Jack Hardaway
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We live in an image-soaked time. Dripping, swirling, awash in images.
We can’t see the water for the flood.
Yet we live a faith where the image reveals God.
We are over stuffed yet starving due to becoming resistant to the image, an acquired immunity due to over exposure, and we are ironically starving for the image of God.
Much has been said about today’s reading about Jesus, and paying taxes to the emperor, about the image on the coin, rendering unto Caesar, and unto God what belongs to them.
Is it about separating Church and State? About giving to the Church?
I think more than those things this is mostly about Jesus. Jesus not being trapped or tricked by our diversions. It is about Jesus using every opportunity to get us to rethink and resee our lives.
A clever answer at first then becomes a puzzling question. What does belong to God? If I worry so much about money and taxes and the government, why am I not just as, or more so, preoccupied with God? What can I give to God?
I think everyone who walked away being amazed at what Jesus said ended up not being able to sleep that night as it sunk in.
Something as shallow and meaningless as politics-which is usually just a way for me to take out my frustration and confusion at the world- is turned back on me, and suddenly I am confronted with how shallow and meaningless I have become, starving for the image of God.
Jesus turns the trap into bait. The proverbial hunted becomes the hunter.
There is a difference between being clever and being sly, and Jesus is sly.
Whose image is on the coin? Look again. See your life differently.
I spend a lot of time looking at the image of God. That would be you. You are so often the sacred text that I contemplate, revealing God breaking into the world.
That is how I go about doing my funeral sermons, if you haven’t caught onto that yet.
I’ve been doing a lot of beholding the divine lately.
Why do I wait until someone dies to speak what I see? That spiritual portrait of words.
Why not speak it all the time? Why wait till death?
Someone told me recently, who will remain nameless, that they would like their funeral sermon before they die so they could correct it! Probably one of the sweetest and funniest things I’ve ever been told.
They are right. Why wait till death?
Why wait till death? Speak it now.
Whose image do we seek? What are we beholding?
Don’t wait till death, speak it now. Amen.