Year A: Proper 24 | Matthew 22:15-22
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
October 18, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“Whose engraving and inscription are these?” – Matthew 22:20b[1]
On the surface, today’s Gospel looks like a fun little story about bumbled entrapment and clever evasion. Jesus has been making waves in the Judean community, challenging the Pharisees—who were sort of the keepers of cultural and religious traditions—to look beyond a literal observation of the Hebrew Bible and live into its generous spirit. His ability to draw a crowd worried the Herodians—those supporting the region’s governmental status quo—who were concerned he might start an insurgency, resulting in Roman authorities taking away their jobs or even violently suppressing the region.
This being Matthew’s Passion Week, an unlikely alliance of that era’s religious conservatives and secular progressives comes up with a plan to force Jesus into an impossible spot: either he’ll have to openly support the occupying Empire, which would turn the common people against him, or he would have to denounce the government’s taxation, which could be punished as sedition or treason. Either way the situation went, Jesus’ would knock himself out of the picture, allowing both the Herodians and the Pharisees to go back to their status quo of courting power and defining themselves through their preferred cultural means. But Jesus deftly side-steps the trap, completely surprising everyone.
The most obvious way we might boil down Jesus’ give-to-the-emperor/give-to-God statement is something like “pay your taxes and your tithes.” While that’s perfectly reasonable advice, if we stop there, we miss how Jesus redefined the conversation, subtly turning his opponents’ concerns from religious debate and governmental issues to those of human dignity.
To make sense of the change, we need to step back and consider Jesus’ question in this passage: “Whose head is this, and whose title?”[2] Our translation obscures it, but where we see the word “head” here, Jesus uses a familiar-sounding Greek word: eikōn.
Eikōn is where we get our word for both the Eastern Church’s painted religious images and for the little pictures we click on all our screens. It’s also the same word that Paul uses in Romans when he talks about being “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son.”[3] In both Matthew’s story and Paul’s writing, the eikōn is the likeness stamped into a coin, the engraving of the government official’s face that not only denotes authority but also subtly implies ownership. Despite the general population’s statuses as free or slave, as the top of the Roman hierarchy, the emperor essentially owned the economy, and his face on the coinage functioned as a silent reminder of that every time you got paid or needed to make a purchase.
Over the course of the 2- and 300’s BCE, as the world increasingly adopted Greek as its common language, Jewish scholars wanted to ensure that younger generations would still have access to their ancient scriptures. Those scholars’ translation, called the Septuagint, was the most common version of the Hebrew Bible available in the First Century. It’s what the New Testament authors quote whenever they reference the Psalms or prophets. And in the Septuagint, the word eikōn shows up very early.
“In the beginning,” so to speak, Jesus would have encountered the word at synagogue any time a lector read the first chapter of Genesis, where God says, “Let us make humankind in our image [eikōn]…”[4] And it echoes again in the next verse: “So God created humankind…in the image [eikōn] of God he created them; male and female he created them.”[5]
I suspect that in today’s confrontation, Jesus is alluding to this primal Creation story, turning his exchange with the Pharisees and Herodians into more than just dodging a sneaky trap. He’s flipping their—and our—entire understanding of life, challenging us down even to the level of how the economy works. And it appears our understanding of what’s valuable is completely unrelated to God’s.
On an everyday level, things drive our society and hold a majority of our waking attention. We spend most of our time worrying about the currency of “empire:” the coins in our pockets, the money in our bank accounts, and the advantages that those collections bring us. Money is basic to modern society, and you’ll notice that Jesus isn’t condemning it here. We live when and where we do, and we do need to be able to interact with our present reality. But how quickly do we turn to possessions to offer ourselves a sense of control and security in the face of an unpredictable world? We often gather more than we need, slipping beyond wisely preparing for the future to hoarding stuff we’ll never be able to use and sometimes don’t even want. Soon the objects, in their demand for continuing care, own us.
