Pocket Idols

 

Pocket Idols

A nation's currency says a lot about its priorities and aspirations. Monarchies put the king's face on the money to show that, even as they publicize the human foibles of their rulers, they feel there is something important about loyalty to the crown.

In our country, we have a rule against putting a sitting President on a coin, because that would be too much like monarchy. (Notwithstanding this rule, the current POTUS is planning a “commemorative” dollar with his own face. Many Americans interpret this as him trying to be a king. Or even an emperor?)

But what images do our actual coins bear? Mostly dead Presidents. Those delightful dollar coins with women on them have never really caught on, which also says something about us.

If you carry change, which I realize a lot of people don't anymore, take a coin from your pocket or purse and really look at it. What iconography do you see? What does it say about our own empire?

My roommate Lauranne has a theory about the Great God Lincoln. She imagines archaeologists in the distant future finding the Lincoln Memorial with its oversized statue and interpreting it as a temple. Then they will find millions of little copper coins with the same image on them (their presence mysteriously fading out in the later 2020s), and they will assume that people carried this little icon around with them as an act of devotion. When they find them in refuse piles surrounded by carpet lint and pet hair, they might conclude that this was a sacrificial rite and lay all sorts of theories over our supposed worship of Lincoln.

This aside from the irony that the Lincoln coin is of such low value that the Mint recently decided to stop making it.

I wonder what the actual Abraham Lincoln would think. I doubt he'd have aspired to be seen as divine like a Roman Emperor. But we no longer see him as just a person, do we? He represents something we value as a society, a transcendent truth we aspire to embrace while often falling short of it.

 I just checked my coin purse, and there were no pennies. Lots of nickels, bearing the head of a man who penned some of our nation's most profound prose but who also sexually abused an enslaved woman, promising to free her and her (his) children, only to renege on the deal on his deathbed. Archaeologists could easily conclude that Jefferson was another of our gods. We are only in recent decades realizing that he was actually a very fallible human. And don't get me started on the quarters. The guy we call the Father of Our Country was arguably a virtuous person for his time, but he was no holy saint.

Whose image is on the coin used for the Roman tax? The Greek word for “image” is eikon, a word Eastern Christians came to use for a visual rendering of a transcendent reality. But of course, this coin was a false icon. Tiberius was not a saint or an angel, and certainly not a god.

Why do Americans feel the urge to turn the “Founding Fathers” into divine icons? Could it be that we are an empire and just don't want to admit it? When asked to venerate our white, male forebears, what are we saying about our priorities?

When Jesus asks to see the coin for the Roman poll tax, he's flipping the script on the Pharisees, who weren't supposed to go about with pagan idols in their pockets, especially in the temple. And that's what that denarius was. The inscription described the Emperor Tiberius as the son of the great god Augustus—another Emperor—and the tails side bore the image of his mother, shown as the goddess of peace. The tails inscription reads “pontifex maximus,” which translates to “HighPriest.” Yes, that's the same root word as Pontiff. The Caesars asserted control over religious life as well as politics.

I read one commentary that cast Emperor Tiberius as a really terrible person. More recent historians, however, have noted that Tiberius was less a comic-book villain than a commonplace, troubled human. He was shy. He doubted himself. Yet the machinery of empire insisted on casting him as divine. Imperial Rome needed its ruler to be the son of a god in order to assert its power. So the denarii were cast and distributed and became critical parts of the imperial economy, each little pocket idol declaring the divinity of Empire.

In a Facebook post about the recent casting of Meryl Streep as Aslan, Eric Ewing noted that the second commandment forbids making images of God, a ban “aimed at the human habit of freezing the living God into something we can manage.” We all want to turn the infinite divine into something we can put our hands on, solidify.

Weird thing is, Jesus already did that for us.

Dr. Peter Carlson reminds us that Jesus was a human with a visible, tangible existence. He wrote, “Jesus was in-bodied and divine, and that meant that the people in power were trying to whoop his in-bodied ass all the time.”

It's interesting that the next thing Moses does after discovering the golden calf and breaking the tablets of the Law is to ask to see God's face. He wants something visible and tangible. What he gets is God's backside because that's as much of the reality of glory that a human can survive seeing. As Madeleine L'Engle put it, “Just show me your hindquarters and let me hear you roar.”

