by CCW | 4 November 2018 15:00
No one talks as much about money as Jesus and there is nothing that Jesus talks quite so much about as money. He knows us only too well, our weaknesses and our temptations. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”, he teaches us. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”, he warns us. And in today’s Gospel, “Show me the tribute-money”, Jesus demands of the Pharisees, who sought to “entangle him in his talk”.
“Whose is this image and superscription?”he asks about the coin. It bears the image of Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, the highest power on earth, humanly speaking, at that time, much as we used to have and still do have currency that bears the image of the Queen here in Canada and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. The point is that money is the concrete symbol of power, of worldly and political power. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” is a true statement, after all, which reflects the political order to which economic matters are subordinate. But can money be the image of who we are in the truth of our being? Can it be the image of us? Are we simply and entirely by definition, homo economicus, economic man?
In my view, money cannot capture who we essentially are. If we think that it can, then we forget and deceive ourselves. We give it a power over ourselves. The question “whose is this image and superscription?” recalls us to ourselves and recalls us and all things to God. More to the point, ‘Whose image and superscription are we?’
The coin may bear the image of Caesar and thus symbolize 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, and so too, for every power and every kingdom.
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 thus our economic life must be subordinate not only to political life but to the spiritual reality of our godly and redeemed creaturehood. The real worth of our being is to be found in that higher and eternal relation of exchange, the exchange of love transacted in Jesus Christ on the cross for us and for our salvation. It is to be realised in our lives of sacrifice, in such things as the widow’s mite, the giving without counting the cost, for with God all things are possible, even the salvation of the rich, it seems.
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 must constrain 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” (2 Cor. 5.14). Such is the infinite exchange of love. 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, priceless because it is beyond human calculation. It costs too much. It is, in Sappho’s lovely phrase, “more gold than gold”. Such is the infinite value of the heart-blood of Jesus.
Providentially, we read this Gospel in The Octave of All Saints’ Day along with the Epistle reading from Philippians which also points out the misidentification of ourselves with our appetites, literally our bellies. (And this is after the Men’s Club Breakfast!) All Saints’ recalls us to our spiritual identity in Christ, to what Paul wonderfully identifies as our heavenly citizenship. We look to Christ and find the truth of ourselves in him. Just as the Beatitudes, read as the Gospel at All Saints, ground us in the love of God and set before us the Christian ethical manifesto, so too, then, we are not to “mind earthly things” so as to be defined by them. We are defined instead by the grace of Christ.
The teaching of the Beatitudes, much like all good teaching, is fundamentally subversive in the sense that it turns the world on its head and challenges all of the pretensions and presumptions of power in our world and day. “The poor in spirit” of the first Beatitude are the humble and “theirs is the kingdom of heaven” because humility is our openness to the truth of God in the face of each and every form of power, even in the face of persecution where your good is called evil; the eighth Beatitude. “The meek” are the gentle ones as opposed to the arrogant proud who seek to dominate and bully. The gentle ones understand that the earth is God’s world and creation and not simply ours to manipulate and destroy. Mercy becomes the real defining reality of our lives in the communion of saints. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. “Our citizenship is in heaven” and we are to live that reality now, receiving mercy and showing mercy.
Heaven is not ‘pie-in-the sky, by-and-by’, as the musician Joe Hill famously put it, echoing a Marxist critique of religion as ‘pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die’. The suggestion is that religion ignores the realities of the present. As Marx famously said, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” (Theses on Feuerbach). This marks, ironically, a feature of every form of progressivism, whether as global capitalism or communism; it is really a kind of secular providence in which we seek to make the world in our image, the image of the agendas of the power elites. Therein lies the presumption and the problem. We forget our commitment to God’s will as the primary ethical principle with respect to our relationship to the world and to one another.
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 sign of the cross of Christ. The love of God must be what constrains us, compels us and defines us, anything less makes us less than ourselves. Here in this place, this holy place, we find the necessary counter to all the forces in our day that would constrain us to what is less than ourselves. 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 is written over us, to be sure, 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. “Whose image and superscription are we?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXIII (in the Octave), November 4th, 2018
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