POTENTATE PAYMENTS PRECIPITATE PARLANCE CONCERNING THEOPHANIC IMPRINTS AND FEALTY PROPRIETIES

or

PRINCE OF PEACE ANTICIPATES ENTRAPMENT WHILE PANHANDLING FOR PENNIES IN TEMPLE COMPOUND

Quoting Old Ben Franklin, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes”. I would like to emend this with the help of church historian Dr. Robert Handy, “What is certain in life is death, taxes, and graffiti,” and then further emend Handy’s observation by adding “coinage”. Whether you engage in procuring the ever-elusive bitcoins or hedge against inflation with the purchase of gold, all of you have your lives shaped by the iconic prospectives of currency. (There are times when it is so nice to be a mouse!) From the days of “Let George do it,” referring to giving a dollar for Pullman porter privileges on the train, to paying for priceless family moments, captured with photographic precision with your Pentax, or maybe just your phone, iconography is a major preoccupation in the world today.

In writing of missives to one another, iconography intrudes. It is difficult to go through a day without seeing an emoji conveying hyperbolic states of attitudes because apparently punctuation is no longer adequate (place emoji here). And can there be a Hallmark moment without some depiction? And don’t get me started on trademarks. (place emoji here)

All of this is to say that we live in a world of images that have the potential of becoming Idolatrous, distracting us from the fact that we are created in the image of God. Before artists started shaping images out of clay, painting images on cave walls and canvases, and revealing the inner-stone image, God shaped us in God’s own image and declared it good.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes or not?” (Matthew 22:15-22) Taxes represent the social contract we have with the governing bodies that lend order to our lives. These taxes may be oppressive. They may support agendas we do not approve. There may be expenditures on projects or people we deem underserving, and there may be graft amid the procedures of procurement, but taxes remain the financial backbone of a social contract we have with one another. Taxes fund many of the social structures on which we depend: municipal governance; school; streets; sewage treatment; maintenance of parks, recreation, and green spaces; water sampling and purification processes; garbage pick-up; building codes; legislation for lifting the rights of all people; our personal, local, state, and national protection. This social contract is good as long as the citizenry complies with the expectations of the governing body.

This, of course, is not addressing the issue that the disciples of the pharisees and Herodians were asking. Is it proper to pay taxes which are above that prescribed in Torah, the law that God has laid down for the governance of God’s own people? Is paying taxes to a government placing that government in the place of God? If one pays the tax to the empire (government), then must one also pay the tax to the temple? Is the tax paid to the temple (i.e., benevolence or mission support) actually giving to God what is God’s, or is it just the administration of Godly work? In the midst of all this giving, is there a difference between giving our lives to God and living a Godly life?

Both and … are posed to Jesus in the courtyard of the temple and are for our consideration today. (See Nickey’s Corner re Matthew 16:13-28. It feels so good to footnote myself.) There were life and death, political implications pending on that 1^st century day, but the question continues to plague us. Somehow, we need to determine under whose rule we will live. In paying taxes do we regard the governing body of our day as being the ultimate purveyor of our political reality or is there a greater justice to strive for?

Borrowing from Paul Tillich, is government or God our “ground of being”? With a more Buddhist lens, “Where do we find our center?” Then, if our “ground of being”, that centered place, reveals a greater justice to strive for, what does that justice look like? How will we go about the work of reaching that more just place? Can that place of justice be attained without a government requiring taxes?

In the world of icons, which icon will we depend on?

Will we depend on the imprint of famous dead people with their various claims?

or

Will we depend on the diverse, living body of God’s own corpus revealed in the places where weeping and gnashing of teeth against oppression and injustice surround us daily?

More importantly in today’s world, will the icon of the flag or of the cross be our “ground of being”, our center?

As a blind mouse, I find most of this dependence on pictures overwhelming. I find the dependence on image to be part of what Rod Michalko claims as “sighted people proving to other sighted people that they are sighted.” It seems to be a strange insecurity of the sighted.

(And what do you think, did Jesus give the denarius back, or did he keep it?)

“Whose picture is it?” You tell me.

(Personally, hearing God’s word for God’s people is much safer than striving to see God. Seeing God is deadly, as deadly as the cross itself, while hearing God’s voice is the foundation of relationship.)

And, just as an aside, as famous as Patrick Henry was, have you ever wondered why he never made it to our currency?

When Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” was he making a claim for no laws, God’s law alone, no British rule, or a change in the governing body he wished to live under?

Your Pal,

Nicodemus, Pontiki Ekklesias*

 

*Church Mouse

DOUBLE PLEASURE, DOUBLE PHUN

Peter and I had some heavy conversation this week about Matthew 16:13-28.

When did the driver know that the pavement was angry? At the crossroads.

Have you ever noticed that there is a mess in Messiah?

Do you think that Jesus is building the Church on Peter (Greek petros, English stone/rock) because he is a foundation stone or because he is so dense?

Or can you see the blockbuster movie here? “Rocky,” the prequel!

How is it that when things seem to be going so well, they can so quickly go horribly wrong?

When Jesus demands that his disciples take up their cross and follow, do you think it means crucifixion or resurrection?

What are angels anyway? What is glory?

What does Jesus’ kingdom look like?
 

In a world of expedited trials, food insecurity, banned books, and denial of history comes this perplexing proposition of premature propitiation. Within it is a presentiment of presumed punitive penalty and a paradisical pronouncement. (Don’t you love the power of P?)
We know Matthew is leading us to the Mount of Transfiguration, but is that the kingdom Jesus refers to this week? (Oh, the places the mind goes.)

