Month: October 2016

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

A coin? A bitcoin? No. An actual coin, a physical object, and not the term coined, if you will pardon the pun, for a computational algorithm belonging to the realm of bits and bytes in the digital world. All this fuss about a coin? Well, yes, it seems so. “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not?” The Pharisees and the Herodians ask Jesus but only so as to “entangle him in his talk”. All this fuss about a coin turns on an image and a superscription, a picture and the words which surround or are about an image on a coin. Coins as physical objects have a powerful symbolical significance. Jesus uses something as ordinary and basic as a coin, a penny, to teach us something powerful about our identities and the structuring of our loyalties.

The picture is an image, a depiction of Caesar, the ruling authority of the political world of Jesus’ day. The superscription identifies in writing that authority. Our coins, to the extent that we still have them, are stamped with the image of the Queen – the sovereign principle of this nation of Canada. All on a coin. It suggests the interplay between politics and economics.

It is a much vexed problem which we can never entirely escape. The challenge is to think the relation between economics and politics, on the one hand, and, far more importantly, the relation between them both and spiritual life, on the other hand. It is the latter about which Jesus is most concerned. In a way, it is a question about what is the fundamental nature of reality. Is the real simply the social, the economic and the political? Or does the spiritual and the intellectual, the philosophical and the theological point us to the reality of God which in turn engages the realms of the social, the economic and the political?

This gospel story, like so many of the gospel stories, challenges our assumptions. They disquiet and disturb us. This gospel story confronts us with the fundamental question about our spiritual identity. In a way, Jesus’ question is really asking about us in relation to God. Whose image and superscription are we? The analogy here is between the coin, symbolizing economic and political might, and ourselves as made in the image of God as spiritual and intellectual creatures.

But if we define ourselves primarily and essentially by money, property, and power then we deny the one in whose image we are made and remade. It is the challenge and the issue for contemporary culture. What is a means to end, a medium of exchange, becomes instead the defining reality of our lives. We forget what money really is because we forget who we truly are. The consequences are enormous and inescapable.

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“That your love may abound yet more and more”

Abundant love. Super-abundant love. The love which cannot be numbered. The love which cannot be constrained. It is a beautiful concept. How is it to be realised in us? In a way, that is the great question of the Trinity season. How are the living words of Christ to be made alive in us? How will we act out of what we have heard and seen? Will we? The point is that we hear and see things that require a response in us.

The Gospels often provide us with powerful illustrations about our human failings, on the one hand, and God’s redeeming grace at work in us, on the other hand. The Gospel for the 22^nd Sunday after Trinity is one such example. It begins with a question from Peter to Jesus about how often do you forgive the one who has sinned against you. Is there a set number? Can forgiveness be limited to an algorithm, to a mathematical formula? Everything else is in our world and day, it seems. We are quite content to let the algorithms of Googledom send us birthday greetings and tempt us with endless advertisements programmed to our supposed interests, not to mention letting the entire stock market be run by algorithms. So why not forgiveness? Why not seven times?

Jesus’ response is about abundant love. “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.” Literally? Four hundred and ninety times? And, then, at the four hundred and ninety-first time, what? Forget it, your allotment of forgiveness is up? Tough luck, buddy. It is, of course, a deliberate exaggeration. Who, after all, is going to keep track of such a number? Why, you would need some sort of algorithm just to do the numbering! But that misses the entire point. Forgiveness is not something that can be quantified. To think that it can misses the whole meaning of forgiveness. Ultimately it is something from God that is meant to live and move in us, if we will let it.

There is the crux of the matter brought out in the parable which Jesus tells to illustrate the point about the immeasurable nature of forgiveness. It is the parable of the unforgiving servant who having been forgiven a great debt of “ten thousand talents”, a huge sum, turns around and refuses to forgive a lesser servant a far, far, smaller debt owed to him, a mere “hundred pence”. It is a brilliantly clear example of someone being forgiven who does not forgive in turn; the complete opposite of the petition in the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

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