by CCW | 15 November 2009 22:00
In the contemporary culture of illusions, questions about image are everything. Whether it is ‘American Idol’ or ‘Canadian Idol’ or ‘So you think you can dance, Canada?’, so much turns on our image of ourselves and our sense of how we would like others to see us. In so many ways, it is a dangerous illusion. The dangers are the narcissistic ‘look-at-me-looking-at-you-looking-at-me’ and the soullessness of it all. What is missing, paradoxically, is the very thing for which we are seeking. We are seeking, I think, for some sense of meaning and purpose, some sense of identity and dignity. Our readings this morning speak wonderfully and directly to those deep and underlying desires.
“Our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul tells us. And Jesus asks those who would entrap him, “Whose is this image and superscription?” His question is really about us and recalls us to the deep and wonderful scriptural teaching that to understand our humanity is to understand that we are made in the image of God. For Christians, that image of God has been further intensified in Jesus Christ. He is the express image of the Father, and he is both God and man. And only so, can Paul claim that “our citizenship is in heaven.”
But what does that mean? The Church is always in one way or another counter-culture. Nowhere is that more clear than in these readings which speak directly and as a counter challenge to the dominant aspects of our culture which can no longer really be said to be a Christian culture in any meaningful sense. What defines us? Will it be our social and political convictions, illusions and commitments? Or will it be something spiritual and intellectual, something theological? In a way, it is as simple as that.
In the oldest literary text known to humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, goes on an extraordinary journey. Quite unlike his earlier journey of adventure and great deeds, killing the mighty ‘Humbaba’ and defeating ‘the Bull of Heaven’, the death of his friend, Enkidu, has made a change in his whole outlook. He is in despair at the loss of his friend in whose death he sees his own mortality. He sets out on a quest for wisdom, the search for meaning and understanding, seeking to question Utnapishtim, the original Noah, a figure who has survived a great flood and has been granted ‘everlasting life’ at the end of the world in a kind of no place, ‘the land of Dilmun’. Not exactly heaven. But then for the Sumerians, the idea of citizenship in heaven is unthinkable since the gods are at best indifferent and at worst destructive to our humanity.
Like an ascetic wanderer in the desert, Gilgamesh in his quest for wisdom reaches ‘the garden of the sun’, a kind of Sumerian version of Paradise. There he meets Shamash, the sun god. But he also meets Siduri, the wine-women, also sometimes known as the Ale-wife. Beer or wine, take your pick. Both are on offer as part of the remarkable contributions of the Sumerians to civilisation, along with walled cities, irrigation, and of course, cuneiform writing. Her advice to him, to put it in words from Ecclesiastes that capture best the fatalistic outlooks of all ancient and modern cultures, is “to eat, drink and be merry.” The further point is implicit but left unsaid except by Ecclesiastes, “for tomorrow you die.” This is the same view put a little more polemically by Paul about those “whose god is their belly.” The advice of Siduri is simply the ancient and modern view of life as pleasure, the philosophy of hedonism. It is a dominant force in our present culture that has despaired of any meaning and purpose to life. We are nothing more than our consumer appetites. Our whole culture is saturated with the advice of Siduri.
Several years ago, it was noticed that beer commercials in America and in Canada for the same brand of beer are different. The American commercials depict men at work; in Canada, it is Johnny Canuck busy at his leisure. The Canadian commercials are pitched to the idea that Canadians are pragmatic hedonists!
It is to Gilgamesh’s everlasting credit (and to the possibilities of the story) that he rejects Siduri’s advice. In a way, he is refusing to be defined by sensual pleasures and by extension by social and political matters. He is looking for something more with respect to the meaning of his humanity. In a way, it has its ultimate expression in what Jesus says in the context of outright hostility in his encounter with the Pharisees. In a way, what Gilgamesh seeks, it is not too much to say, has its fullest realization in the idea of our heavenly citizenship.
In the gospel, Jesus is being put to the test about political loyalties in relation to religious commitments. The Jews are under the thumb of Roman rule. For some it seems to compromise their religious identity and commitment to the God of the Hebraic Law. For others, like the Herodians, there have been various accommodations. Is it lawful – lawful for Jews – to pay tribute money to Caesar? Being under the thumb of the Romans comes with a price. Jesus turns everything around. Taking the coin, he asks “whose is this image and superscription?” He is told that it is Caesar’s. He answers, famously, then “render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” It is more than just a clever retort. It goes to the issue of identity. His answer acknowledges the realm of the political but at the same time asserts the primacy of the spiritual which cannot simply be collapsed into the social and the political. This is the great insight without which we cannot say that “our citizenship is in heaven.”
The task for the Church in our own day is to recover the primacy of the spiritual and to rediscover our primary identity in Christ. Jesus takes a coin, the means of exchange in a commercial culture, and uses it to remind us of the more primary question about ourselves. Whose image are we?
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXIII, ‘09
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/11/15/sermon-for-the-twenty-third-sunday-after-trinity/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.