Tag Archives: Matthew 22:34-46

Gotcha Questions and the Image of God: A Sermon for Proper 24A, 2026

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October 18, 2026

Picture the scene. It’s the week before Passover in Jerusalem. Tensions are running high, as they always do in this season. It’s Roman practice to bring additional troops down to Jerusalem to help with crowd control and to be close at hand in case the usual disturbances break into open revolt.

On Sunday, a small group of ragtag peasants and fisherfolk from Galilee, led by their rabbi, had entered the city. They staged some sort of public display. It’s not clear how many of them there were, but there was a donkey and palm fronds. It was clearly drawing on imagery from Jewish scripture and history—this was imagery associated with the Davidic monarchy, and it’s likely that the leader was making some sort of messianic claims, interpreted by his followers and hangers-on as a call to rebellion against Rome.

The first thing they did after entering Jerusalem was to go to the temple. Most tourists did that, for Jews, the temple was likely the reason they had come to Jerusalem. It was spectacular—rebuilt by Herod the Great, still under construction. It gleamed with marble and gold in the distance. But this group didn’t go to the temple to worship or offer sacrifice. Their leader entered the temple courtyard, headed straight for the tables of the moneychangers, and again, caused some sort of disturbance, overturning the tables, crying out against their presence in this sacred space.

They left the city, it was evening, and went to the nearby town of Bethany, where they spent the night (either with friends, or because the accommodations were cheaper there than in the city during a high tourist season).

The next day, they came back in and headed straight for the temple again. And over the course of that day, their leader, Jesus taught and engaged in conversation and debate with various religious figures and groups. Over the course of this day, things get more pointed, as Jesus directs his attention at the religious elite, criticizing them for their actions and telling parables that are clearly directed at them. At one point, Matthew reports that the chief priests and Pharisees wanted to take action against him, arrest him, but they held back because of the crowds that were listening to him. It may also have been that they weren’t sure what charges they could bring against, whether those charges would stick, and whether they could convince the Romans that Jesus was enough of a threat to go after him.

So, some Pharisees and Herodians got together. That in itself is quite interesting. They were two groups that had little in common and were political opponents. The Herodians, as the name suggests, were supporters of Herod’s family, who had come to power through their connections with Rome. While they had done things to ingratiate themselves with the Jewish populace, like rebuiliding and expanding the temple, they were despised because of their support for Rome. The Pharisees were generally opposed to the Roman occupation, though they were unlikely to support armed revolt.

So when these two groups come together to ask Jesus this question, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor,” they think they’ve got Jesus trapped. The Herodians would say yes, the Pharisees likely would say no (but pay anyway). And if Jesus agrees with either of them, he’s in trouble. If he says “yes” he would likely lose whatever popular support he had. If he says “no,” they can have him arrested for sedition.

A classic “Gotcha” question. We see them all the time; especially now, in the midst of the campaign for midterm elections, with so much at stake. Journalists, influencers, and the like, try to get candidates to say embarrassing things, confront them with past statements, seek to create soundbites that will go viral.

But, as is usually the case in these dialogues between Jesus and his opponents or questioners, Jesus turns the question back on them. First he asked them for a coin. Then he asked them a question, Whose image and title is on the coin? Caesar’s was their reply.

Already, there’s a great deal of interesting stuff in this story. Jesus asks for a coin, and out comes from someone’s pockets, a denarius. In the Roman Empire, coins were minted with the image of the emperor. Because of the commandment against images, however, most Jews considered Roman coinage, with the emperor’s image and an inscription alluding to his divinity idolatrous. In fact, special coinage without an image of the empire was minted and used in the Jewish temple precincts, where this conversation took place. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, for one of Jesus’ interrogators to come out with such a coin.

Jesus asks them a question when the coin is offered: “Whose likeness does it bear?” The Greek word Matthew uses here is “ikon” It’s the same word used in the Greek translation of Genesis 1:26, when God says, ““Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” And I suspect that Matthew had that connection in mind. He wanted his readers to reflect on the significance of what it means to bear the “image and likeness” of God.

Jesus may have avoided the trap that the Pharisees and Herodians laid for him. But he has left us with important questions. What does it mean to be created in the image and likeness of God? It’s not just that as we humans we all share that same nature, being created in the image and likeness of God—that we need to remember that all of us, whatever our ethnic background or nationality, whatever our sexual orientation, gender identification, whatever our political views, our economic status, we are all created in God’s image and likeness. It’s also that remembering whose image we bear ought to make a difference in the way we live our lives, in our actions, in our goals and aspirations. What difference would it make, if, as we think about decisions we have to make, the choices we’re faced with, we paused for a moment and asked ourselves, Will what I do, what I choose show to myself and others that I bear God’s image and likeness?

Think for a moment, about how you might make sense of Jesus’ next sentence, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, give to God what is God’s,” if you approach it from the perspective of being created in God’s image and likeness.

This little sentence has become one of the proof texts for a certain understanding of the relationship of church and state, the relationship between the competing demands of the government and our Christian faith. Most of us view it somewhat simplistically. As citizens of the US, we are obligated to obey the government, pay taxes, and the like, and our faith is a largely personal, private thing. But if we are created in God’s image and likeness, if we bear that image and likeness, and if we are called to shape our lives, remake our image and likeness according to the model of that image and likeness revealed to us in Jesus Christ, then limiting our faith to a private, individual corner of our full and busy lives, seems like quite an inadequate response to the God who created us.

And so it may be that as we live out our lives, seeking to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, bearers of God’s image and likeness, these two questions—what does it mean for our daily lives that we bear God’s image and likeness, and that second question, how do we embody, live out, that command, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, Give to God what is God’s,” are the most important questions we face.

Buried in Love: A Sermon for Proper 25A, 2023

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October 29, 2023

This has been a year of funerals at Grace. By my count, including those of members both here and offsite, we’ve had twelve, including the one coming up on. That many funerals takes a toll, on volunteers and staff, on the life of the congregation, on our emotional and spiritual well-being. The number of those who have passed, their absence from our pews and from the life of our congregation is a burden we will carry with us. For me and for many of you, it’s not just those we’ve lost this year; it’s all the others who have entered the larger life; people who gave so much of their time, energy, skills, and expertise to Grace; people who meant so much to us.

This past Tuesday, I performed another ritual as part of our love and care for our deceased loved ones. I took a spade, and in the courtyard garden, dug a hole in which we would later inter the ashes of one of our faithfully departed members. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I would say those familiar words a few minutes later, but as I dug, a few steps away, volunteers were welcoming guests to the food pantry, and a few steps further away, people were walking by on the sidewalk, oblivious to what I was doing.

In today’s reading from Deuteronomy, we come to the final scene of Moses’ life. We have heard over the last months, the story of the God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that God would make of them a mighty nation, and that God would give them the land of Canaan as their possession. But those promises have not been realized. Now, at the end of Deuteronomy, the Israelites have still not entered the Promised Land, and their leader, Moses, who had brought them out of bondage in Egypt, would die, like his ancestors, with that dream and promise unfulfilled. 

But in the last scene of his life, God showed him all of that land. It’s particularly poignant to hear that story, and that promise now, in these weeks, as war rages in that very land, some three thousand years later. The effects of that promise endure, weaponized by hatred and the thirst for revenge, countless lives have been lost over the centuries and today.

But there’s the promise and God showing Moses all of that land, and then Moses dies. I would like to draw your attention to another theme in the story and that is the relationship between Moses and God. Here, we are told that God knew Moses face to face. We have seen details of the intimate relationship the two shared. We have seen Moses appeal to God on behalf of the Israelites, we have seen him ask to see God’s glory, and instead to be seen God’s backside from the cleft of a rock, while his face was shielded by God’s hand. We have seen his face transformed by his encounter with God, shining.

Now we see something else, although it is obscured by the translation we use. In the report of Moses’ death, our text reads, “He was buried in a valley in the Land of Moab…” The Hebrew actually reads, “he buried him” that is, God buried him. That tender, intimate act, the image of God taking up a shovel and burying God’s beloved and devoted servant is evidence of the intimacy the two shared. It points to God’s care and concern for God’s people.

It also calls to mind other stories. At the very beginning of the Pentateuch, in Genesis, we are shown God’s tender actions in creating human beings, the man out of the dust of the earth, and the woman from the man’s rib. We also see God’s tenderness, care, and protection of the first humans, when after they sinned, God made clothes for them out of animal skins.

