Jesus asks "whose image is on the coin" because what God and Caesar want from us is the same - their image. Caesar wants the image minted on coins, but God wants the image He has imprinted on our souls.
It seems like the priestly rota has been stacked against me, that whenever I am sent to celebrate Mass here in St Bernadette’s the Gospel is a challenging one: like the Canon has, without telling me, involved me in a game of good-cop bad-cop with this part of the Parish!
Obviously I don’t believe we have such a devious Parish Priest, but I will be the first to put my hands up and say my homilies can be challenging, I know it can be hard but I make no apology for it. The Gospel is challenging because Our Lord is challenging. He wound people up and got them agitated. I said it myself a few weeks ago after I’d failed my first driving test, nobody likes being criticised, nobody likes it when some deficiency in the way they think or act is highlighted. When we hear something that touches a nerve, the natural response is irritation and anger and upset, and our natural response to those feelings is often an unhealthy desire to get back and the person who made us feel that way – to confront them and tell them off. But when you hear someone, me or another priest or a deacon, trying to apply the Gospel to your lives and something touches a nerve – when we’ve found the place where it hurts, perhaps ask yourself – is this really all that unfair, or am I upset because I’m hearing something I don’t want to hear? If we don’t ask ourselves these questions, we never find the places where we really are deficient, where our behaviour or our way of thinking is lacking, and if we don’t find those areas we lose the opportunity to grow, our spiritual lives stagnate, and once they’ve stagnated for too long, they begin to die. The things that agitate us and get under our skin are the things the Holy Spirit uses to help us to grow and avoid stagnation!
Today a Pharisee tries to catch Jesus out; is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? If he says no, he runs afoul of Rome and can be accused of inciting rebellion, but if he says yes he alienates all those who believe he is the Messiah who will free them from the Romans. It’s a catch-22, with seemingly no way to win. But our Lord doesn’t fall for the lawyer’s trick, instead posing a question; whose image is on the coin? Caesar’s image? Well then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God. The plain reading of this passage concerns justice, the virtue which directs us to give what is due to the one to whom it is due; paying our taxes and doing our civic duties is an act of piety as much as making the due offering to God. A Christian must always be a good citizen. That’s the plain reading.
But if we only follow the plain reading, our outlook gets restricted and we become minimalists; we only give to God what we think belongs to him, and as with everything human beings do what we’re willing to give gets less and less and less over time. Take Sunday for an example, the Lord’s Day – except for most people the Lord’s day became the Lord’s hour, and the hour we gave to Mass becomes the only way we made our Sunday a holy day. And once this decrease happens it goes even lower, and for many it becomes the Lord’s forty minutes, or the Lord’s day but only every other week when I don’t have a lunch to go to. You see? When we follow a “just give God what belongs to Him” mentality, we try to take more and more back from what belongs to God. We don’t do it deliberately, it’s natural and it’s human to try and minimise our obligations and take back more for ourselves.
But there is a second way to read this incident, that goes deeper than the plain reading of the text. Why does Jesus ask for the coin? Why is the image on the coin his focal point? There is something more going on here than the clever evasion of a lawyer’s trick. What does Caesar want from us? Caesar wants his image. Caesar mints the coins and they are distributed as pay, but he hopes to get them back as taxes. Caesar gives us his image because he wants us to give it back to Him. What then does God want from us if not His image? He too has given us his image and wants us to give it back, but God’s image is not minted in coins of gold or silver, or on paper banknotes, it is instead minted in our souls.
Because, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we can be re-made into images of Christ. But we have to cooperate with this re-making. Let me offer you an analogy.
Each one of us is like a sculptor with a large lump of clay – except the clay is our souls. Each one of us has been set an assignment, turn this lump of clay, this soul, into an image of Jesus. Only, it turns out we aren’t actually very good sculptors; on our own we don’t have the right skills, or the right tools for the job. Just the clay, and our hands.
Jesus offers us help. He gives us the tools, and He takes our hands in His to help us shape the clay. When we follow his guidance, the image of Christ becomes more and more perfect, but when we don’t, when we pull away from his hands and try to do our own thing, we disfigure it. A nose out of joint, a dented earlobe, a squashed in eye. The image is still recognisably Jesus but it is marred and disfigured, sometimes quite badly. Then there are times when we go totally off the rails, we strike at the clay in frustration or despair, or we tear big pieces of it away, until it no longer looks like Jesus at all.
As I said, the clay is our souls, and throughout our lives every action we perform, good or bad, helps to shape the clay. At the end of our lives, the clay is fired in a kiln, whatever shape it is in, and we present that image back to God.
The sculpting is acts of virtue, acts of love for God and acts of love for our neighbour. They are the thousand ways we imitate Christ and make the image of Him that He is helping us to make visible to other people.
What then are the disfigurements? The disfigurements are Sins. The times when we choose to ignore Him, in little ways, mar the image but they do not destroy it. But the times when we do something gravely wrong, knowing that it is wrong and choosing to do it anyway, in other words when we commit a mortal sin, we destroy the image entirely and are left to start again.
Now, if we want our souls to be images of Christ, we need one thing; constant contact with the Lord. You wouldn’t paint a picture or sculpt a statue of someone without looking at them from time to time, and you wouldn’t try to build a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle without occasionally glancing at the box. The transformation of our souls is exactly the same. How do we look at the box? Or to use our previous analogy, how do we make sure we keep Jesus’ hands firmly guiding ours in building the sculpture?
It isn’t rocket science. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, to prepare ourselves, without all three, without prayer, fasting, and almsgiving we haven’t even invited Jesus to sit by us on the workbench. Once he’s there, sitting beside us, what’s next? Again, it’s obvious, not too difficult; read the scriptures so you can hear His words speak to you, receive the Eucharist worthily and regularly (ideally daily), so he can give you the food you need for the journey, and when you fail, and pull your hands away, and mar the image or smash it up entirely – go to confession and ask Him to help you remake the image.
Give to God what belongs to God, gains new meaning when we think about it in these terms. This isn’t a minor thing he’s asking that lets us be minimalists – He’s asking for everything. If our whole lives are supposed to be an image of Christ, then our whole lives are like that coin, stamped with an image and belonging to the one who made it. Give to God what belongs to God means, everything belongs to God, and we should hold nothing back from Him.
He is there, ready and willing to guide our hands, but we actually have to want it, we actually have to be willing to let him take control. We have to be willing to remind ourselves every day: not a minute of this day belongs to me – every second of it belongs to God. Will I keep it for myself anyway, or will I give it willingly to Him? Will I carry the image of Jesus with me for others to see?
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