Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Year A (10-18-26)
Whose Image?
Matthew 22:15–22
The Rev. Drake Douglas
Most of us handle dollar bills so often (or so little) that we rarely stop to really look at them. But on the back of each one dollar bill, just above the large ONE, are four words: In God We Trust. It’s easy to assume that motto has been there since we’ve had a one dollar bill, but it hasn’t, and the story of how it came to be there is a rendition of today’s Gospel in an American key.
It’s the week before Passover, and Jerusalem is crowded with pilgrims who’ve come to remember how God once delivered their ancestors from Pharaoh’s oppression, even as occupying Roman soldiers watch from the walls. Jesus is teaching in the Temple courts when the Pharisees send their disciples to him with an unlikely set of companions: the Herodians. The Pharisees resented Roman rule; the Herodians owed their position to it. They agreed on very little, except that this rabbi from Galilee had become a problem.
They come to him with flattery on their lips, and then they lay the trap: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” If Jesus says yes, he has sided against his own people. If he says no, he’s spoken sedition, and Rome has a clear track record of how they deal with sedition. So, per usual, Jesus doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he asks to see the coin. He doesn’t seem to have one, but they surely do.
So, there in the courts of God’s house, they draw out a silver denarius. On one side is likely the face of the emperor Tiberius, encircled by words naming him the son of the divine Augustus. On the other is likely a title: Pontifex Maximus, high priest. It was more than currency. It was a creed in miniature, placing the emperor among the gods.
“Whose head is this,” Jesus asks, “and whose title?” When they answer that it’s the emperor’s, he says: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Which brings us back to those four words on our dollar: In God We Trust. They first appeared on American currency in 1864, on a two-cent coin minted in the middle of the Civil War, after a Pennsylvania pastor wrote to the Treasury, convinced that God stood with the Union, and that our coins ought to say so.
Nearly a century later, at the height of the Cold War, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, after a Washington preacher warned that without it, Soviet children might recite the same pledge to their own flag. And that just wouldn’t do. In 1956, In God We Trust became the national motto, and soon it was printed on our paper money.
Easy to overlook, however, is the motto it replaced, the one used since the earliest days of the republic. It’s still there on the same one dollar bill, on a ribbon in the eagle’s beak: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. We set aside a motto that gathered people together for one that, by its own champions’ admission, was meant to mark some people as other.
I don’t believe the people behind those changes were cynical. I think they were afraid: of communism, of war, of the bomb, of a world coming apart. And that’s how it usually happens. The caesars of the world rarely have to take God’s name by force. Because, in frightened times, faithful people offer it to them freely, hoping for reassurance that God is on their side.
Our comparison with Rome isn’t exact, though, and the difference is important here. Rome claimed the emperor was himself divine, one god among many. We’ve never claimed that—at least not most of us. What we’ve reached for instead is God’s favor: not a ruler who is divine, but a nation that is chosen, a cause that is blessed, and perhaps most importantly, an enemy who stands outside of God’s care.
In one sense, ours is the subtler danger. Rome’s coin was at least honest about setting up a rival god. Ours invokes the one true God and asks God to bless our boundaries. That was the intent when those words were added, even if few of us think of them that way today. Scripture has something to say about that: “You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain.” The Hebrew literally warns against carrying God’s name for an empty purpose. And we carry it in our wallets.
When a nation borrows the name of God for its own purposes, whom is it really serving?
Jesus’ answer points us somewhere else entirely, and it turns on a single word. The word Matthew uses for Caesar’s likeness is eikōn: icon, image. The same word the Greek Scriptures use on page one, when God creates humankind in God’s own eikōn, God’s image. So, follow Jesus’ logic here. The coin bears Caesar’s image, so it belongs to Caesar; let him have it.
But what bears the image of God? You do. And so, you belong to God.
But not only you. Your neighbor bears that image. So does the person you voted against, and the migrant waiting at our border, and the prisoner, and every person we’ve ever been taught to call our enemy. They belong to God too. And yet that is exactly what we forget. We take such care to put God’s name on our cash, and so little care to honor God’s image in one another. We keep drawing lines around who belongs, sometimes in God’s very name, when in truth every person on the far side of those lines already belongs to God.
Deciding who belongs was never our task to take up.
Notice, too, what Jesus doesn’t say. He doesn’t tell them to throw the coin away. Give it back, he says; it has its place. Money pays the rent and buys the groceries. It keeps the lights on in this building and supports the ministries that reach far beyond it. We can’t live without it, and Scripture never pretends that we can.
But Jesus is just as clear that money makes a rotten master. You cannot serve God and wealth, he says earlier in Matthew. The trouble with that Roman coin wasn’t that it was money; it was the creed it carried. And our temptation, I suspect, isn’t so different. Few of us would call money a god. But we’re quite capable of asking it to do what only God can do: to make us secure, to tell us what we’re worth, to decide whom we notice and whom we pass by.
Our first loyalty belongs to God: not to a nation, not to a party, not to our bank accounts, and not to the crowd. We can love our country, pay our taxes, and use our money well. But Jesus asks us to remember that the world’s claims on us are limited, and that God’s are not. Caesar may have the coin, but God has our soul.
The Christian call is to let money be what it is: a tool. A useful one, a necessary one. When spent with care, saved with wisdom, and given with open hands, it can serve holy purposes. It can support God’s purposes without ever taking God’s place. But it was never meant to bear the weight of our trust. That belongs to God alone.
So, the next time a dollar passes through your hands, look at it once more. In God We Trust. I’m not suggesting you scratch those words out. I’m asking you to make them true: to hold the money lightly as you hold the trust firmly, remembering that it is God, and not the nation or the crowd or the coin, who holds us.
And in a few minutes, you’ll hold out those same hands for something else. We’ll come forward to this table from different sides of many lines the world has drawn, and each of us will receive the same bread. It bears no emperor’s face. It asks for no allegiance but love. We who are many are one body, for we all share one bread.
That’s the motto God has been writing all along, not on our money, but on our hearts.
Out of many, one.
Amen.