We might be turned off by the intimacy and earthiness of this imagery, of the notion that God might create out of the dust of the earth, that God might take up needle and thread, or that God might bury Moses. Such language might seem overly mythological or anthropomorphic, a far cry from the God of the philosophers or of contemporary theology. 

But such language can offer us comfort and strengthen our faith. To imagine a God so intimately involved in the lives of those God loves, a God whose concern and care extends to the clothes on our back or the disposition of our final remains, a God who knows us face to face, can be a source of strength when we struggle or stumble.

And it also, I think, helps us reflect in a new way on the story from the gospel, in which a lawyer asks Jesus to prioritize the commandments. Jesus’ response is hardly revolutionary.  His words are quotations from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, straight out of Moses’ law. 

It’s worth stressing that Jesus is saying nothing outside of the Jewish tradition. It’s not just only that this understanding of the centrality of love of God and neighbor in the Mosaic law is enshrined in scripture. In Jesus’ own day, it was an idea that was widely shared. A contemporary of his, Rabbi Hillel, is remembered to have said in response to a similar question, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it.”—A reminder, much needed in these days of rampant Anti-Semitism, that Jesus’ teachings were well within the larger framework of 1st century Judaism.

Be that as it may, these words of Jesus continue to challenge us profoundly. We have compartmentalized so much of ourselves, so much of our lives. We place our faith in God in one small sphere of our lives, for Sunday mornings, for example, or for those quiet moments of prayer and meditation. We think of love as an emotion, we talk of falling in or out of love, or we say, we love this or that food, or activity. We are commanded, in Deuteronomy, here in Jesus’ words, to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind—we might say “with all of our selves, with our whole being.” I’m not sure I can even fathom what that might look like for me, what that would be like to love God with all of myself. And then, on top of that, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourself. Is that even possible?

Here’s where I think the earthy, intimate image of God burying Moses might be of help. For in that very human, incredibly intimate action—I bet most of us are turned off by it, by the idea of the transcendent, immortal, invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, being though of performing that very intimate even offensive act, who of us could imagine, in this day and age, actually burying a loved one with our own hands—in that incredibly intimate action, we see a parable of God’s love for us. Imagine God lowering Godself to care for us so intimately. Imagine that love. If God can love us so powerfully and intimately, how can we not love God with the same intensity, with our whole selves, hearts, minds, and souls?

 And if God can love us, how can we not love our selves? That element of this statement is often ignored. We might think that to love ourselves is somehow sinful, inappropriate; yet if you think about it, love of neighbor is predicated on love of self; love of neighbor requires love of self. And when so many people have internalized self-hatred, to open out the possibility that we, too, are worthy of love, well; that’s a gift worth receiving.

And finally, if we love God, and love ourselves as God loves us, how can we not also love our neighbor, who like us, is loved by God? How we live out and incarnate love may take different forms. It may be in the way we at Grace care for members of our community and their loved ones when they pass. It may be through the work of our food pantry and its many volunteers who offer food to those who are food insecure. It may take many other forms as well, by welcoming the stranger; opening our doors for programs like Uptown Sanctuary or Off the Square Club. There may also be new opportunities that we haven’t yet discerned; ways the Holy Spirit may be moving among us to share God’s love, to be God’s love.

A Sermon for Proper 25, Year A, 2017

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Our readings from the Hebrew Bible this season after Pentecost have been dominated by a promise. When God called Abram and Sarai to follow him, God promised them that he would give them the land that God would show them, and that God would make of their descendants a mighty nation. As we have read the story this summer and fall, we have seen that the fulfillment of those promises has been deferred. At Abraham’s death, he had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, and the only land he legally owned was the burial plot he had purchased for his wife Sarai.

The promises remained just that, promises, for generations. Jacob and his sons and families ended their lives in Egypt, having fled famine and found refuge in that foreign land. Later, the Israelites fled Egypt, making their way to Sinai, where the received the 10 Commandments. But the hopes of that generation to enter and possess the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey were also dashed, as they were condemned, because of their unfaithfulness, what the text likes to call their “stiff-necked-ness” to die in the desert.

