Spare Change
Exodus 33:12-23; Matthew 22:15-22

October 16, 2005

How do you see the face of God? Is not everyone’s goal and purpose in the life of faith and of life itself - to see God? It is never a simple task and the curious story of Moses’ request shows that a direct answer is usually unavailable when you are talking to God.

Things don’t go well after you build a golden calf. God was furious, yet ready to move on, to get the Israelites back on the road heading for the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, but with an edge, a proviso. God would no longer walk with the Israelites; he wouldn’t be with them in person. They would have God’s support, kind of, but they would have to find their own way now. Moses knew that being unaccompanied would become their death sentence, because indeed they were a stiff-necked people.

Fortunately, God really liked Moses and thought he was a special person, an extraordinary human being. Moses took advantage of this relationship to argue with God in the best tradition of Hebrew patriarchs. Noah and Abraham had dared to bargain with God over the lives of the people, so in the end, God let Moses win. God would continue to walk with the wandering Arameans, to be present with them. Moses decided to push for something more personal. Moses had talked to God and received God’s confidence. Now he wanted to see God face to face.

God is shy. Well, probably not shy, but God knows that too much of a good thing is too much. God tells Moses bluntly, “No one can see me and live.” And yet, God does seem to allow his favourite people to adjust his thinking and change his mind. God backs down his anger at the plea of Moses, and it would not be surprising to hear God relent and show Moses the face of God.

But not quite. I’ll show you everything but.

Describing the actual physical presence of God is beyond our imagination. All we’ve got is human language which is always inadequate. And in our culture, even describing God is beyond our proper understanding of the nature of God. Having been taught that God does not have a body and does not therefore walk or run around us, we hear these early stories with the same ear as to a fairy tale. Yet there is a lot of talk of God’s presence and God’s still small voice that still speaks to some. A presence of what? Out of what does a voice come except a body?

God has it all figured out. Moses will sit down on a specific rock by which God is going to pass on his rounds, and then scrunch down into a large crack of this rock so he really can’t see anything around him. Passing by, God will place his hand over Moses’ eyes - and God has a big hand - and only once he is past will God let him go. Moses will get a glimpse of God’s back side, not God’s face.

Jesus turned to the Pharisees surrounding him, pressing upon him a cunning conundrum about money and taxes, and asked, “Whose face is on this coin?” By then the Pharisees’ faces had to be turning red in embarrassment and humiliation. “Caesar’s” was the quiet subdued answer. The very fact that a pious Jew had one of those idolatrous coins embossed with a graven image on its surface was bad enough. There are coins still in existence from that time that show the classic side portrait of the Caesar with the words inscribed around the head, “God manifest.” So here’s a bunch of religious police attempting to convict Jesus of blasphemy and seditious practices, and they have probably more than one coin in their pocket that violates Judaism’s most fundamental principles, “You shall have no other gods, and shall not make any graven images or any likeness of anything in heaven or on earth, and do not bow down and serve them.” What right they had had to challenge Jesus’ orthodoxy should have stayed in their pocket.

“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” sounds like it is coming out of both sides of his mouth, but the Pharisees knew he knew that they had given what belonged to God to Caesar.

A lot of hands might shoot up at this suggestion. We have allowed our government to take prayer out of schools. Christmas is disappearing rapidly from any public demonstration. We salute the flag with more reverence than we do the cross. Blue laws and other conventions to protect the sabbath day of rest are the curiosities of apparently archaic societies. Economic status has become more a judge of one’s character than the character of one’s life.

Some of these hands and voices are painful to hear, some are irrelevant, others are self-centred and delusional. Most are absorbed in nostalgia about the golden age we think is now past. Make certain those golden ages are not populated by golden calves.

There is one fundamental thing of God that we are in danger of handing over gleefully to Caesar. Some would not hesitate to say that we already have done so. We have handed over the Truth to Caesar. That is, we have allowed Caesar to be the ultimate definer and arbiter of what Truth is in our society, a movement that has been going on for the last two centuries in Western. Caesar is not narrowly the Premier or the Prime Minister, President, Chancellor or King, nor is Caesar simply the code name for the government of nation-states, but the ideology that declares the way we identify ourselves in the first place is by our nationality.

Governments have been good for society: they have provided services for the community and a sense of order and justice that are needed and required for a civil society. Taxes properly assessed and raised for such services are the “things that belong to Caesar” that Jesus had in mind. But, Jesus also had in mind that taxes in first century Roman Empire frontier territories were exorbitant, oppressive, and unabashed gouging of defenseless citizens by corrupt officials. Why do you think tax-collectors were usually mentioned in the same breath as equals to prostitutes?

Governments have proved in different generations and regions of the world to be the worst enemies of truth because they often possess most of the power to shape what passes for truth. Few governments have ever told the truth about war. Since war, after all, is the antithesis of human truth, what would you expect? When Jean Chrétien declined on the behalf of the Canadian government and people to join the United States in the ill-conceived war against Iraq, did we not hear a multitude of strangely different voices vocalizing different versions of the truth, many applauding, many condemning our refusal to go to war?

Truth also does not reside in our justice and legal system, though we like to pretend that it has to be there. We are human beings and cannot see the face of God, so in our justice system we can only point towards the truth. Many times we hit upon the truth by the rigour of our discipline and the integrity of our minds and honesty. Yet truth is not automatic, and as long as there is one David Milgard - and we know that there are too many - we cannot pretend to own the Truth.

The most serious problem about giving Caesar the Truth that belongs to God is that God’s Truth always includes Love. When can you ever accuse Caesar of loving anything, except power and money and force? When we allow Caesar to define what is true and what is not, then we allow love to be a non-factor in our decisions.

Maybe Truth is the face of God that we can never look at straight in the eyes. We can never really face the Truth. But we can look at the back side of God and be able to point to it and follow in the direction that God is going.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan