesis it says that God created male and female in his own image, and that image is still on us, and Jesus is still in the business of claiming what belongs to him.
What Jesus came into the world to build was a church, and to help and save all the people who bear God’s image. The reason he worked with people was not as some stepping stone to working with money. He worked with people, no matter how weak, broken, or poor, because he saw their immeasurable value as people made in the image of God.
What does it mean to be created in the image of God?
I believe it refers primarily to four things about us:
The Scriptures suggest that our physical characteristics – our bodies and the way they work – are relatable to God. In the first reading, it says that God would cover Moses with his hands while he passed by, and then Moses would be able to see his back but not his face. This is not teaching that we look physically like God, or that God has hands, a back, and a face, but rather that our physical characteristics can help us understand what God is like and what he does.
It can refer to our temperament and emotions. The Scriptures also speak about how God can feel angry or happy or sad. This does not mean that God has constantly changing emotions as we do; but the variety of emotions we experience, tell us something about how responds to different situations.
It can refer to God’s creativity and rationality: Just as God created the world and governs it wisely and decisively, we also have the ability to create things and translate our imagination into reality.
And it can refer to our sense of morality and justice. Just as God is everywhere in Scripture concerned with justice for those who are victimized and accountability for those who abuse their power, we also share these same concerns and some form of preserving justice is a feature of every human society, even when it is misused and falls short of what it ought to be.
The Scriptures also teach that, because of our sin, we need the image of God to be renewed in us. We do not need to become something new so much as to return to the way God created us to be. We lose track of God’s image in us, primarily in two ways. We treat the gifts God gives as if they were God himself; and we make God in our image rather than making ourselves more like the image of God that we are.
We take the image of God in us, our bodies, our emotions, our creativity, our minds, and our moral sense of right and wrong, and begin to feel that, armed with these gifts from God, we no longer need God to lead us or guide us. When we do not use these gifts for what they are intended, we misuse and abuse them so that they become harmful and dangerous to us.
Rather than treating our bodies like a temple, we worship our bodies or the imaginary bodies we wish we had.
Rather than ruling over our emotions to respond in a godly way to the situations around us, we let our emotions take control of our actions.
Rather than using our creativity to continue God’s creative work in the world, we devise evil against others and destroy God’s world in imaginative ways.
Instead of using our minds to act wisely according to how God has wired us, we worship our intellect and remove God from our thinking and our efforts at understanding.
Rather than using the moral sense of right and wrong to make the world a better place and to stamp out injustice, we worship our ability to know right from wrong and come up with our own systems of justice that align with whatever we want to give ourselves permission to do.
And once we have remade the image of God in this way, instead of coming back to God until we are in line with his ways, we tell God to get in line with our ways, so that he becomes the image of us.
We end up with a God who has all the same opinions and biases as us, who always thinks we are right, who supports every decision we make, whose laws are always convenient for us, and whose words never challenge or convict us.
We never look to God for anything, because whatever we feel we have, we make it fill in for God.
If we have a good relationship, we make love, sex and romance our God.
If we have some of the comforts of life, we make whatever brings us comfort our God
If we have money, we make that our God.
If we have a nice family, we make family our God.
If we are popular and people like us, we make this our God.
And even more tragically, we sometimes make these things our God precisely because we do not or cannot have them. We worship and idolize things we don’t have or the people who have what we don’t have. And the further we are from having these things, the more we worship them.
When all of these gods fail to live up to what we need them to be, we become obsessed with creating an image so at least we can project to the world that we have it all together when we know we don’t. We decide that it’s enough for the At least if I share carefully-curated moments of my day with the world on Instagram or TikTok, I can look to others like I am blessed. But no matter how many likes we get, this is never enough to satisfy the deep longing in our hearts for belonging and being known and truly loved.
The good news for us, not matter what the image of God in us has become, is what Jesus says to these Pharisees-in-training: Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God. And the first place we should look to figure out how to do this is to Jesus himself.
