October 18, 2026
Pentecost 21 / Proper 24, Year A
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Exodus 32:12-23 ~ Psalm 99 ~ 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 ~ Matthew 22:15-22
At some point in my studies, many, many years ago, I took a class or two in philosophy. It did not take long for me to figure out that, no matter how much I loved it, I was not very good at it. It just isn’t the way my mind works. Thankfully, I later discovered that I was a better theologian than philosopher, but every now and then, my failed attempts at understanding the workings of the minds of Plato and Anselm and Descartes, uncover something useful. And such was the case this week.
In modern philosophy, there is something called a category error. A 20th century thinker named Gilbert Ryle came up with the term in his arguments against René Descartes’ ideas about the mind being distinct from the body, believing that they are separate categories. Ryle called this a category error because our minds are not something other than or distinct from the physicality of what we are.
To make this easier, to ask the question, “when is halftime?” during a baseball game is a category error, because baseball has nine innings and no halftime, and the one break it does have – aka the 7th inning stretch – is not at the halfway point. To say that the number twelve is red would be another category error.
In our gospel this morning, the Pharisees and the Herodians are making a category error. A coin with an image of Caesar does not belong to the same category as the reign of God. A coin with an emperor’s face on it is idolatry and violates the law of Moses so it is a foreign concept to the world that Jesus proclaims.
As followers of Jesus, our principal identity is not related to empire or denominations or national boundaries or clans or family groups. Our identity is in the cross of Christ, in the life, death, and resurrection of the one we believe to be God in human flesh. Let’s not confuse our spiritual identity with our civic one. There’s plenty of that to go around in public life these days.
Over the past several weeks, the religious leaders have tried to trap Jesus into a misstep, into saying something that they can take to the Roman authorities and present as a threat to the Caesar. The Herodians are aligned with King Herod who is a puppet ruler for Rome, so what we have here is spiritual authority and temporal authority joining forces to protect what they see as their purview. Just who does this rabble-rousing itinerant preacher think he is?
Today, they are still trying to entrap Jesus, asking him about the Roman coin with the emperor’s face on it. If Jesus says don’t pay taxes, he’s in trouble with the law. If he says taxes must be paid, the people will turn on him for propping up the empire. And just as he did a couple of weeks ago, he answers the question with a question of his own.
“Whose head is this, and whose title?” (Matthew 22:20)
Except that’s not exactly what he asks. The Greek uses the words εἰκὼν, icon, and ἐπιγραφή, or epigraph, inscription. The inscription identified the emperor as divine. So already, anyone holding them is violating the first commandment about having no other gods (and the second about idols). But the image? The icon? It’s the same word we find way back in Genesis chapter one: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” (Genesis 1:26). The image, the icon (εἰκὼν), of God is us. Jesus does not accuse his sparring partners of heresy or blasphemy. No, he calls them hypocrites, literally someone who puts on a false appearance. They have taken on the image of the world and forgotten that they are icons of the living God. They have forgotten who and whose they are.
The same thing happens to us, I think, more often than we might like to admit. We go along to get along. We don’t ruffle feathers or rock the boat. Keep our head down. Keep calm and carry on. Succumb to the ways of the world.
The thing is, we can only do that from a position of privilege. Those who are downtrodden and oppressed, who live on the edge of financial calamity, who struggle with addiction or mental illness, whose skin color or ethnicity or country of origin put crosshairs on their backs? They can’t afford to keep calm and carry on. Life is too dangerous for that. This is why liberation theology found such support among the people of Central and South America where the empire – in whatever guise it organized itself – was dangerous. Where the poor had nothing else to hold onto. There was, and is, no going along to get along, because poverty and hunger and violence are always a hair’s breadth away. They see in Jesus a brother who also lived hand-to-mouth with “no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:30) and who drew his strength through staying connected to God. So that’s what they did, too.
We cannot then assume that Jesus rejected the political, because we all live in societies with political structure, just as Jesus did. The question is whether we are going to resist an empire that mocks and destroys and excludes and increasingly rewards the already-wealthy, or are we going to resist that? Are we going to point out that category error that is incompatible, inconsistent with, that does not belong, to the reign of God?
One of the reasons why we come here each week, why we need to be here each week, is to be reminded that we are made in the image of God, not in the image of a king or president or emperor or dictator anything else in this world. We are the icon of God. We are God’s currency in this world, not Caesar’s. And we can squander that by putting our blinders on or by burying it in a field, or we can spend ourselves in loving and serving our neighbors, seeking justice and mercy where they are absent, relying on God’s extravagant provision for us to accomplish more that we could ask or imagine.
And so, each week, we come to this table where we find all that we need in the bread and the cup and in this community that doesn’t let us forget who we are. We give generously so that there is enough to go around. We recognize Christ, the icon of God, in each other. And whereas Moses did not see God’s face, only God’s backside, we meet our savior here.
In the words of Horatius Bonar’s lovely hymn (1855):
Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face to face;
here would we touch and handle things unseen;
here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace
and all my weariness upon Thee lean.
(Hymnal 1982, #318)