Minted to Be Spent

Whose image and inscription is this?” They replied, “Caesar’s.” At that he said to them, “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

MATTHEW 22:20–21

Nearly every morning I make the drive into Detroit to take my sixteen-year-old to his high school, and this Wednesday morning was no different. Some of these roads I have been driving for years, and some of them I have been driving my whole life, so by now the route has become a kind of slow film that plays out over the seasons and the decades. One of the things that never stops amazing me is how much the neighborhoods change. Some of them fade slowly, a house at a time and a storefront at a time, until you realize one morning that a block you once knew has gone quiet. Others begin to come back. The most dramatic changes come when an investor arrives with significant capital and decides that a particular corner of the city is worth the risk. In just a few years strategic investment can turn a whole neighborhood around: the empty storefronts reopen, the boarded houses are restored, and people begin to walk the sidewalks again. I have watched it happen on streets where I would not have believed it possible.

What strikes me every time is that restoration always costs something. Someone has to put up the money, and someone has to be willing to spend it where it is needed rather than where it is safe. I want to hold onto that image as we turn to a moment in the Gospels when Jesus is handed a coin, because what begins as a conversation about money ends up being about much more than money.

Whose Image Is This?

In Matthew’s Gospel the Pharisees and the Herodians come to Jesus with what they believe is a perfect trap. They ask him whether it is lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar. If he says yes, he loses the crowds who resent Roman rule, and if he says no, he can be handed over to the Romans as a rebel. Jesus asks them to show him the coin used for the tax, and when they hand him a denarius he asks a simple question: “Whose image and inscription is this?” In the Greek of the Gospel the words are eikōn, image, and epigraphē, inscription.

It is worth pausing over what that coin actually said. The denarius of Tiberius carried the emperor’s face, and the inscription around it named him the son of the divine Augustus. The coin was not a neutral piece of metal. It made a claim about who was divine and about who owned the world. When they answer “Caesar’s,” Jesus gives his famous reply: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

Everyone listening would have known where the next question leads. If the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears Caesar’s image, then what bears the image of God? The answer is waiting in the first chapter of the Bible, where God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” When the Scriptures were translated into Greek, the word chosen was the same word Jesus used of the coin, eikōn. Caesar stamps his face on silver, and God stamps his likeness on human beings. We are, in the most literal sense the Gospel allows, coins from God’s mint, and we carry both his image and his claim.

The New Testament takes this image further than we might expect. The Letter to the Hebrews describes the Son as the “exact imprint” of God’s being, and the Greek word there is charaktēr. In the ancient world a coin began as a blank disk of metal, and it received its image only when the minter placed it beneath an engraved die and struck it with a hammer. The charaktēr was the impression that blow left behind: a perfect copy of the die, line for line, so that everything engraved on the die appeared in the coin and nothing appeared in the coin that was not first on the die. To say that Christ is the charaktēr of the Father is to say that everything the Father is has been pressed, without loss, into the Son, which is why Jesus could tell Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Saint Paul tells the Colossians that he is the eikōn of the invisible God, and our own word “character” comes from that same Greek term, which the Church still uses when she speaks of the indelible character that baptism leaves on the soul. Paul also tells the Ephesians that we have been “sealed” with the Holy Spirit, and the word he uses, sphragizō, is the language of a seal or stamp pressed into wax or metal to mark ownership. The early Christians spoke of baptism simply as “the seal.” We have been struck, stamped, and marked as belonging to God.

God’s Money

The Fathers of the Church loved this passage, and they read it in exactly this way. Saint Augustine, preaching on the Gospel of John, puts it with startling simplicity: “We are God’s money.” He goes on to say that sin has worn the image down, the way a coin passed from hand to hand loses its face, and that Christ came to stamp the image fresh. His summary of the Gospel is one worth carrying with us: give Caesar his money, and give God yourselves. Tertullian said much the same two centuries earlier, telling Christians to render to Caesar the image of Caesar on the coin and to God the image of God on the human person.

Saint Athanasius offers an image that brings me back to those Detroit streets. In On the Incarnation he describes a portrait painted on a wooden panel that has been ruined by stains and neglect. The artist does not throw the panel away. Instead, the subject of the portrait comes and sits again so that the image can be painted anew on the same wood. That, Athanasius says, is what the Word of God did in becoming man: he came in person to restore the image in the very material where it had been defaced. God is not in the business of demolition. He is in the business of restoration. Our Lutheran brothers and sisters have kept this same note alive in Luther’s Small Catechism, which confesses that Christ has “purchased and won me … not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood.”

Heavenly Currency

Up to this point it might sound as though this is simply a reflection about belonging. We bear God’s image, and so we ought to give ourselves to God. That is true, and it would be enough to carry us through the rest of the week. But I think the image of the coin asks us to go one step further, because coins are not made to sit in a drawer. They are minted to be spent. A coin exists in order to circulate, to change hands, and to purchase something.

The New Testament describes our redemption in remarkably commercial language. Paul tells the Corinthians, “You have been bought at a price,” and the verb is agorazō, to buy in the agora, the marketplace. In the Book of Revelation the heavenly hosts sing that the Lamb “purchased for God” people from every tribe and tongue and nation. Jesus himself says in Mark’s Gospel that the Son of Man came “to give his life as a ransom for many,” and the word there is lytron, the price paid to free a prisoner of war or to buy a slave out of bondage. In Luke’s Gospel he begins his ministry by announcing “liberty to captives.” The whole drama of salvation is described as the buying back of hostages.

Here we have to be careful, because the Christian faith is clear that Christ alone is the ransom. His blood is the price, and nothing we do adds to it. But Saint Paul makes a further claim in Second Corinthians that changes how we see our own lives. He says that God has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us “the ministry of reconciliation,” so that we are now “ambassadors for Christ.” The Greek word for reconciliation is katallagē, and long before it meant reconciliation it was the word for exchange, the business of the money-changers, trading one currency for its equal value. God has entrusted us with the ministry of katallagē. We are not the price that was paid, but we are the currency the Redeemer now spends, coins stamped with his image and put into circulation in exactly the places where captives are still being held.

Paul knew this about himself. Near the end of that same letter he writes, “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls.” The Greek is even stronger: dapanēsō kai ekdapanēthēsomai, meaning I will spend, and I will be utterly spent. Paul understood his own life as money that God was laying out, coin by coin, for the freedom of others. That is what it means to bear the image of God in a world that is still held hostage. We were minted to be spent.

The Greatest Restoration Project in History

So I come back to those neighborhoods on my drive into the city. If a measure of strategic capital can turn a neighborhood around in only a few years, then we ought to consider what God is doing with the capital he has invested in us. In Jesus we are part of the most transformative restoration project in history. In the Book of Revelation, the One seated on the throne says, “Behold, I make all things new” (in Greek, kaina poiō panta). He does not say some things, or the things that seem worth saving. All things!

In Mark’s Gospel the risen Jesus sends his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to every creature, pasē tē ktisei, the whole of creation. It is a big calling, and if we measured it against our own resources we would have every reason to be afraid. But we are not working from our own account. We have a Renovator who has already paid the price, and his account will never show insufficient funds. Paul speaks of “the unsearchable riches of Christ” and promises that God will supply every need “according to his riches in glory.” The capital behind this project is without limit.

We have been struck with his image, sealed with his Spirit, and placed into circulation in a world full of captives he intends to set free. As we go through the rest of this week, the only question that remains is the one every coin must eventually answer. Are we willing to spend ourselves with him?