In Hebrews chapter 1, the writer says that Jesus is the “reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” The word for “exact imprint” is χαρακτηρ which also refers to the imprint made in ancient coins of an image and inscription. We can say that every moment of Jesus’ earthly life, he fully lived out and put on full display what it means to be in the image of God. And so getting to know the Son of God in his earthly life will tell us a lot about what it means to live as God’s children for ourselves too.
it means we are called to do the same things the Son of God did in this world. To care for and minister to the eternal part of every human being. The Pharisees never seemed able to get this about him, and I believe we often don’t get it ourselves. Even when it came to his enemies, he still acted towards them as someone bearing God’s image to other people also bearing God’s image.
No matter how mean spirited or devious the attacks are against him, he always gives a response that is life giving and full of both grace and truth.
Jesus knows how our sin can damage and blur the image of God in us. Like old, worn, weatherbeaten equipment, we may find there is a layer of dirt and rust covering what we are meant to be. Like tools that have been used for the wrong purpose for so long, we no longer seem suited for or capable of what we were made to do.
But saying that we are made in the image of God is not the beginning of a quest to regain some long-lost innocence. We are not returning to what we once were, we are returning to the God who is, always has been, and always will be. As we follow his Son, who is himself the only Way back to the Father, we will find that just as his scars are part of his resurrection body, so our scars, our detours, our pain, and our sorrows can be redeemed too, and come to complement and illuminate the image of God in us.
This is exactly what he offered to the Pharisees who hated him, but they refused to change their minds and believe there was another way for them.
And what about us? How can we minister as people made in the image of God to other people also made lovingly in his image.
Wearing a clergy shirt as a sign of hope to people…
[when I first started wearing a clergy shirt, it felt quite uncomfortable, especially walking around downtown or taking the subway to pastoral visits around the city. Sometimes people would stare at me, and sometimes they would do everything possible to avoid eye contact. It got to the point where I was looking forward to winter so I could at least cover it up with a jacket. But when I shared this with a good friend, she told me that I shouldn’t be embarrassed to wear these clothes in public, because it can encourage a lot of people and be a sign of hope to them that there are still people who have faith in Jesus]And it’s not just me: I wouldn’t be walking around with a clergy shirt if I didn’t also belong to a congregation that still has faith in Jesus.
Even without a clergy shirt, wearing the image of God proudly in our lives every day, wherever we are, can also be a sign of hope in a world where goodness and godliness seem so rare.
Wearing the image of God is not like a costume or a get-up intended to portray an image that isn’t real. If it becomes just an image where we externally follow God while our hearts our not with him, then we won’t become the signs of hope that we need to be in these difficult days.
If I may paraphrase Jay-Z for a moment, “This is not (just) an image, this is God-given.”
As you experience what it means to be “renewed in knowledge according to the image of your creator,” as the Apostle Paul describes it, may you discover that his image is the most important thing about you and the most important reality in your life, as well as the greatest gift you can offer back to him and to this world.
V.22
The Pharisees who had come to test him were amazed, but they left him and went away. This is unfortunate, but not uncommon. It is not uncommon for people to hear Jesus’ teaching, to be amazed by wisdom he uttered in this world, and still to walk away. I believe the Pharisees-in-training thought he was just another clever Rabbi with good one-liners. They were impressed that he got out of a difficult trap they set for him. They probably admired his confidence and his public speaking ability. But they missed seeing that he was not like any person they had ever met or seen or heard.
Jesus kept returning to them until they would see the truth, and we read and listen to his words every Sunday because we also want to communicate that he is not just another good man. We believe and teach that he is God. He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords who is coming to judge the living and the dead. And he is also the one who came into to this world to be with us, to comfort us, to plead with us, and to die for us. All he asks in return is that we don’t simply walk away amazed at him, but that we decide to follow him each and every day. I urge you then not to walk away, or to be in too much of a rush to get on to the other business in your Sunday, that you miss out on conversion, something we all need each day and each moment: deciding that even with all the other things that are pulling us in a million directions we are going to follow Jesus wherever he leads. If you have decided today that you want to follow Jesus, keep turning to him each day until you see him as he truly is. And in so doing, you will be enabled to see who you truly are: a reflection of God’s glory and goodness, for the good of this world.
Amen.