21 Pentecost A 2023
Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine
Heir of salvation! Purchase of God!
Born of his Spirit, washed in his blood!
This week I was praying for assurance from God, and it occurred to me that assurance is what all of us are seeking.
Moses wanted assurance, and God was infinitely patient with his repeated and ever-more demanding requests, only stopping short of showing Moses his face, and that only to save Moses’ life.
Humans struggle with idolatry because they can see the face of an idol, but they can’t see the face of God. The idol is concrete, available to the senses. The idol’s way to salvation is measurable and demonstrable.
What’s an idol? In the ancient world, they were statues or painted icons that represented or embodied a god. It was understood that if you prayed to the idol you were praying to the god; if you offered to the idol, the deity would receive your offering.
There was also a political dimension to idolatry: empires and nations identified themselves with gods and required their subjects to worship them, and if they were successful in their military campaigns and created wealth and established security, the power of their gods would be vindicated. Emperors, including Caesar, required worship of those they ruled.
In our time, idolatry can take the form of ideologies that make religious faith out of philosophies of government or economics or social science, the -isms of the day. Communism, racism, nationalism, fascism, capitalism… you get it.
Human idols are also among us today, mere humans that are literally worshipped by their following, political leaders, musical performers, athletes.
This is not to say that one can’t have an idea without being idolatrous. I am talking about worship. People can have ideas and believe in them without worshiping them. However, it doesn’t matter what the object of worship is, such worship will always end in spiritual disease, and spiritual disease will always result in social strife, even if the idea or person or nation or whatever is being worshipped is in many ways good. When we make gods of such human things we become sick as humans and as a society.
Addiction is a form of idolatry: the worship of any substance we put into our bodies to fix whatever we think is wrong with us, to save us. It can be alcohol or a psychoactive drug or carbohydrates or fat. If we turn to it to save us, it becomes our god.
Perhaps the most insidious idol is the one we make of God himself. It’s so easy to make up a God amenable to me, a God that only requires what I’m already willing to give, a God that agrees with all my unexamined values and my wishful thinking. Whole church movements are energized with the spirit of hate and anger toward whatever groups they regard as demonic. Annie Lamott famously said that if your god hates all the same people you hate, you’ve got the wrong god.
The supporters of King Herod and the disciples of the Pharisees were sent to entrap Jesus in front of his adoring crowds as he preached in the temple courtyard in Jerusalem.
We need to see this from their perspective. Jesus looked a lot like a budding insurrectionist, and his crowds looked pretty menacing. Despite the Gospel’s portrayal of Pontius Pilate as a fair-minded governor, history shows him to be a sociopathic sadist who even disgusted the Romans enough that they eventually dismissed him from the post.
And so it was that the religious and civil leaders of the city were anxious to put an end to Jesus’ movement before Pilate called down a pogrom and massacred everyone in the temple. If they could trick Jesus into convicting himself of insurrection, on the one hand, or show him up as a hypocrite before his followers, on the other, the problem might be solved. Hence, the trick question, was it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?
Jesus asked to see a Roman coin, then asked whose image was on it. Interesting choice of word: image. The same word we see in Genesis 1:27, when God created humankind in his image. Whose image, Jesus asked?
When they responded, “Caesar,” Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”
Jesus seems to be saying that the image on the coin represents the coin’s rightful owner. Of course, that’s not how money works, right? The coin was a denarius, it represented one day’s work by a laborer. It was exchanged for that work, and then it could be exchanged for any other thing of equal value. The image of the emperor engraved into it only said it was legal tender anywhere in the Roman Empire’s territories. Whoever held it, owned it.
But Jesus said, the image on it defines its owner. This is the predicate for the second part of his saying: give to God what belongs to God. If what belongs to Caesar is engraved with Caesar’s image, what belongs to God would be engraved with God’s. What is it that is engraved with God’s image?
Humankind, of course. Our bodies, our minds, our souls, and our hearts. It’s easy to forget that ancient empires, for all the beautiful art and philosophy and science they were able to create, were built primarily on slave labor. This is what the god-emperor Caesar was all about. This is the perfect example of the injustice that always arises from idolatry.
Give what bears Caesar’s image to Caesar; give what bears God’s image to God. Give the piece of metal back to Caesar. Give your mind and body and soul and heart back to God.
I want assurances from God, the kind of solid assurance the false gods of the world are constantly offering me. I can see their faces, so I want to see the face of God.
But there’s only one way to see the face of God, and that’s to die.
He died a real death to invite us into a spiritual death, so that by his rising, we might rise in the Holy Spirit.
To the extent I’m willing to die with Jesus, is just the extent to which I will receive that blessed assurance that he will be with me in all things. Will I ask the word of God to slay the old me, and build the new me in its place? I have to ask. I have to make that first move.
Not all of us are brought to this moment. It’s not a bad thing that people go to church for less intense reasons. They may not feel any need for assurances from God. They may feel confident God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Still, they enjoy church fellowship and the moral lessons they derive from it. Nothing wrong with this.
But some of us have been burned by one false god or another, and therefore turn to God not out of interest but out of need. We are not just here because we crave moral instruction, but because we feel called into discipleship, the practice of worship and study and discipline in the service of Christ and his church. And it’s a hard road, particularly in times like these.
And by times like these, I mean a time of confusion and manifest misdirection, a time when the enemy is undermining our common sense of reality. The great alternative god of western culture is Mammon, and it has led us into its own bizarre wilderness where truth is just another market commodity.
Things we own now own us. But our bodies and our souls and our minds are stamped with the image of God, and we therefore belong rightly to God. We who seek assurance that God will walk with us even in times such as these need only detach ourselves from the false promises of the idols of a world that is passing away, die with Christ on his cross, so that we can rise into the true and reliable promises of our Father in heaven.
We want assurance, and our assurance is this: that God’s image is all around us, in each other. If we am willing to give ourselves wholly to Christ’s way, then everyone we meet is God’s presence with us.
So we can sing:
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation! Purchase of God!
Born of the Spirit, washed in his blood!
Amen.
