What bears the image of God?

There is a difference between a question asked because we want to understand something and a question asked because we want to catch someone in a mistake.

We know the difference, even if we don't always recognize it in ourselves. Sometimes we ask questions because we're genuinely curious, because we're willing to be surprised by the answer. And sometimes we ask because we've already decided what we think. We want to expose a weakness, force a choice, or make it impossible for someone to respond without getting into trouble.

The question the Pharisees and the Herodians bring to Jesus in today's Gospel is that second kind.

They begin with flattery. Teacher, they say, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth. It's a lovely description of a faithful teacher. The trouble is that they have no intention of learning from him. They're setting a trap.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?

Under Roman occupation, this isn’t a simple question about civic responsibility. The tax is a reminder of who holds power, and the coin used to pay it bears the emperor's image and an inscription associating him with divine authority. For some, paying the tax represents an unacceptable accommodation to a pagan ruler. For others, refusing to pay it could be understood as rebellion against Rome. Either answer could be used against Jesus.

But Jesus sees the trap. He asks them to show him the coin used for the tax, then asks a question of his own.

Whose image is this, and whose title?

The emperor's, they answer.

Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, Jesus says, and to God the things that are God's.

Matthew tells us that the questioners are amazed, and they leave.

It's a remarkable answer, in part because it isn't quite the answer anyone was looking for. Jesus refuses to accept the terms of their argument. He doesn't give them the straightforward yes or no they want, and he doesn't offer a tidy formula for dividing our obligations between God and the world.

Instead, he leaves them with a question that is harder to answer than the one they brought him.

What belongs to God?

I wonder if we sometimes move too quickly past the second half of Jesus' response. We know what to do with the emperor. We can debate the relationship between faith and politics, the responsibilities we have as citizens, and what happens when the demands of government conflict with our convictions. These are important questions. Jesus doesn't tell us that the world is divided into two separate realms, one sacred and one secular, or that every claim made by an earthly authority is necessarily a legitimate one.

He acknowledges the reality of Caesar's power without making Caesar the center of the story. And then he turns our attention somewhere else.

The coin bears the emperor's image. But what bears the image of God?

We might remember the story of creation, when God makes human beings in God's own image and likeness. Before we have accomplished anything, before we have earned anything, before we have proved ourselves worthy of love or belonging, we are made in the image of God.

Not just some human beings. Not just the people who believe the right things, make the right choices, or belong to the right community. All human beings.

If the coin bears Caesar's image, what bears God's?

We do. And so do the people around us.

I wonder what it would mean to take that seriously. Not simply as a beautiful idea we affirm on Sunday mornings, but as a truth that complicates the way we live.

We live amid competing claims on our lives. Some are ordinary and necessary: the demands of work and family, the bills that need paying, the people who depend on us. Others are harder to recognize. The claims of fear and resentment. The pressure to measure our worth by what we accomplish, what we own, or how well we keep up with everyone else. The invitation to place our hope in a political movement, or to see our neighbors primarily as threats to what we hold dear.

Sometimes we give these things more of ourselves than we realize. We allow them to tell us who matters and who doesn't, whose suffering deserves our attention and whose can be dismissed. We begin to see people through the categories the world has given us, rather than remembering the image of God they bear.

And we can do this even when our convictions are sincere. Even when we believe we are working toward something good.

Remembering the image of God in another person does not mean that we must agree with them, excuse the harm they cause, or remain silent in the face of injustice. If every human being bears God's image, then the way we treat people matters. The suffering we overlook matters. We cannot proclaim the love of God while treating some people as though they are less than human, beyond the reach of compassion, or outside the circle of God's concern.  It isn’t enough to say that every person bears the image of God. We have to ask whether the ways we live together reflect that belief.

This doesn't make the work of justice simpler. Sometimes it makes it harder. It asks us to speak honestly about harm without surrendering to hatred, to recognize that human dignity is not a reward for getting things right, to hold people accountable for the ways they use power without forgetting that they, too, bear the image of God.

Perhaps this is part of what makes Jesus' answer so unsettling. He refuses to let his questioners make the whole conversation about Caesar. He moves the question beyond the coin in their hands and into the shape of their lives.

What belongs to God?

If we are made in God's image, then our lives belong to God. Not only our prayers, our worship, or the parts of our lives we label spiritual. Our whole selves. Our work and our rest. Our public lives and our private ones. The ways we spend our money, the ways we use our influence, and the ways we respond when someone challenges us.

If we belong to God, our worth is not determined by the powers that govern us, or by the opinions other people hold about us. No earthly authority gets to decide whose life has value, or whose dignity can be set aside. We do not have to earn our dignity. We bear God's image because we are God's beloved creation.

And the same is true of our neighbors.

This is the foundation of our life together as the church. We gather not because we have learned to agree about everything, but because we are learning what it means to belong to God. We practice seeing one another differently. We make room for one another's questions and struggles. We try to tell the truth about harm without surrendering to hatred, and to disagree without forgetting the humanity of the person across from us.

We won't always get it right. We will sometimes be caught in our own traps, convinced that we already know the answer, that we understand another person's motives, that we have nothing more to learn.

Jesus does not hand us a simple rule that settles every question about faith and public life. He gives us something more demanding, and perhaps more hopeful: a reminder of whose we are.

The emperor's image is on the coin. But the emperor does not get to tell the whole story of who we are, or who our neighbors are.

We bear the image of God.

If we lived like this was true, what might change in the way we speak to one another? In the way we respond to people with whom we disagree? In the way we understand our responsibilities to our neighbors, especially those whose lives and experiences are different from our own?

What might change if we remembered that the person before us bears the image of God, even when it is difficult for us to see?

Jesus leaves his questioners amazed, and they go away. We aren't told whether they understand what he has done, or whether they are willing to let his answer change them.

We are left with the question, too.

What belongs to God?

And what might it mean to live as though we really believe that we do?

Amen.