Today’s gospel reading centers around a coin, a single denarius, which had the image of “the Caesar” on it. Some of these coins still exist in the world, and much like our coins today, the profile picture of the person also had an inscription which read “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus.”
Essentially they were saying Caesar was the son of God. In the first century A.D., the two previous emperors, Julius Caesar and Augustus, had both been divinized, elevated to the status of gods by the Roman Empire. They were called the Deified Julius and the Deified Augustus, the Divine Julius and the Divine Augustus.
So here we have Jesus, the true Son of God, holding a coin with an image of a man claiming to be the son of God. Jesus asks “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” And they say “Caesar’s.” And then brilliantly he says to them “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”
Now this can be taken as an example that it is lawful to pay taxes and be contributing members of society, and that is a part of what Jesus is getting at, but that is not really the heart of it. If you look at the Greek text, there’s a double meaning here in Jesus’s words, because when He says that the likeness is on the coin and the inscription, the Greek word there is eikōn. It means image or likeness, and we get the English word icon from this.
But Jesus is also alluding to another occurrence of that word in the Old Testament, in Genesis when God makes man and woman, He says that He made them in “image and the likeness of God.” The Greek translation of the Old Testament there is the same word, eikōn. So it says that man and woman were made in the eikōn of God. They are literally icons of the creator. They bear the image and the likeness of God. So there’s a double meaning here.
What Jesus is essentially saying to the Pharisees in response is, you can give your money to Caesar, but you need to give your life, yourself, to God. Giving ourselves to God is difficult, more difficult than paying taxes even, giving ourselves to God requires our time. Giving our time to God shows we are giving ourselves to Him. We know Jesus made time for prayer, and He became more like the Father, a true icon. He invites us to do the same, to grow to be icons as well, but that takes our time.
We are tempted to spend our time by doing so many different things: to go there, to spend time with those people, to do that activity, but God really wants us to spend our time with Him, specifically time in prayer.
Yesterday, I ran into someone and she told me she was going out to campaign for some political candidates, driving fliers around and she said, with a touch of sadness in her voice, “it’s the only thing I can do anymore.” And I asked her, “do you take time to pray every day?” And she said, “in the morning I thank God for another day and at night I do an examen.” That only take a few minutes so I encouraged her to pray more and she said “I know I should.”
For me, this happens on a daily basis where I am in this position and have to make the decision, “do I go to this event or do I stay and pray?” Just think about how many school activities are happening at Wahlert and Mazzuchelli every day. I am frequently torn between choosing multiple good options. And don’t hear what I’m not saying, please keep inviting me.
But what is the best option? It is tough because there are things we must get done. Other people depend on us for certain things. For me, I have to make prayer a priority. I have to give it first place in my life. Prayer has to be the first fruits of my day, true quality time, not just the leftover time when I can squeeze God in, that’s a real temptation.
I believe God wants that from all of us, prioritizing prayer, less doing, more being. We have to be before we can do. We have to be a child of God first, before we can help others to know they are children of God, icons in His image. Serving neighbors is the doing. We become icons of Him first through prayer. Prayer is simply our spending time with God and talking to Him.
This looks different for everyone because it is a relationship, no relationship is the same, and they change. Taking time to pray is us taking time in our relationship with God. Hopefully, through that good quality time, we begin to look more like our creator, and less like the world. We want to be an icon of God, not an icon of Caesar, or an icon of any other false gods in the world, there are many, anything that isn’t God can be turned into a lowercase g “god.”