The story we hear today involves some rather strange bedfellows. No friends, these two: on the one hand, the Pharisees, esteemed guardians of pure Judaism, devout patriots, haters of Rome and her arrogant, idolatrous ways, and on the other, the Herodians, fat cats and bureaucrats, tied to the religiously-tainted, morally-bankrupt puppet regime that answered to Rome like a yappy lapdog. How could these natural enemies, who detested all that the other stood for, agree upon anything - much less hatch a plan together?

But a plan they have hatched – and it’s a trap. You’ve heard it said that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and evidently that held true when somebody, probably the Pharisees, went to King Herod’s cronies with a clever proposal. This new sensation from Galilee, Jesus, is getting awfully popular with the little folk, they said. He’s a superstar with the waiting-for-the-Messiah set. Better to nip these things in the bud, don’t you think? So what if we were to ask him publicly whether a decent, faithful, patriotic Jew like himself ought to be paying taxes to the Emperor in Rome?

The Herodians would have known that if Jesus were foolish enough to say the politically-popular thing, that such a tax was unjust and an offense before God, that no one should pay it, they could roll him up before the sun went down. Sedition, treason, was a serious crime – a man could end up on a cross for that. The Pharisees certainly knew that if Jesus gave the more likely answer, the more cautious one, they could ridicule him as unpatriotic phony, and embarrass him before the crowds who so wanted him to be their hero and national Savior. Strange bedfellows, with a clever scheme – and between them a very real chance of bogging Jesus down in the poisonous, messy swamp of politics.

Of course, we wouldn’t ever worry about Jesus getting bogged down in politics today, would we? Today, we who are so much more evolved than squabbling little Hebrew factions in the Bible, we have conveniently separated church and state, religious belief and politics. We just check our politics at the door, we Goldwater Republicans and Yellow Dog Democrats, we fiscal-conservative realists and big-government idealists. We declare a delicate truce for Sunday, the one day, it seems, that we can deal with otherworldly, heavenly matters, before launching back into the real world, the world of money and marketing, where campaigns demonize the opposition, scare us, radicalize us, and ensure that whatever happens on Sunday, for the rest of the week it’s going to be us versus them.

Is that right? Is this the one place that we can be free of politics, of gritty reality, and deal with a Messiah who rather conveniently came to us just to save souls? Or could it be…that there is more to following Jesus than awkwardly balancing church and state? Could Jesus have something to say to us today that might go beyond the rhetoric, the campaigns wrapped in the flag and laced up with Scripture, beyond the politics calculated to make us us and them, them? Could Jesus actually be bigger than the Church, and more powerful than the State?

Let’s get back to the trap. How clever it was when these two parties, so divided at heart, came together to find out where Jesus really stood on the issues. Their mouths dripping with insincerity, their moves as languid as a cobra about to strike, the Pharisees and Herodians ask him: “Rabbi, should we pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” And with the verbal jujitsu so familiar to those of us who love him, Jesus responds: “show me the money!” The Pharisees stay motionless: their tradition forbids carrying nasty Roman coins – Hebrew money never bore the image of a living creature, much less one whose inscription read: “Tiberius Caesar, mighty son of the divine god Augustus.” But the Herodians had plenty of coins in their pockets, and so they produced one – a denarius. “Whose portrait is this?” asks Jesus. “And whose inscription?”

Whose portrait is this? A curious thing, perhaps, that the word Jesus uses here would be fairly rendered “image” – “whose image is this?” That’s how the King James has it, and it’s probably how the crowd heard it that day, so long ago. The Pharisees ought to have known better, ought to have heard the hinges on their delicate, clever trap pivoting dangerously backwards – but somehow, they didn’t. Whose image is this?

We recall that way back in the beginning, “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female, he created them.” Three times Genesis 1:26 makes one, basic point – that all men and all women, equally, are created in the image of God. And we’ve struggled every since to sort out what that means, and what the implications are for we who are made that image.

We have learned along the way that it is not always easy to see God in one another. We look at a stranger, one who is not like us, and we may not see the common relation that makes us kin. We see an angry motorist giving us a gesture of ‘singular significance,’ and the knowledge that they are made equally in the image of God is the farthest thing from our mind. And that’s in Botetourt! When we see a grainy video of men in headscarves training to attack our soldiers, our allies, or even to strike at us here at home, we know what we see: we see the other. In our world, religion and language, culture and history, race – these are the ‘images’ we tend to see first – and often enough, we don’t like what we see and quit looking altogether.

Jesus says, whose image is that - that you see? The Herodians, grubbing their Roman money, may easily have missed it, but the Pharisees, steeped in the Scriptures, should not have. We are all made in God’s image, even mighty Caesar. When we are invited to forget that, to play the callow politics of division, we who follow Christ are instead obliged to look into the faces of our neighbors and search for God, maybe especially when the faces look to us less than neighborly.

It isn’t always easy to see God’s beloved child in our neighbor, of course – sometimes even in church! Our Christian brother will say, “I believe it is my God-given duty to protect this nation from the Democrats.” Our Christian sister will hear that and say, “I know it may be possible, but I just can’t see how a person can love Jesus and vote Republican.” And we might well give up hoping for better, and figure that a Sunday truce is about the best we’re gonna get, this side of the Kingdom.

But when we keep this Scriptural truth before us – that we are all kin, all made in the image of our common Father – there are some very real implications for how we understand our world – and for how we regard our neighbors who live in it. And they are not wispy, spiritual ideas, but very practical, political implications. When we consider that all are made in God’s image, can we conclude that God does not care if the wealthy increasingly are making a killing, while mounting millions are unable to make a living? If all human beings bear the divine image, can we conclude that Jesus is totally unconcerned with the lives of the inconvenient unborn? Or will anyone contend that Jesus counts cheaply the lives of those goatherds and schoolchildren, haplessly going about their lives in the instant before our bomb obliterates them? Or that God’s image is not to be found among those residing in our political prisons abroad, or in the face of a teenager here at home on death row, or in the body of a profoundly handicapped woman with a reduced life expectancy?

A person could almost wonder if we, red and blue, right and left, are really ready to be accountable for living out a culture that loves life, that finds the Creator’s mark in it, if this means seriously dislocating and discomforting our own political beliefs. Are we ready, friends, to render to God what is rightfully God’s? If you are an independent, if you are a McCain man or an Obama mama, I encourage you to vote. Render to Caesar that which will make ours a better nation.

But as you vote, after you vote, remember in this swirling season of division the One in Whose image we are made. Let’s encourage one another to be courageous enough to be out of step with our party, with any party, when it embarks on a course that esteems human beings as less than precious before their rightful Owner. So vote your conscience. And having done so, give your heart to the One who makes it beat in the first place.

Amen.