Whose likeness and likeness is this?

Isaiah 45:1, 4-6 ‘I have grasped the right hand of Cyrus to subdue nations before him.’

1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b ‘Remembering your faith, love and hope.’

Matthew 22:15-21 ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’

‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?

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The fundamental Christian assumption of what it means to be human is that:

God created man in his own image,

    in the image of God he created him;

    male and female he created them. (Genesis 1.27)

This is what we can call Christian anthropology: we are made in the image and likeness of God.

Each human being is always made in God’s image, even if most of the time we fail to bear his likeness, through our own sins.

From this we derive the inviolable dignity of the human person and the call to inhabit and become the persons God made us to be.

And the way we are restored in the true image and likeness of God is through life in Jesus Christ.

It is with the foundation of that belief, about who we are made to be and that we are redeemed, that we hear today’s gospel reading.

Jesus’s scheming, nit-picking critics, want to catch him out and try it using the perennially touchy subject of taxation and money.

Only a lawful authority can enforce taxation, otherwise it is racketeering or demanding money with menaces.

So, should good Jews pay taxes to the Romans?

Say ‘no, they shouldn’t’ and Jesus is in trouble with the Romans; say ‘yes, they should’ and Jesus is denounced as a collaborator with the pagan occupier.  

Jesus both answers and frames the question in a much deeper reality.

In his answer he sets an important principle for how Christians navigate being earthly citizens and citizens of heaven at the same time, picked up in St Paul’s teaching on honouring the emperor and always knowing a higher authority, from whom their power is derived.

Human power is always derivative: as Jesus says to Caesar’s representative, Pontius Pilate, at his trial:

You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above (John 19.11)

Even Cyrus, a pagan emperor who did not know the God of Israel, is called God's anointed instrument in today's first reading.

Political rulers often imagine themselves to be masters of history, but Scripture reminds us that God remains Lord of history.

So, give to earthly powers what is theirs on earth; give to God what is his eternally.

And Jesus takes us deeper by asking ‘whose likeness and inscription is this?

It’s not just about the coin, it is about who we are as human beings, made in the image and likeness of God.

The word ‘likeness’ is a translation of the Greek word eikon (εἰκὼν).

We know that word as a rich word that speaks of the likeness, the image, that points beyond the surface to the reality.

The word ‘inscription’ is a translation of the Greek word epigraphē (ἐπιγραφή), from where we get the word ‘epigraph’, meaning some words that sum up the subject and that are written down in an enduring way.

‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?

Jesus is asking to whom you belong: whose image do you bear, what is inscribed on your heart?

What is inscribed on our hearts? Is it the pursuit of status? Anxiety about wealth? Political loyalties? Resentments we refuse to surrender? Or is it Christ?

Beneath all these questions lies the deeper one: who is your maker?

Is it God or is it you?

We are all tempted to imagine that we are self-made people, authors of our own story, accountable only to ourselves.

As was once said of a vain, self-satisfied person, "he is a self-made man, and worships his creator".

That’s nothing new, but it is certainly the spirit of the age.

This is what Bishop Robert Barron describes as the ‘ego drama’, when we place ourselves at the heart of things, the production in which I am the writer, the director and the star.

The ego drama never features God.

That is the ‘theodrama’, living in a world where God is author, director and centre.

The ‘theodrama’ is far more real than our own petty preoccupations and schemes, because in the drama of God we recover the marred image, and inhabit the true likeness of our Creator, to whom we owe life and allegiance.

Made in the image and likeness of God, human beings are image bearers.

The Blessed Virgin had the joy of being the bearer of Christ ‘the image of the invisible God’.

Inscribed in her heart is the willing and active ‘yes’ to God’s purposes and God’s will.

St Paul’s words to us all apply first and foremost to her:

And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Corinthians 3.3)

‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?

The saints are the image bearers par excellence, because God’s image and likeness is seen most transparently in them, his word is most clearly inscribed in their lives.

We are all God’s saints, with a lower case ‘s’, restored in God’s image by baptism and called to be Saints, with an upper case ‘S’.

We will be counted truly amongst the Saints when we bear God’s image and likeness, when goodness, beauty and truth shine out of us, when God’s commandments are inscribed on our hearts and when we render unto Him all worship, praise and adoration.

Then we will have risen above the petty schemes, manipulations and machinations of the rulers of this world and will know ‘that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.’ (Romans 8.21).