Now forty years have past and the Israelites are camped on the banks of the Jordan River, all that separates them from receiving the promise God had made them. Of that first generation only Moses, their leader since Egypt, survives. Even the words God uses here remind us of God’s words to Abram in Genesis 12—“Go from your country to the land that I will show you,” God said to Abram. Now, God shows Moses the whole land and tells him that this is the land that had been promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Still, just as the book of Genesis ended with Jacob and his descendants in Egypt, not in the promised land, so Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, the first five books of Hebrew Scripture, ends with the Israelites still awaiting the fulfillment of the promise.

For us as Americans, this story evokes another prophet, another promise unfulfilled. For it was this story that Martin Luther King Jr referenced in his last speech, given the night before he was assassinated. We will commemorate that speech, we will remember the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination in a little over five months. He may have been to the mountaintop, he may have seen the promised land, but it seems we are no closer to reaching it now than we were fifty years ago, and perhaps further away now than ever from that hope of a nation where racism no longer reigns, where African-Americans can find the same level of success and achievement as whites.

That’s an important, perhaps the most important way this story connects with our lives and world. But it’s not the only one. I would like to draw your attention to another theme in the story and that is the relationship between Moses and God. Here, we are told that God knew Moses face to face. We have seen details of the intimate relationship the two shared. We have seen Moses appeal to God on behalf of the Israelites, we have seen him ask to see God’s glory, and instead to be seen God’s backside from the cleft of a rock, while his face was shielded by God’s hand. We have seen his face transformed by his encounter with God, shining.

Now we see something else, although it is obscured by the translation we use. In the report of Moses’ death, our text reads, “He was buried in a valley in the Land of Moab…” The Hebrew actually reads, “he buried him” that is, God buried him. That tender, intimate act, the image of God taking up a shovel and burying God’s beloved and devoted servant is evidence of the intimacy the two shared. It points to God’s care and concern for God’s people.

It also calls to mind other stories. At the very beginning of the Pentateuch, in Genesis, we are shown God’s tender actions in creating human beings, the man out of the dust of the earth, and the woman from the man’s rib. We also see God’s tenderness, care, and protection of the first humans, when after they sinned, God made clothes for them out of animal skins.

We might be turned off by the intimacy and earthiness of this imagery, of the notion that God might create out of the dust of the earth, that God might take up needle and thread, or that God might bury Moses. Such language might seem overly mythological or anthropomorphic, a far cry from the God of the philosophers or of contemporary theology.

But such language can offer us comfort and strengthen our faith. To imagine a God so intimately involved in the lives of those God loves, a God whose concern and care extends to the clothes on our back or the disposition of our final remains, a God who knows us face to face, can be a source of strength when we struggle or stumble.

And it also, I think, helps us reflect in a new way on the story from the gospel, in which a lawyer asks Jesus to prioritize the commandments. Jesus’ response is hardly revolutionary. His words are quotations from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, straight out of Moses’ law. Moreover a contemporary of his, Rabbi Hillel, is remembered to have said in response to a similar question, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it.”

We have compartmentalized so much of ourselves, so much of our lives. We place our faith in God in one small sphere of our lives, for Sunday mornings, for example, or for those quiet moments of prayer and meditation. We think of love as an emotion, we talk of falling in or out of love, or we say, we love this or that food, or activity. We are commanded, in Deuteronomy, here in Jesus’ words, to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind—we might say “with all of our selves, with our whole being.” I’m not sure I can even fathom what that might look like for me, what that would be like to love God with all of myself. And then, on top of that, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourself. Is that even possible?

Here’s where I think the earthy, intimate image of God burying Moses might be of help. For in that very human, incredibly intimate action—I bet most of us are turned off by it, by the idea of the transcendent, immortal, invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, being though of performing that very intimate even offensive act, who of us could imagine, in this day and age, actually burying a loved one with our own hands—in that incredibly intimate action, we see a parable of God’s love for us. Imagine God lowering Godself to care for us so intimately. Imagine that love. If God can love us so powerfully and intimately, how can we not love God with the same intensity, with our whole selves, hearts, minds, and souls. And if God can love us, how can we not love our selves? And how can we not love our neighbors, and the stranger with our whole being, loved, as it is, by God?