“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.
The relationship between economics and politics is itself fraught with similar difficulties. What serves the end becomes the end and we are the much lesser for it. Money is power and money talks. The forms of political life easily get reduced to the economic. We become essentially slaves to the ruling economic powers of the day, however we define it, whether the market state or the neo-liberal global economy. More problematically, we easily become its willing slaves. We go along with the economics so long as we think that we are getting at least something out of it. We might like to demonize the realm of the economic by “blaming the system” whether we mean big business or big government, but the harder, yet truer, point is that we are completely implicated ourselves. How? By something which belongs to a spiritual understanding of the disorders of our humanity, what the general confession in the Prayer Book powerfully calls “the devices and desires of own hearts.” By our “getting and spending.” We define ourselves by our purchasing power and by our possessions. We do so in the vain attempt to avoid the void, as it were, of our spiritual lives when we have forgotten who we are in the sight of God.
Something of ourselves is vested in what we have and in how we spend our money. Property is an extension of personality which is why, for instance, if we are robbed, there is the sense of having been violated. But there is equally the sense that we are more than our stuff. Money or property is an extension and an aspect of ourselves but not totally or primarily who we are.
Jesus is raising that larger question. He reminds us that we are not simply our property. We are not mere consumers, unless, and this is the concern, we choose to be so defined. And that is only too often the reality, namely, to be defined by market principles as if the real were the economic and the political.
But then our situation is exactly as St. Paul describes, “god is their belly and their end is destruction.” We forget not only that money is a means but that we have a higher and a greater identity found primarily and essentially in the liturgy and worship of the Church and which then extends into the forms of our everyday lives. They are to be lives of service and sacrifice, lives that manifest something of the virtues of Christ in us, the virtues of faith, hope and charity. These are the very things, too, which define the spiritual community, the communion of saints, the qualities of spirit which we are reminded about in the great feast of All Saints.
“Whose image and superscription” we are is answered in our liturgy. It is entirely about our being Christ’s, about being in him and living for him. Death and resurrection are the fundamental principles of our Christian identity and life in Christ. It begins in baptism where we are signed and sealed as belonging to Christ. Growing into that image is the direction and purpose of our lives. “Our citizenship”, as St. Paul reminds us, “is in heaven,” the very community of the spirit that All Saints’ celebrates. It is an affirmation of the reality of the spiritual which shapes and challenges all other forms of identity such as the economic, the social, and the political.
Here in the sacrament of the altar, the body and blood of Christ are offered and received that his life “may live in us and we in him.” Who we are is entirely bound up in the Christian story. Forget that and we are little more than homo economicus, enslaved to our appetites. It belongs to the ancient wisdom of Plato to teach us that we are more than our natural appetites, important as those things are. No. We are primarily spiritual and intellectual beings. That, too, is the wisdom of Christ and his Church without which we are, to use an economic term, spiritually, morally and intellectually bankrupt. Jesus uses the coinage of this world to teach us about our spiritual identity and life.
Providentially, we have this gospel reading just on the cusp of the great feast of our spiritual life and community, The Feast of All Saints. We are recalled to the forms of our heavenly citizenship in which we participate even now. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”, to be sure, but more importantly render “unto God the things that are God’s.” His answer is not compromise. What is owed to God embraces the whole of our lives in and through the distinct forms of our everyday activities. The challenge is to let that spiritual reality actually shape our economic, political and social lives; to live in the world but not to be defined by the world. We are to be defined by the one in whose image we are made and whose word is to be written in our lives.
“Whose is this image and superscription?”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church,
Trinity XXIII, 2016