But God’s economy isn’t like ours. God’s economy doesn’t run on coins or precious metals or digital codes stored on a bank’s hard drive somewhere. It never runs on the desperation of the poor or offers even more power to those already privileged. In God’s economy, value isn’t found in jewels or in government-sanctioned pieces of paper. Nor is it found in the power those things often hold in our lives. In God’s Kingdom, the things we long and live for—the things we might even steal or kill for—hold no importance whatsoever. What we view as common is where God puts the most attention. What we ignore, misuse, or treat as expendable is what God views as precious. You don’t have to mine, mint, or print the currency of God’s kingdom. It’s almost never locked away in some vault, hidden from the view of everyone but billionaires. You only have to walk down the street, pick up a phone, or turn on a TV to find it. This morning you encounter it on the surrounding pews—because the currency of God’s kingdom is people, human life in all its wonder, mess, and frailty.
Precious metals may be difficult to procure, but they really aren’t all that rare, in a cosmic sense. We work hard to collect and process them, but stable metals seldom just disappear. And gems, though pretty, aren’t all that exciting either when you really think about it. As one of the characters on The Good Place once pointed out, diamonds are simply the most boring way to line up carbon molecules. We struggle to make them look more shiny and sparkly, but once they’re cut and polished, they stay that way pretty much forever. The same gold and gems that awed the ancient world still impress us today. That’s a large reason people go to museums; it’s fascinating to see something crafted thousands of years ago. Still, no matter what the object is made of, it simply exists. But what about the lives of the people who created those things, who invested their time, skill, and imagination in them, who offered one another these inert items as physical representations of their love or respect? The jewelry and carvings and coins still exist, but the people and personalities who crafted and cherished them are lost forever.
So, then, which is truly scarce: a material object that sits unchanging from generation to generation, or the generations who learned and grew and breathed and bred and then disappeared, passing completely from time and memory?
God isn’t impressed with anyone’s net worth. What’s valuable to God are the human lives around you—especially the forgotten ones: the abused, the discarded, the homeless, the helpless, and the weak. In today’s Gospel, Jesus reminds both us and his opponents that from the very moment of birth, each and every person is revealed as God’s most precious possession. Before we draw our first breath, each of us is already stamped with God’s eikōn, God’s proud image—a mark of ownership and love that the world may do its best to mar or deface but that can never be transferred or erased.
We’re in Stewardship Season, so with our reading mentioning money, I feel mildly obligated to point out how submitting your pledge over the next few weeks helps our Vestry plan for next year’s budget. But we’re also in Voting Season, and our choices there may be even more important.
As American citizens, we have the right to guide our own governance by choosing leaders to represent our values and interests, priorities that often quietly reflect who or what we worship. People often vote according to how they feel the national economy is doing. But what would it look like were you to vote in support of God’s economy? What choices would you make at the polls if you were concerned not simply with your own financial situation but rather with how our governmental policies and leadership treat God’s eikōn, God’s Image? How might concern for those on society’s margins affect your vote?
A Christian doesn’t aim simply to go to Heaven when they die but, to the best of their abilities, to reveal and reflect the reality of God’s Kingdom in our present world. We do so by following Jesus in both his example and his teachings. So how well does your preferred representative reflect the life of Christ? Do they lift up the poor and encourage positive treatment of those our society would rather leave behind? Do they seek to find common ground and demonstrate respect and concern for both friend and (often invented) enemy alike? How have—and do—their choices and decisions affected God’s economy? How does their leadership affect real, living people? How, in real life, do their actions, policies, and words honor or demean the coinage of God’s Kingdom? As you prepare to cast your vote this fall, each of us needs to consider both the consequences of our choices and the significance of Christ’s question:
“Whose eikōn and inscription are these?”
[1] My translation. | All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Matthew 22:21b
[3] Romans 8:29
[4] Genesis 1:26a
[5] Genesis 1:27 | The Septuagint compilation I’m using lacks the first appearance of “in his image” found in both Hebrew and English versions of this verse.