Dr. Carlson also noted that “The Psalm and its warnings about being in the presence of G-d is perhaps the context that we need as we try to understand G-d's reply to Moses, which amounts to, 'Okay, fine. I'm gonna hide you in this crevice here, and I'm gonna pass by, but y'all can't look at my face because, dude. You'd fry.”

What all this means is that with God, there is nothing we can perceive to make an image of. It becomes extremely important to the Israelites to always remember that no one knows what God looks like, and that no one should try to find out. Because any god that can be rendered as a statue or imprinted on a coin is not a real god.

I notice that the Pharisees brought some Herodians along, members of the pro-Roman political party. These were not people the Pharisees usually saw eye to eye with. The one thing they agreed on was that this Jesus guy was trouble.

This scene takes place after Palm Sunday, that demonstration Jesus arranged to contrast with the spectacle of Pontius Pilate's recent posh arrival in Jerusalem. Pilate had shown up with a small army in the hope of keeping things calm during Passover. Rome had already had to deal with a tax revolt from this troublesome province in recent years, a rebellion led by one Judas the Galilean. It was an uprising that kept threatening to reignite for decades, so as the holiday approached, the whole city was on edge.

Under these conditions, if you wanted to get someone in serious trouble with both the Empire and the religious zealots, asking about taxes would be an excellent way to do it. The Pharisees and Herodians thought they had Jesus over a barrel. If he said, “yes, pay the tax,” he would lose all credibility with the crowds who had been calling him not just a prophet but a king as they threw their coats on the ground beneath his donkey. (And remember, they did this in a context where they were constantly being told that the monarch was divine.) If Jesus said no, the Herodians would jump all over this apparent treason against Rome. In either case, it wasn't likely to end well for Jesus.

The question, Dr. Carlson notes, is still with us today: “Do we pay taxes to the government, when we absolutely disagree with so much that the government is doing? Conservatives worry: do we pay taxes to support abortion? Or, on the liberal side, do we pay taxes to support the military industrial complex? Do we support the economic and military imperialism that our country utilizes to maintain its place in the world?” Carlson adds, “This is not cause to excuse ourselves from the democratic process, broken as it may be in this world, but to investigate our lives and ask what belongs to G-d.”

The empire stamps the Emperor's image on the means of trade. But God stamps Their image on humankind. Even timid Tiberius and pompous Pilate bear the image of God. So, in a way, Jesus' reply could be interpreted to say that nothing really belongs to the Emperor because everything, including the Emperor, belongs to God. But for those trying to catch him saying something anti-Roman, it could also come off as an endorsement of the unpopular tax. Jesus cleverly deflects both angles with a reply his critics can't make anything out of.

This story is frequently cited to emphasize obedience to civic laws, keeping divine laws separate. But it may not be about a binary between what's worldly and what's heavenly. The whole world is God's.

The curious thing about all this is that the question is being put to the incarnate God, the divine glory in a body with a visible backside (who came into town riding on a visible...ass). Rendering unto Caesar takes on a different hue when we realize that Caesar, too, belongs to God, just like the rest of the universe.

Pharisees belong to God. Herodians belong to God. Pilate belongs to God. The people throwing down palm branches belong to God. All Caesar has, in the end, is a silver disc with his picture on it. He's not a god. He's an idol-wannabe.

But we should ask ourselves, if everything belongs to God, does that include our own bodies? Does it include our votes? Does it include the little idols in our pockets?

Idols make an appearance in Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, too. The church there is described as having turned from idols to the true God. We probably don't fully understand, in our post-Constantine Christendom, how hard that would have been to do. Religion was an integral part of how the Empire maintained control. The Gentile converts to the Way would have had to turn their backs on an entire way of life, drop out of their whole culture, and-most hazardous of all-renounce worship of the Emperor. I wonder how those folks felt about those little idols in their pockets.

But of course, in 1 Corinthians we are taught that an idol is nothing. There is no transcendent reality behind those images, any more than there was behind last week's golden calf. There is only humanity, stamped with the eikon of God and belonging to God.

Tiberius is not God. Lincoln and Jefferson are not God. The USA is not God. Only God is God, and the only icon we have of Their glory is this one guy from Nazareth, who said to give God what belongs to God...and that means everything from our little pocket idols to our votes to our very physical existence.

Let's think about what that means, to give our entire selves and all we possess to the God of nuclear glory who yet took on human form, which is the image of God God's-self. What do we give to Caesar? Nothing that doesn't also belong to God.