It’s that time of the year
again when we human beings are going to engage in what must be one of the most
peculiar and uniquely human of all behaviors. Many of us are going invest a good
bit of time and energy and even some hard-earned money to locate and obtain a
specific variety of squash that we think fits a certain criteria we have in
mind. In fact, some of us are even going to ride a wagon or a tractor out into
a field that we don’t even own with the sole purpose of choosing one of these perfect
squashes. We are going to buy that specific variety of squash, called a
pumpkin, and we are not going to eat it. We are going to hollow that thing out and
we’re going to carve a face in it. And then we’re going to put a candle in it
so that the face lights up at night.
Regardless of what you
believe about the origins of this Halloween practice, you have to admit it’s
quite a preposterous one. Personally, I have no problem with making
jack-o-lanterns. I think it’s a lot of fun and, in fact, the youth group will
be doing it today. However, as human practices go, from start to finish, it’s
pretty eccentric! If you ever are tempted to believe that humans are really not
that different the rest of the animal world, that we’re just another organism
inhabiting the galaxy, think about all these hollow, grinning-wide squash.
This is likely how coins and
other forms of money had come to be formed with the images and trademarks of emperors
and queens and other people in power. It was a way for them to it to consolidate
their power and to control the people. Almost as extraordinary as putting human
faces on pumpkins, Caesar, in Jesus’ time, had stamped his own face on the denarius
coin. So, then, every time goods and services exchanged hands it was like Caesar
was there, saying “This is mine.” Every time one of the empire’s taxes came up,
Caesar was there, proclaiming, “This is mine, too.”
The people of religion loathed
it. Currency, especially with a human face on it, was the stuff of idolatry. It
was easy to see, for one, how people could start to worship it, to give it more
value than anything else. In fact, in addition to Caesar’s likeness, each coin
also bore an inscription: “Tiberius Caesar, Augustus, son of divine Augustus.” So
it was no wonder that the Jewish authorities would have despised them so much. Simply
the use of the money was a constant reminder of the Roman occupation, and the
yearly census tax made it even worse. Each time that tax was paid with one of
those coins, it felt like worship to a false god.
This is precisely why the
Jewish religious leaders find this to be the perfect way to trap Jesus. If Jesus
agrees to the payment of Caesar’s yearly tax, then he will become immediately
unpopular with the crowds of ordinary folk who are following him. They, too,
feel that Caesar’s face is everywhere, oppressing their livelihood, and this
yearly tax (I know it’s hard to imagine) was deeply unpopular. It was another
form of tribute; that is, a system whereby they handed over a portion of their
livelihood in return for protection and the right to live. By consenting to
that system he will be seen as just another one of the spineless leaders in
hock to the Roman army trying to maintain the status quo. However, if Jesus agrees it is unlawful to pay the tax then
he becomes a normal revolutionary, an upstart warmonger who wants to overthrow
Rome. It will be much easier for the authorities to encircle him and label him
as trouble.
Jesus’ response about paying
the tax is remarkable. He manages to wiggle out of the trap by reminding them of
something that everyone finds so easy to forget, or worse, deny. What’s more
extraordinary and ingenious than the face of Caesar on a coin? Well, the fact
that each one of us—each pumpkin-carver among us, each cave-wall scribbler,
each money-minter—bears a mark on his or her very life. What’s more astonishing
than an entire system of currency containing the image of the emperor who made
it? The truth that each one of us human beings is minted in the image of our
Creator. From Jesus’ point of view, it is no big deal at all to pay Caesar’s
tribute with the money in our pockets once we remembers that we pay tribute of
thanksgiving and service to God the Father each and every day with our lives. The
currency of Caesar is copper, stone, and sword. Those are powerful, insofar as
you want to build a city or an army. But the currency of the Creator are things
like flesh and blood, intellect and language, creativity and morality and kindness.
And imagine what those things can build.
To be reminded that we are
created in God’s image is no small thing. I wonder if the Pharisees and
Herodians had forgotten it, caught up, as they were, in fretting about how Caesar
was laying claim to everything. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we really
know what it means anymore to be made in God’s image. We hear so many competing definitions of what
it means to be human nowadays that our divine qualities get glossed over or
downplayed. The brain is just one giant computer, programmed from birth, some
say. Others tell us all our features of human-ness can just be explained by
cold-hard science, as long as we have the time. More likely, we don’t hear
these things; we just feel them. So many of us get the impression that we are
just cogs in a giant machine, working, day in and day out, to pay the bills and
make ends meet, worrying if we’ll have enough for retirement, slaving to
consume and purchase things that leave us unfulfilled. Millions of others of us
scrape by in the filthy slums of the world’s poorest communities, living on
little more than a denarius a day. We see, we hear, we sense deep in our bones that
we are just pawns of whichever cruel empire we have, that we are massed-produced
squishy computers that can just be controlled and manipulated.
The reality, we must
remember, is different. The reality is that God has carefully picked out and
chosen each person who has ever walked on this earth, male and female, and
said, “This one. This one is mine.” The
reality is that each victim of Ebola who seems destined to become just another
statistic, destined to become just another contagion for us to fear in the attention-hungry
news cycle, bears the image of God. It means that Hannah Graham bore God’s image, just as whoever abused her and left her to die, though we are so prone to
call such a person a monster.
But bearing God’s image does
not just mean that we are precious or worthy. It means that we have the
capacity re-present God in our very thoughts and actions and interact with
creation in the same manner that God can. It means that as much as we
participate in a world that will always try to convince us otherwise, we have
been designed to reflect these qualities back to someone else in a way that
contributes to the good, to praise someone other than ourselves.
A recent edition of the
magazine Intelligent Life ran an
article where they asked six leaders in very intellectual fields to answer a
question: what’s is the point? Noted novelist and atheist Philip Pullman
weighed in, as did a philosopher, a poet, a psychoanalyst and a reporter. Their
articulate responses were all fairly interesting to read, very auspicious-sounding,
full of wisdom and observation. Most compelling, however, was the simple four-word
response that came from the biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe. She was the
person among that list whose career essentially involves scouring the sum total
of people’s life stories and finding within them some pattern and meaning. Ms.
Wroe responded curtly, “The point is love.”
Yes, love is ultimately what
we and no one else are able to render to God and creation. It was placed there
in the beginning and it remains there still, like a small tea light in the
bottom of a hollowed-out pumpkin. And even when our godlike image is so
tarnished and broken, so demolished by sin and our self-serving behavior that
we are not sure we are even able to love, not able to recognize the healing powers
of our speech, our intellect, our creativity, much less lift it to God…then we
remember that God become one of us in that human image. And because of that, we
can see that even in death, even in utter suffering, we still bear the image of
the divine. Even as we breathe our last and the story of our life comes to a
close there is still opportunity to reflect God’s glory. Caesar’s army and tax
may be powerful, but imagine all the force of justice and righteousness if our
redeemed lives were offered in tribute each and every day to the Lord of heaven
and earth because the point is love.
That, I believe, is what
Jesus envisions as I see him flipping that coin back into the hands of the
Pharisees. He isn’t all that impressed with the power of cash or currency, but rather
with the beauty of our very beings offered in grateful devotion, each one of
us, like a beautiful jack-o-lantern, who learned from Christ that the point was
love, our light glowing from the inside and shining that smile of existence
right back in praise of the one who carved it.
And he envisions that Creator
gazing right back, with them lined up on the front porch of his creation,
saying, “These. These beauties are mine.”
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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