Lord's Day Reflection: Whose image do we bear?

By Fr. Marion Nguyen, OSB*

When the Pharisees bring Jesus a denarius, they intend to trap Him with a political question. Instead, He asks whose image and inscription appear on the coin. “Caesar’s,” they reply. Jesus answers, “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mt 22:21).

His words lead us to a foundational question: If the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image, what belongs to God because it bears His?

Genesis provides the answer. God creates the human person in His own image and likeness (Gn 1:26–27). Caesar’s image is stamped on a coin, but we bear the image of our Creator.

Our lives are not ours to possess absolutely; they are a gift entrusted to us by God. The question is whether we are willing to render ourselves back to Him.

The monastic tradition hears in Jesus’ words a call to interior freedom. Monastic renunciation is not contempt for the world, but a refusal to let the world possess our hearts.

Wealth, status, achievement, and even good works can become attachments when they serve our desire for recognition or control. We may be doing many good things while remaining inwardly governed by vanity, resentment, or anxiety.

The Desert Fathers understood the spiritual life as a patient work of purifying the heart, learning to name the thoughts and desires that keep us from loving God and others freely. Good works remain necessary expressions of faith (Jas 2:17), but outward activity cannot substitute for interior conversion.

An ancient image, found in Plotinus and echoed in Christian spiritual tradition, compares this work to that of a sculptor (cf. Plotinus, Enneads I.6.9; Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, ch. 12). The sculptor removes what obscures the form within the stone.

In the spiritual life, we likewise strive to let go of what obscures God’s image in us: our insistence on having things our way, our yearnings for approval, our reluctance to forgive.

Yet we do not transform ourselves by willpower alone. God’s grace heals and renews us, gradually conforming us to the image of His Son (cf. 2 Cor 3:18). Our task is to cease resisting the grace that seeks to free us.

Jesus asks us to render to God what belongs to God. This begins in detachment: releasing a grievance instead of nursing it, letting go of defensiveness when justly corrected, ignoring the desire for recognition in service, or relinquishing control when things do not go our way.

Perhaps, then, the question is not simply what we owe God, but what we are still withholding from Him. What must be released so that His image may shine more clearly in us?

* Abbot of St. Martin Abbey—Lacey, Washington