Pentecost 21 - Year A 2026

I first started exploring faith as an undergraduate student from a non-Christian background, from a family who believed that good people didn’t have to be God people, and that God people often weren’t good people. It was an upbringing that emphasised kindness, non-confrontation, hard work, putting others before myself. God didn’t need to be in the mix for that to happen, or so I thought.

And at that time of exploration a wise chaplain mentioned these words during a sermon; that she wasn’t sure there was any such thing as atheism, because everybody worships at the altar of something. Little did I know that this phrase would set me on a journey where I would repeat those words to you 15 years later, a chaplain myself!

Why did these words strike me? Because as a probably naïve and annoyingly principled 19-year-old, I was already feeling exhausted by the prospect of a lifetime of maintaining these virtues, and beating myself up every time I failed. I had made an altar to these faceless, impersonal virtues and could see they were already eating up my family.
• The worship of kindness became an inability to speak truth;
• the worship of non-confrontation, an inability to act justly;
• the worship of hard work, an inability to rest;
• the worship of serving others, an inability to articulate personal needs, callings and desires.

But God gifts us all these virtues – truth, justice, rest and desire – just as much as kindness, non-violence, honest labour and service. The problem came not with my adopting one set or the other, but my stubborn belief that any of them were sustainable without their source, which is God.

And so the root of my conversion experience was and is this: in a world where the small gods of both vice and virtue slowly but surely demand their pound of flesh and make mincemeat of us; here is a God who invites us to the table empty-handed, and instead offers themself as food for the journey. It’s difficult to describe how utterly that blew my young-adult mind – to be liberated, through grace, from a life of solo righteousness, from the weakness of my own strength.

Today’s Gospel resonated with that experience. Why? Because I think we often have an image of idols as obvious vices like money, greed, lust, power. The dangerous ground in my experience is making idols out of things that are just virtuous enough to pass for a pale imitation of God. To make God smaller than God is.
We hear Jesus use the image of a coin to separate out the things that belong to God and the things that belong to Caesar. Maybe we can think of those things as a life lived to God, and a life lived to obviously worldly things. Obviously worldly things belong to obviously worldly leaders like Caesar, godly things belong to the divine. We could stop there and have a pretty solid set of principles for discernment.

But there are phrases and historical titbits that make me wonder whether there is something much more subtle going on here, something like a warning from Jesus to a group of observant fellow Jews about the grey area, the danger of making idols out of things that seem just good enough to be a decent substitute ingredient for the divine.

Let’s sketch out the first century scene a bit, so that you can hopefully wonder along with me.
In the crowd, we have a trick question being set up by two groups within Jewish society who didn’t always make for good bedfellows at the time – the Pharisees, and the Herodians (this is the only place they pop up in the whole of Matthew’s Gospel). As a general rule, the Pharisees were trying to live strictly according to the Law under occupation, in a multi-ethnic and multi-god society. The supporters of Herod were more willing to assimilate into Roman society to survive as a minority group. Integrity, or influence? Which group will Jesus side with, and who can criticise him as a result? It’s a classic political checkmate.

They declare that Jesus ‘regards people without partiality’. The original Greek uses prosopon, or face, for people – our face being the thing that differentiates us. Maybe this was Jesus’ inspiration for asking to see the coin used to pay the tax, which bore the face of Caesar Augustus along with his titles: ‘Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus’, and ‘High Priest’. Coins weren’t just money. In the absence of TV and the printing press, they were a major form of visual mass propaganda.

This conversation is taking place inside the Temple. Observant Jews should not have been carrying coins bearing the face of a divine pagan emperor into the sacred space. That’s partly why money-changers operated in the outer precincts of the Temple, to exchange Roman currency for the prescribed temple offering of a silver shekel, seen throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus calls out this primary hypocrisy as they try to test him.

But here’s where it gets really interesting – or possibly just interesting to me, as I went down a historical coin-related rabbit hole at 11pm on Wednesday…

Jewish coinage had carefully avoided graven images and divine titles, in keeping with the second commandment. Jews visiting the Temple sometimes had no choice but to use shekels minted with foreign gods during the occupation. But archaeological evidence suggests that Herod the Great – the one of nativity-story-infant-massacring fame – and his successors in power during Jesus’ lifetime started to add their own titles to the Temple coins; Jewish kings aping pagan propaganda practices.

In classic rabbi style, Jesus has pulled the ol’ switcheroo on this group of law-abiders and Herod-supporters. What started as a question about Jesus’ stance on Roman law has been reflected back as a question about the group’s stance on God’s law. Jesus first and foremost points out the hypocrisy of them testing him on how to live faithfully under Roman occupation while they are carrying prohibited Roman coins into the Temple.

But I wonder whether he’s also asking about what else they have in their pockets. Maybe some Temple coins which are evidence of a much more subtle form of idolatry, silver shekels reserved for God’s offering but marked by the name of their own ruler. As the crowd says, Jesus doesn’t regard faces with partiality – he doesn’t differentiate between a coin glorifying a pagan face or a coin glorifying a Jewish one.
But where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Salvation does not belong to the Emperor, that much is clear. But Emperor aside, who is their saviour, I hear Jesus ask. Is it God, or the human dynasty of Herod? Do they survive and flourish through the power of God, or through the political wrangling and questionable ethics of a ruler who happens to be one of them? This kind of idolisation, like my thankfully failed attempts to live entirely off personal strength, is much harder to spot, because it’s so easy to rely on as a socially acceptable alternative to God.

And after all this, Jesus stands before them as a new Temple offering, whose blood will be poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. He is the one who bears the name and face of the son of the divine, not a propaganda coin but a living and true God, incarnate flesh and blood willing to die on their behalf.
Unlike the idols and small gods, whether vice or virtue, Jesus does not demand from us a pound of flesh, does not eat us up. Instead, he offers up his body and blood as bread and wine, without payment and without price.

And we are offered the privilege of partaking in that here and now.

This is the real deal, my friends.

Accept no substitutions.