29th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2026

According to the textbook account, trade begins with barter: you have some rice, and I have a paper I’ve written about the nature of doxastic mental representations—I want the rice for obvious reasons and you want the paper for reasons known only to God, so we swap them. Then, emerges commodity money: you have some rice, and I have lumps of silver—I want the rice, and you might not yourself want lumps of silver, but you know that lots of other people do, including that guy over there who has a paper on the architecture of Mohenjo-Daro, so we swap, and I have to weigh out the amount of silver you want. Then, we get a slight improvement with coins: you have some rice, and I have these conveniently pre-portioned bits of silver, which dispenses with the need for a weighing scale. Then, eventually—skipping a few steps for time—we get fiat money, which is totally detached from any particular desirable commodity, and is backed only by some authority.  

Authority. That’s why we have the faces of our monarchs on our money, especially on fiat money, which is made of otherwise worthless material, it is a way of saying that this coin is worth £1 because King Charles says so, him and His Majesty’s Armed Forces… But on commodity money too, the imprimatur of the monarch plays a role. 

A Tiberian denarius is, in fact, a lump of just under 4 grams of just under totally pure silver, made round and flat and stamped with image and inscription. But you cannot be sure of this without spectrometric analysis, or at least a weighing scale and a touchstone of flint slate, on which you would drag the coin to see what kind and colour of streak it leaves, as a test of its purity. Absent that, the imperial markings are meant to be a sort of guarantee that this flat bit of metal is, in fact, about 3.9 grams of 98% silver—at least in theory.

But it doesn’t always work that way: there has been counterfeiting for just about as long as there has been coinage itself. The earliest known coins are made of a gold-silver alloy, and are from the seventh century BCE Western Anatolia; the earliest known fakes of these coins appear already around the same time, made mainly of silver, absent the gold, sometimes with copper instead, but deceptively wrapped in a veneer of the more precious gold alloy, then hammered and heated, and made to look like the real deal. There were fake Tiberian denarii too, copper coins coated in silver and stamped with the imperial visage and verbiage. 

+++

Jesus does not ask whether the coin is genuine or counterfeit; he asks whose image and inscription it bears. But the potential disjunction between the two is revealing: what the possibility—and, indeed, reality—of counterfeiting reveals is the superficiality, even the impotence of Caesar’s seal of approval and authorisation. The imperial stamp is literally skin deep: scratch under the surface, and we may well find something else altogether, something very far from legal tender, indeed in some ways its opposite, the counterfeiting of money being illegal then as now. Caesar’s image and inscription promise value without being able to confer it. Given its ineffectiveness, this slapping of his face on things seems an act and sign of futile narcissism, and Caesar can have it back, if he wants.

But not because he owns the coin, let alone the value it holds or represents. That’s not what his face and name mean here, remember: they are meant to be signs that generate trust and faith, which is the real currency on which economies are run. What he can have back is our faith in him, the authority in which we have vested him, our participation in the economy that is predicated on this authority, this trust. That is Caesar’s world, and not ours. We may live in it, but we do not belong here; because Caesar does not own us; the image stamped into us is of another, whose seal in truth delivers what it promises, makes what it signifies. 

There has been a lot of ink spilt on what it means to be made in the image of God. This has, I am sure, not been a waste of our collective time and effort, though one does wonder sometimes. There is an especially tiresome cottage industry that hypothesises about features of human uniqueness among species: tool-use, language, and the like. But animals and computers turn out to be much more capable than we like to give them credit for. The history of the science of the imago Dei has involved much advancing and retreating, asserting and nuancing. It’s all good fun, this hunt for observable marks of divinity, no less visible and palpable than the Tiberian visage on a bit of shrapnel. But such tail-chasing is nevertheless entirely wrong-headed.

We need no outward and visible sign here, except perhaps that of the Incarnation itself, the first and fundamental sacrament, the sign and substance of what we are created and called to be as bearers of the image of God. It is not only to belong to God—which we do, certainly more than the coins belong to Caesar—but to be invited to share in God’s life, the life of perfect mutual love. That is our world, of which we are true heirs by adoption. To give back to Caesar what is his is to give up our citizenship of his world with its currencies of power and prestige, which are ultimately counterfeits of value. To render to God what is God’s is to recognise the reality to which we actually belong, and from which we are ambassadors here in Caesar’s world, or in Charles’s, Burnham’s, Trump’s.

We are here to bring good news to that world, this world before us, to be good news here, the good news that has been indelibly sealed into us, even forged into us, which is nothing less than the presence of God, the love of God made present and real in this same world that, in every way that matters, does belong to God after all, the claims of the prevailing powers and principalities notwithstanding, usurpers all. To render to God what is God’s is to receive for ourselves our inheritance of the divine image, and to reveal this invisible truth, that all may see it for themselves, and know it too.