by CCW | 7 November 2010 14:44
What’s this? Can it be that we are defined and governed by money? Does everything come down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” as the chorus sings in Cabaret. Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?
Money, it is proverbially and scripturally said, is “the root of all evil.” Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted around from being a medium of exchange to becoming a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others; but there is, as well, the fact that money comes to dominate us.
It causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in our own world and day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are constantly beseiged by images that persuade us that we are essentially economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but also of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly.”
Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the way in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends must always fail us for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then, we are but “bellies,” as it were, mere consumers, and, no doubt, “bellyachers” too! We are seduced into thinking that everything, including God and religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.
In the face of this kind of perennial forgetting, Jesus would recall us to ourselves. In the New Testament surprisingly, no one talks as much about money as Jesus. He knows us only too well, our weaknesses and our temptations. After all, he knows that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The key point is about our loves. What we love defines us. And so in today’s Gospel, Jesus demands of the Pharisees to “show me the tribute-money.” They sought to entangle him in his talk over an issue about money and taxes.
“Whose is this image and superscription?” he asks them about a coin. It bears the image of Caesar, the Roman Emperor, the highest power on earth, humanly speaking, at that time. For money is, inescapably, the concrete symbol of worldly power. The phrase, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” is a true statement which reflects the political order to which economic matters are, in some sense, subordinate (which is not to say, in modern terms, that the state can endlessly interfere in the realm of the economic, at least not without serious consequences, nor that the economic order simply or primarily determines the political agenda). At issue is the relationship between the economic and the political, and even more, the relation of the spiritual to both.
Money is utterly unable to be the image of who we are in the truth of our being. It cannot be the image of us. Money cannot capture who we essentially are. If we think that it can, then we both forget and delude ourselves. We give money a power over ourselves. The question, “whose is this image and superscription?” serves to recall us to ourselves and to God.
The coin may bear the image of Caesar and thus symbolise his worldly power, but as Jesus will say to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.” Even the power of Caesar ultimately derives from and belongs to God.
The image we bear is something greater. It cannot be captured on a coin. We are not made in the image of money but in the image of God. We have been stamped with the sign of the cross at our baptism. “Our citizenship is in heaven” and our economic life subordinate not only to political life but to the spiritual reality of our God-created and God-redeemed humanity. The real worth of our being is to be found in that higher and eternal relation of exchange – the exchange of love – transacted by Jesus Christ on the cross “for us and for our salvation”. It is to be realised in lives of sacrifice – the widow’s mite, the giving without counting the cost, for “with God all things are possible.”
If the love of money constrains us, then we defraud ourselves with what is less than the whole worth and true measure of our being. Paul would remind us that the love of Christ constrains us “because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who died for their sake and was raised.” Such is the infinite exchange of love and such is that infinite exchange in us. God becomes man that he might give himself for us and that his life might live in us. It is without price. It is priceless because it is beyond human calculation. It is the infinite value of the heart-blood of Jesus.
Against the idols of economic determinism and technological exuberance, we are reminded of our identity with God in Christ. We are made in the image of God and stamped with the cross of Christ. The love of God must be what shall constrain us, compel us and define us; anything less makes us less. Here in this place we find the necessary counter to all the forces in our world and day that would constrain us to what is less than ourselves. We find ourselves, too, in a company of those who bear the image of Christ, the company of the saints.
Here in this service of the Holy Communion, we are recalled to the love which is poured out for us. It is poured out so that we might be reconstituted in the image of the one who has made us and redeemed us. We are God’s. His love, like a banner, is written over us, to be sure, that is the great and real “superscription,” but it is also to be written in us, in lives of sacrifice and service, in lives of prayer and praise, in lives consecrated by Word and Sacrament. It is about who we are.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity XXIII, 2010
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/11/07/sermon-for-the-twenty-third-sunday-after-trinity-2/
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