June 14, 2026
Whose Image?
Mark 12:13-17
Today I’m beginning a six-week series called One Nation Under God, Revisited. Together, I want to explore the ways our Christian faith — and particularly our Reformed theological tradition as Presbyterians — gives us tools to live together in a diverse society, in a free democracy, and to seek the peace and justice we find in God’s kingdom.
Next month, our nation will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While we as a country are not a perfect union, I believe America is one of the most dynamic, prosperous, and possibility-filled places to live anywhere in the world.
We are, by temperament, hopeful and cheerful and kind people. And yet, as we mark this anniversary, polls show many of us are also feeling gloomy about the future. Studies show that many of us pine for the past, and believe the best days are behind.
We are caring and generous and thoughtful toward our neighbors. Yet, more than in almost any nation on earth, polls right now show that half of us believe the other half is morally bad.
As followers of Jesus, we are citizens first and foremost of that kingdom — a kingdom both temporal and eternal, one that transcends time and space and nationality and race. And as Americans, we are citizens of the United States: a nation whose ideals have always outrun its reality, and yet which has the capacity, in every generation, to reform and change for the better. The next few Sunday’s of this summer of 2026 are a good time to think about these things together.
Before I was called to ministry, my passion and interest was history and government. I went to college at William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, the school that is Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater, and I loved walking those brick sidewalks. As a government major, I read Plato and Aristotle, Locke and Hobbes, arguing about where government’s authority comes from and what it’s for.
When I went to seminary, in my first year — out in California — I had to choose a topic for a church history research project. I chose to look at the role that Christians – Presbyterians and Baptists, mostly — in colonial Virginia played in shaping the idea of religious freedom: the convictions that eventually became the First Amendment.
I remember driving down to UCLA to sit in on lectures about John Locke’s religious beliefs and how his ideas about rights and consent and the limits of kings, grew out of his theology, out of convictions about God and the human soul.
I tell you this not to bore you with my bio, but because this sermon, and this whole series, comes out of something I care about and believe is really important. Today, we start in many ways at the root of the question: with the question of who and whose we are, and where our rights, and our dignity, come from.
Most of us carry, in a pocket or a purse or phone, the evidence of who we are — cards, coins, IDs. But, if we seek to follow Jesus, those things also carry a quiet tension. Our coins say we are citizens. Our baptism says we are Christians. We want to be faithful to both.
Those two identities don’t sit easily side by side. The questions get complicated — taxation, immigration, war, what we owe each other as neighbors, what role technology should play in human life. The easy answers from either side of our politics almost never survive contact with the actual complexity of being a person in the world.
The gospel is not red or blue or purple. The gospel is light that changes the colors and disrupts the categories of our questions and answers.
That tension is not new. It is, in fact, very old — old enough that we find it in the temple in Jerusalem, the week before Jesus died.
By this point Jesus has become a problem. The religious leaders and the political leaders both sense it, each for their own reasons — and on this occasion, two groups who normally have little use for each other, the Pharisees and the Herodians, find common cause.
They come to Jesus with flattery on their lips: “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and that you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and that you show deference to no one.” And then the question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”
It’s a perfect trap. Say yes, and he alienates people who already resent paying for their own occupation — and who are offended that the tax can only be paid with a coin bearing a graven image and a blasphemous inscription calling the emperor divine. Say no, and he’s handed his enemies exactly the charge of sedition they’re looking for.
Mark tells us Jesus knew their hypocrisy. The word he uses is the Greek word for an actor — someone playing a part, wearing a mask. Jesus sees straight through the flattery to what’s underneath it.
“Why are you putting me to the test?” he says. “Bring me a denarius.”
Someone hands him the coin. He holds it up.
“Whose image is this? Whose inscription?”
“The emperor’s,” they say.
“Then give back to the emperor what belongs to the emperor — and to God what belongs to God.”
Mark says they were amazed. We’re not told whether it was admiration or unease — maybe both. But notice what Jesus didn’t say. He didn’t draw a line down the middle of life and say, “this part for Caesar, this part for God, in roughly equal measure.”
He used the same verb for both halves of the sentence — give back, return what is owed, restore to its rightful owner. And he left something unsaid, something his questioners would have known from the very first chapter of their own scriptures.
Caesar put his image on a coin. But on the sixth day, God made humankind — male and female — in God’s own image and likeness. Not stamped on metal. Stamped on us.
If the coin belongs to Caesar because Caesar’s image is on it, then we belong to God, because God’s image is on us. That was true before Rome existed, and it will be true after every empire since Rome has come and gone. Our money may belong to the state. Human beings do not. We never did.
That conviction — that there is something about a human being that no government, no emperor, no system can claim, because God has already claimed it — did not stay in the first century. It got argued over, in the monasteries of the twelfth century, on the battlefields of the thirteenth century, in the parliaments of the seventeenth and eighteenth — and eventually it landed in a hot room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776.
Listen again to words you’ve heard a hundred times:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…
Endowed. Not earned. Not granted. Endowed — meaning given, by someone other than government. And government’s job, according to the document itself, is to secure those rights; not to create them, not to grant them, and not, by its own logic, to take them away.
That is Caesar and the coin, in eighteenth-century terms. Government has real authority. We owe it real things — Jesus doesn’t pretend that is not the case. But underneath that authority, prior to it, beyond its reach, there is something government did not make and cannot unmake: a human being, carrying the image of God.
I won’t stand here and tell you our nation has always lived up to that truth. We have not — not for the enslaved African, not for the displaced Indigenous, not for women who could not own property or vote, not for everyone the Declaration’s “all men” failed, for far too long, to include.
But the failure to live up to a truth is not the same as the truth being false. The conviction underneath — the one Jesus pointed to with a coin, the one Jefferson echoed in the Declaration — is older than this nation, bigger than this nation, and true for every person in every nation.
If every person bears the image of God, then that is true of every person over whom government has power — not only citizens with the right paperwork, not only the law-abiding, not only the productive. The image of God is not a box on a form. It can’t be suspended at sentencing or in international waters. It doesn’t depend on what someone can contribute or pay. It is innate, endowed.
That doesn’t settle every argument about immigration, or incarceration, or artificial intelligence, or how a society cares for those in need. Jesus doesn’t hand us a five-point plan, and neither will I. Government has real authority and responsibility in all of these areas — to secure borders, to punish wrongdoing, to set guardrails, to decide how resources are used.
But that authority is always being exercised by and for people who belong, first and finally, to God and are accountable first and finally to God. Who are we? We are not — ultimately — voters or citizens or taxpayers or workers or members. We are, each of us, human beings made in God’s image.
Whose image is on this coin, Jesus asks? Whose image is on you, is the unstated question.
Two hundred and fifty years on, we are carrying our stamped coins and bills in our pockets, and cards in our wallets, and our complicated questions on our minds and hearts. Whatever is stamped on the things in your pockets, something else is stamped on you — and on every person we will ever meet, argue with, vote on, or stand in line behind.
You belong to God. Not to Caesar. Not to the market. Not to the party. Not to any nation, however dear. That is who you are before you are anything else. It is who everyone is, before they are anything else.
That conviction is the guiding principle of the very best potential of our nation and of humanity. And it is the taproot of God’s amazing and gracious love for the world.
So give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But give to God what is God’s. And let us see, and let us work for a nation that sees, in every person — however the law counts them — the image of the Holy One in whom we are made.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina