Jesus and John the Baptist

Jesus and John the Baptist
Luke 7.18-35

Pull a coin out of your pocket and look at it. What does it tell you?

I don’t mean, how rich does it say you are. Nor am I thinking about the actual words that are engraved on it. I’m referring to the pictures, the symbols.

The last two countries I visited before writing this were Greece and the United States; as usual, some of their coins came home with me. The Greek ones have pictures of ancient heroes: Alexander the Great on a 100-drachma coin, Democritus the philosopher on a 10-drachma one. On the other side they have symbols: the sun with its bright rays on the first, the sun and the solar system on the other. The American coins have heroes, too, though not quite so old: Abraham Lincoln on one, George Washington on another. And the symbols, for those who bother to look at them, are powerful too: Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia, on the back of the 1-cent piece, the great eagle on the quarter, and so on...

Taken from Luke for Everyone – by Tom Wright