A sermon by the Rev. Canon George Maxwell
The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 24, Year A
It is a trap, and everyone knows it.
They come to Jesus in the temple courts with a compliment first. Teacher, we know that you are sincere. You show deference to no one. Then comes the question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?
If he says yes, he betrays the people who long to be free of Rome. If he says no, he has spoken against Rome in a city full of Roman soldiers. Either way, the trap closes.
Jesus does not answer. He asks for something. Show me the coin used for the tax.
And they hand him one.
Just like that. In the courts of the temple, someone has a denarius ready. They have been carrying it all along.
If we are honest, so have we.
We should picture that coin. It is silver, small enough to rest in the palm. On one side is the face of Tiberius. Around the edge runs his title: Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus. Every coin is a little sermon. It tells whoever holds it who is in charge, and who is god.
Jesus holds it up. Whose head is this, and whose title?
“The emperor’s,” they say.
Our translation has Jesus answer, Give therefore to the emperor. But the word he uses is apodote. It can mean more than simply “pay.” It carries a sense of giving back, of returning what belongs to another.
Return it. Hand it back to the one it came from.
The coin has Caesar’s face on it. Let it go home.
But Jesus is not finished. And to God the things that are God’s.
Matthew says they were amazed. Perhaps they understood exactly what he meant. Underneath that second half lies the question that matters: if the coin goes back to the one whose face it bears, what bears the face of God?
The word Matthew uses for the head on the coin is eikōn. Image.
Anyone in that crowd who knew the Scriptures in Greek had met that word before. It appears at the beginning of Genesis. God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them. It is the same word, eikōn.
So the answer is standing right in front of him. Caesar’s image is pressed into silver. God’s image is pressed into us.
Caesar’s claim is real, and Jesus does not pretend otherwise. For that crowd it was not a civic duty they had chosen. It was tribute, the price of being conquered. Ours is different: in a few minutes we will pray by name for leaders we had some part in choosing. But either way, Caesar’s claim is the size of a coin. It fits in the palm of a hand.
God’s claim is the size of a life.
What belongs to God is not a portion of what we have. It is the whole of who we are.
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That could sound like a heavier burden than any tax. If everything belongs to God, then everything is owed.
Isaiah tells it another way.
Listen again to how God speaks to the Persian king: Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped.
Cyrus has not asked for this. He does not know the God of Israel, and God says so twice: I call you… I arm you, though you do not know me.
Before Cyrus has done anything, before he has understood anything, his hand is already held.
That is how God’s claim works. It is not a bill that comes due. It is a hand that took hold of ours before we knew whose hand it was.
We were not stamped with God’s image because we earned it. We bear it because God made us, and God does not let go of what God has made.
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So what does it mean to give back to God the things that are God’s?
Think about what our hands do with coins. We count them, and we hold on to them. Most of us know what it is to close a fist around something and keep it near. Money, yes, but also our time, our plans, our reputation, the people we love, our own sense of being right. We hold on because we are afraid of what might happen if we let go.
But a closed hand cannot receive anything. And a closed hand cannot be held.
Giving back to God is not first a transaction. It is a release, the slow opening of the hand that has been clutching the coin.
And here is the gift folded inside the command. When we open our hands to give ourselves back to God, we find that the hand which held Cyrus is already holding ours. We are not handing ourselves over to a stranger. We are going home to the one whose face we bear.
The coin goes back to the one whose face it bears.
So do we.
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In a little while, we will do exactly this, though we may not think of it that way.
We will bring our offerings forward, and the choir will sing the hundredth psalm: It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.
Then we will come to the altar. The leaflet gives us a simple instruction: receive the bread in the palm of your hand.
Remember the coin resting in a palm in the temple courts, bearing the face of a man who claimed to be the son of a god.
Then consider what is placed in our palms at this altar. The letter to the Colossians calls Christ the image of the invisible God, the true eikōn: the face of the one who made us, given into hands that have finally opened.
We cannot receive him with a closed fist. We hold out an open hand, and the image of God is placed into the image of God.
Saint Augustine said it to the newly baptizeds sixteen centuries ago: Be what you see. Receive what you are
That is what we were made for.
To give ourselves back to the one who has been holding us all along.
Amen.