Adam, the first human being, was created as a single person to show forth the greatness of the Ruler who is beyond all rulers, the Blessed Holy One. For if a human ruler mints many coins from one mold, they all carry the same image, they all look the same. But the Blessed Holy One shaped all human beings in the Divine Image, as Adam was…And yet not one of them resembles another. (Sanhedrin 38a)
Well, here I was, all ready to wax eloquent (or at least wax) on Sunday's Gospel lesson. And then I found this .
There's really not a lot to add to Rabbi Waskow's essay. As freed, forgiven, called people of God, we know who we are, and we know Whose we are, as Jesus reminds his interrogators in the Gospel text. The question we can now ask ourselves, the one we can live into from now on, is: How can we, "minted" in God's image and redeemed by Christ, gratefully and lovingly respond to God's tremendous investment in us?
A denarius (photo from Ancient Greek and Roman Coins)
3 comments:
You ask an important question, L Chick :)
Shamefully - some people believe that we should abuse others with our warped interpretations of the Bible and our own assumptions of God's Will and intentions.
Thanks LC,
My BF is preaching similarly. We had a long discussion about this. I kept thinking of the image of Caesar in terms of the Church, which as an institution, I found inserts itself in ways that place itself in the place of G-d.
Dylan makes a very similar point in her lectionary blog this week.
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