A sermon on Exodus 33:12-23; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 & Matthew 22:15-22 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
In the USA, there is a thing called the “America the Beautiful” pass. It is a ticket, which for $80 a year gives US residents entry to all US national parks. Each year’s pass is supposed to feature the winning image from a public photo contest run by the National Park Foundation, so it ends up being this beautiful nature image that many Americans carry around in their wallets. This year, despite the contest being won by a photo of mountain peaks and alpine waters in Glacier National Park, somehow that photo has been replaced on the pass by a close-up of Donald Trump portrayed alongside George Washington. Presumably someone, somewhere, decreed that his portrait was more beautiful than Glacier National Park and should be carried around in everyone’s pocket.
Now this seems relatively trivial and tame in comparison to the ancient world where leaders just came right out and declared themselves to be gods, and insisted that the people worship them as such, on pain of death.
There is a fair bit of this going on in the background of the gospel reading that we heard tonight about the attempt to trap Jesus with a question about paying taxes to the Romans. The question was a trap because the Romans were a hated foreign occupation force, and the Jewish people deeply resented paying taxes to them, so if Jesus said, “Yes, you should pay your taxes to the Romans,” his popularity rating would take a plunge in the next opinion polls. But of course, if he said, “No, refuse to pay the tax,” he would probably be arrested by the Romans within minutes, and his opponents would have got rid of him without having to lift a hand themselves.
It seemed like the perfect trap. But Jesus manages to spring the trap without getting himself caught in it. “Show me the coin used for the tax,” he says, and they hand him a coin. This is a bit of a gotcha moment already; an own goal by the Pharisees and Herodian inquisitors. You see, this is happening inside the temple precinct, and pulling out this coin in there would have been a bit like showing off your 2026 America the Beautiful pass at a No Kings rally.
Jesus jumps on this straight away: “Whose image is this, and whose title?” The image on the coin was the emperor’s and the inscription read, “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus,” and on the other side, “high priest.” To many devout Jews, that made the coin a blasphemous idol, an insult to God. So Jesus has already gained the upper hand in the argument the minute the Pharisees are caught carrying this despised image right into the temple courts.
To us, the idea of Donald Trump’s image on the National Parks pass might seem almost comical, and a long way short of “son of the divine”, but this tendency of self-obsessed rulers to promote their own image for worship and adulation has some interesting implications. It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there have often been fashion trends copying the hairstyles and clothing styles of the most popular rulers. There was a story in 2014 that male university students in North Korea had been ordered to adopt Kim Jong-un’s signature hairstyle, and although it may not have been true, the readiness to believe it said a lot about his public image.
But the desire of rulers to be imitated has definite limits. A narcissistic dictator is delighted if people imitate his appearance and mannerisms and perhaps speech style, but they never want people to start imitating their tendency to draw attention to themselves or to grab power and take control. Anyone who does that is instantly a rival and an enemy. A mirror-image enemy perhaps, but certainly an enemy. If you were to copy Donald Trump by trying to get your picture on the annual pass, he wouldn’t be flattered. Imitation and adulation are not allowed to go that far.
Yet, in our reading from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, we heard the Apostle commending the Thessalonian believers for becoming “imitators of us and of the Lord”. This is one of a number of places where the Apostle suggests that the usual pathway to growth in faith and discipleship is by imitating others who have already made some good progress in their imitation of the Lord. And of course, the call to “follow” Jesus is a call to model ourselves on Jesus or imitate Jesus; not his hairstyle, but his way of doing things, his attitudes and values and behaviours.
There is an important reason why imitating Jesus does not carry the same risk of plunging into rivalry that these other examples of imitation carry. The reason is that Jesus is not the least bit threatened by our imitation. He is not in rivalry with us or anyone else. And because Jesus is not a control freak who seeks to grasp and monopolise power, there is no danger that people imitating him will end up seeking to usurp him.
Jesus’s pattern is to empty himself of power and to offer himself as a servant of all, so anyone who truly imitates him in that is not going to end up staging a military coup to seize power. The Apostle Paul uses this paradox to make a joke in another place, saying that if you want to compete over something, see if you can outdo one another in showing honour. Since honouring one another puts an end to trying to outdo one another, it all becomes sillier and funnier than copying the emperor’s hairstyle, and the Apostle has made his point in the best possible way.
It is true that modelling ourselves on other people who in turn are modelling themselves on Jesus is one step riskier, but I am quite sure that the Apostle doesn’t think we should be indiscriminate in who we take as our models to imitate. We are not being called to some sort of naive hero worship. Paul and many of the other great leaders of biblical times constantly remind us of their thorns in the flesh and their feet of clay and their treasure in earthen vessels, etc. They make no claim to be perfect, and they urge us to be wise and discerning, and to only follow their example as long as they can be seen to be following the example of the Lord.
In our first reading, it was Moses who needed a clearer model to follow. He asked to be able to see God so that the memory of that vision might sustain him in the difficult days and years of leadership that lay ahead of him. Moses was the one who others were going to be following and modelling themselves on, and he was desperate for a clearer view of the Lord he was following himself.
And this event was closely related to this same kind of question about good and bad images, because it arises out of the incident of the golden calf that we heard about last week. There is not that much difference between a gold coin proclaiming the emperor as a god and a golden calf being worshipped as a god. The attractive thing about making your own gods is always that you can project on to them whatever values and characteristics you like. When we choose our own gods, we can become as self-referential as the image on the America the Beautiful pass, because the gods we are imitating are in fact imitations of us, created in our own image to embody our own needs and desires. Idol worship is generally just a vague disguise for the kind of self-worship that the likes of Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, and Tiberius Caesar don’t even bother to disguise.
But this does raise the question, especially for us, of how an icon is different from an idol. Large sections of the Christian family have long been suspicious of any use of icons, lest they tip into idol worship. So what is the difference?
In truth, it often has more to do with the way we approach it than it does with the object or image itself. The same thing can function either way. In essence, an icon is a window, something through which our gaze passes to perceive something beyond. The idol, in contrast, draws attention to itself. Our gaze stops on the idol, and some images are designed to ensure that. That image on the America the Beautiful card is not there to channel your gaze onwards to Glacier National Park; it is literally covering over and hiding the wild beauty of nature with a rival claim to our attention. Anytime we become fascinated with the image itself, and with what it mirrors back to us about ourselves and our self-obsessions, we are tipping over the edge.
Moses rightly recognises that the best protection against such idol worship or self-worship is to really know the true living God, and so he pleads for the opportunity to see God. And in a bit of divine humour that is usually lost in translation, God offers to let him catch sight of the divine backside as God passes by on the mountain. I’m not sure whether you’d want to go as far as saying that God flashes his bum at Moses, but that is pretty much what the original text says! You want to see me: that will have to do you, Moses!
The Bible has lots of jokes like that, and they are easily lost in translation, especially when the translators have a bit of a prudish tendency to clean up the rude bits. But this joke is probably hinting at something important too, something relevant to this distinction between idols and icons. When Moses is only allowed to see God’s rear end as God disappears into the distance, having already passed by, we are perhaps being reminded that we don’t get to capture God in a freeze-frame. We only see a trace, a glimpse of where God has been and where God is headed. Our gaze is drawn on to follow, not stuck on a freeze-frame onto which we project whatever we want God to be.
In Jesus we have been given a much fuller image of God, God’s frontside if you like. But for those of us who do not live in Galilee in the first century, most of the time most of what we see of Jesus is seen as the image of Jesus appears in other people whose lives are lived in imitation of him. Faithful and godly people become like three-dimensional icons of Jesus, windows through which we catch glimpses of the true image of God.
That’s certainly something of what we are trying to capture in calling ourselves “Open Icon Baptist Church”. Not only each of us individually, but all of us together, are seeking to be a living icon, an open window that invites the gaze beyond ourselves and into the life of God. But there is a real danger here, isn’t there? A danger that tonight’s story of Jesus should alert us to. In calling ourselves “Icon”, we are in just as much danger as anyone of becoming another Caesar’s coin, or another America the Beautiful card – an image that wants to be looked at, an image drawing attention to itself. The journey of living up to our name stretches ahead of us, and this story is a warning sign on the way.
On our journey, we look to the example of others in whom we catch that glimpse of God at work, and we imitate what we see of God in them so that we might grow into such icons ourselves, into the fullness of the image of God in which we were created. Which, strangely enough, brings us all the way back to Jesus and his response to the tricky taxes question.
You see, when they hand Jesus the coin and he points out the blasphemous image of a self-obsessed emperor on it, he then says something along the lines of, “Well if this blasphemous image belongs to Caesar, then you’d better go and give it back to Caesar. But you had better also give to God the image that belongs to God.”
And what is it that bears the image of God and belongs in the temple? You and me. Human beings created in the image of God. Human beings learning the way of Jesus by following him and imitating the best of what we see in one another and thus growing more and more into the destiny for which we were created, the fullness of the image of God. There is no disgrace in bringing that kind of image into the temple. In fact, that is the whole purpose of coming into the temple: to give back to God what belongs to God, our whole selves, in worship and thanksgiving and faithful service.