There are clearly more things to heaven and earth than my poor little mouse brain can entertain, so I am going to simply state my speculative surmises. (See what I did there using sibilant alliteration? It is not the power of P, but it has its slithering space, I think.)

Do you remember the DoubleMint twins and the jingle of, “Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double good, double good, DoubleMint gum.  It is two, two mints in one”?
Entering this conversation with Scripture, I find it helpful to remember those words from Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God.” (God is double-good; oh, but God is trinitarian. God must be triple-good, maybe like, Trident gum?)

When Jesus begins to show the disciples that he will undergo suffering and then be crucified, we, with the disciples, hear it as a prophecy of what is to come. This fits the narrative of Matthew’s Gospel, but the reality is Jesus was crucified at least two generations before Matthew is writing. Moreover, I think Jesus is speaking not so much as “both … and”, one and another, but as “both and …”. Both cross-bearing (not an angry, steel ball) and self-denial (not the river in Egypt), Jesus’ commands, present us with “both and …” thinking.

Over the years people have thought (and I hear them often say), “Such-and-such is my cross to bear.” When they suffer, they assume it is the cross Jesus has commanded them to take up. This can lead them to what Peter tells me is the false supposition that their suffering is like Jesus’ suffering and their cross to bear is like Jesus’ cross of death.

But Jesus suffers for us. Jesus dies for us. There is nothing particularly salvific in our suffering, whether by mice or people. We do not die on the cross of Good Friday in order to save anyone. The job of Savior is not ours. That job has already been taken, and we rejoice in the fact that we do not have to, indeed cannot, suffer and die for anyone.

It is not the burdensome cross of death we are to take up because, in the words of Paul, “Christ died once, for all.” Jesus wants us to take up the cross of resurrection living. Without the resurrection on Easter Sunday, Good Friday, after all, is meaningless. It is two, two crosses in one, and ….
 

Peter had me pretty confused for a time, but I think I have finally caught on. There is also a disturbing thread of theology that speaks of denying oneself as a kind of erasure (like losing one’s tail). Peter says, in fact, self-denial results through declaring to the world who and whose we are. This denial of self does not mean that we somehow disappear.

Rather, self-interest that knows who and whose we are allows Christ-centered, resurrection, communitarian living. It is not our own sinful self that is important but our self in Christ that makes the difference. In self-denial we live a life of awareness (wokeness?) and personal development engaging all the issues of our world while acknowledging and depending on Jesus’ leading and salvific promise. We are saint and sinner, two in one, and ….

The persistent search for building up “me” diminishes the importance of Christ, and therefore I lose the very life I am seeking. When I lose my self-identity and assume the identity of one living in Christ, I gain everything. This is the paradox of faith. We live as valued individuals in Christian community, and yet our wholeness cannot come from ourselves but only from Christ. (Who says one can’t win by losing?)

While living this life of self-denial, we are not erased but enhanced. We are raised up through the waters of baptism into the resurrection kingdom world to work for justice in word and deed, advocating for ourselves and our neighbors. All this is done, not to be justified in Christ, but because by grace, in faith, through Christ alone we are justified. In this relationship of kingdom justice, we proclaim our identity in Christ and our place in the body of Christ. In taking up the cross of resurrection living, we take up our cross of death and die to death. If we die to death, we enter into resurrection.
 

I asked Peter, “So how do we live out this paradox?” He told me that we express our two, two identities in one, and… when we lift the hope-filled vision of a world that acknowledges both Jesus as Messiah and the model he gives us for living a Godly life. In this way, we join the role of messenger (Greek, angellos) while Jesus comes with angels in his glory, bringing his kingdom now, and we are repaid for all that we do and have done. This potential judgment of doom hangs over us like the sword of Damocles (or the butcher knife of the farmer’s wife), until we recognize that Jesus’ suffering and death is our justifying sentence. We are judged in grace. Simultaneously, we claim God’s eschatological kingdom of wholeness to come. This too is a two, two in one and ….

 
Yes, I know it is a hot mess (just like when I was in that kitchen). It can ultimately only be reconciled by the Messiah who is and is to come. Yet, our hot mess of messy life is a wonderful mysterious mess of living and loving today and tomorrow, of forgiveness and foresight for today and the future, of claiming and naming who and whose we are. It is not found in personal achievement, in a self-interested overpowering Rome through aggression and warfare, but a more lasting proposal of systemic change.

 
Peter (the disciple) gets it right when he claims Jesus as the son of the living God, but he lacks the “two in one and …” understanding of Jesus’ presence and therefore desires a Messiah of power. Because Peter lacks the narrative ability of knowing the reality of the resurrection, we are invited to examine our own messianic desires, living in, but not of, the world.

Through this examination, we are given license to see ourselves mirrored in history while proclaiming hope for the future—recognizing our proclivity for violent demonstrations of baseless fearful reactions now liberated by the cross of resurrection living to turn to peaceful resolution. Not always being able to embrace the present and a hope-filled future, we sometimes react fearfully and exercise authority by using pejorative power thus limiting the rights of others. The violent acts of lynching and political mistrust in the present cannot bring trust and reliance on the one who brings the kingdom of wholeness and peace.

 
Understanding God’s continued activity in the world, we can say there are some standing here today who can see the glory of that potential kingdom he has shown us for life here and now, and, at the same time, the possibility of wholeness presence of the life to come—that we and our descendants might not just survive, but thrive, loving God, carrying our cross of resurrection life and hope, the ultimate “both and …”.

 

Your pal, Nicodemus

Editor, Theologian, Counsellor, Mouse