Canon Kathryn | Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – Accession Day 2022 | Joshua 1.1-9, Romans 13.1-10, Matthew 22.16-22

The opening sequence of series 3 of ‘The Crown’, Netflix’s dramatization of the life of the Queen, shows Her Majesty, now in middle age, viewing the new profile of her which will shortly appear on postage stamps, and beside it the old profile of her younger self, which will no longer be used. For Netflix, this was a very clever way of getting us used to a different actress playing the part, but as the Queen, in the drama, stoically comes to terms with the new depiction of an older self, the scene also conveys a powerful sense that this, in all its iterations, is an image which bears meaning beyond its appearance.

It is a meaning which was assumed by the Queen 70 years ago today, on the death of her father, when she became our Head of State. ‘My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan,’ says the Lord to Joshua. As he is commissioned, he takes on the mantle of his predecessor: the calling, the duty, the relationships. And so, in a moment, the Queen passed, through the veil of her own bereavement, from living the relatively free life of a princess to bearing the office which fell to her. As the then Archbishop of Canterbury put it, she was ‘God-called to exert a spiritual power and lead her subjects by personal example’. The image on the stamp is not simply that of Elizabeth; it is that of the legend abbreviated on our coinage: dei gratia regina fidei defensatrix - by the grace of God Queen, Defender of the Faith. An image so potent, so familiar to us, that we know, not only who it is, but what it signifies.

Such images have a long history. And the one shown to Jesus in our Gospel reading would also have borne an abbreviated legend: Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filius Augustus – Caesar Augustus Tiberius, Son of the Divine Augustus. And on the reverse, an abbreviated version of the words Pontifex Maximus: Tiberius, the great high priest of the Roman state religion, with authority over its worship.

This coin, freighted with meaning, is presented to Jesus with a bear-trap question, posed by a temporarily united front of Pharisees and Herodians. They differed from each other in terms of the ruler they wanted to see in charge, but their unity came from their shared desire for independence from the Romans, to whom they hated paying tax. You’re in the truth business, they say to Jesus. And that must mean you are impartial. So here’s a thing: we either pay this or we don’t. Which should we do? They’re asking for a binary choice, and if you see it in those terms, Jesus is scuppered whichever option he chooses: if he says don’t pay it, he could be turned over to the Romans; if he says pay it, it looks as if he is colluding with them.

Unless you’ve been on the Today programme, you might not have been on the receiving end of exactly this type of forked question, but it’s a familiar situation to anyone who has experienced a desire for impartiality: being sincere, striving for the truth, doesn’t necessarily mean you can sit there and do nothing.

Sometimes, you have to take a decision one way or the other. And as soon as you make that jump, you are in danger of losing the middle ground, letting go of truth, and ending up with a mess, and the risk of failure or pain, rather than the purity of your original position. This dilemma over the coin is presented as a choice between God and the state, but it contains many more intersections than this: between abstract and concrete, between ideal and reality, between spiritual and temporal, between law and grace. Poised at these junctions, we hold our breath.

It's not binary, says Jesus.

Obedience to the state and obedience to God can coexist. The divine and human realms are not, in this age, completely separate. They overlap, and there are times when, as Paul recognises in the letter to the Romans, allegiance is owed to human authorities. Taxes need paying. But, contrary to the assertion on the coin, this does not mean that the state is divine. The state might have authority over us, but God has authority over all things, including our leaders. This is a much more sophisticated, much deeper answer than Jesus’s interlocutors were expecting. It means that all those uncomfortable junctions lying behind this question can still be keenly felt in our everyday lives. We cannot turn our backs on God, but neither can we turn our backs on the world, with all its systems, its complexities, its imperfect structures. Jesus speaks to the multiple layers of our experience, as the ultimate multi-valent being: the image of the invisible God, he is himself the conjunction of abstract and concrete, of ideal and reality, of spiritual and temporal, of law and grace.

As the Queen looks on the image of herself, she will be well aware that it points beyond the specifics of her own features and personality and situation. And this is because, as she tirelessly reminds us, her authority comes not from within, but from God. The Lord, speaking to Joshua, makes clear that Joshua’s leadership is conferred on him as a gift. Just as it is God who gives the people a new land to inhabit, so it is God who gives his servant authority: authority which comes immediately with a task – the crossing of the Jordan – and with encouragement – ‘be strong and very courageous’ – and with the divine presence – ‘the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’ So the Queen’s image, the sign of her authority, carries with it this overarching, all-encompassing image – the image of God, who is the source of her task, the bedrock of her encouragement, and the divine presence she knows to be with her, as she says, in good times and in bad.

The head of the emperor on the coin shown to Jesus is entirely self-referential: he claims divinity, and claims back his own image in tax. But the head of Elizabeth II, by the grace of God Queen, Defender of the Faith, points beyond itself: her image points us to the divine image, as if we were looking through a window.

On one level, the image of the emperor is much easier to deal with. As Jesus indicates, this is a closed system: give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s - give back the coin, pay your tax, job done. There is no ‘beyond’. But what about giving to God the things that are God’s? And what about doing this while we are still in the world, with taxes and inequalities and leaders who are fallible?

Our challenge is to keep recognising the image of God in Jesus, remembering that gazing on this image is not a one-off experience but a daily task. And it is a daily task which leads us on to question what the image of God really is, because as we read the first chapter of Genesis, we learn that each human being is made in this image. As beings made by Love itself, we bear Love’s image, and we are invited to give back to God the love with which he first loves us. We can only do this by loving each other, recognising that we are each made in this image. And we can only do this in our earthly, created state, through the frailties of mind and body and heart, amidst the trials of illness and bereavement and increasing years, still bearing God’s image even when our countenances change.

This is the constant in our lives, just as it is the constant in the Queen’s life – a constant which has enabled her to be a stable centre of our national life through the tenures of, to date, 14 Prime Ministers, and through seven decades of social change. And as we in the Church of England face changes and challenges of our own, she provides that stability for us, too – the stability of one who has her gaze fixed on Love’s image, and who draws from that image the strength to love and serve her people, knowing that, as she said in 1975 of Jesus’s birth, ‘His simple message of love has been turning the world upside down ever since. He showed that what people are and what they do, does matter and does make all the difference.’

May God bless her, and grant us the strength and the courage to follow her example. Amen.