+++ ++ SUNDAY HOMILY ++ +++
This Gospel presents us with strange companions: the Pharisees and the Herodians. The Pharisees were religious zealots who hated the Romans and longed for the day when Israel would truly be free. The Herodians had befriend the Romans, hoping to make the best of a bad situation.
So how could these groups come together on a united front? They had a common enemy; one so despised that both sides could lay aside their enmity for the other to focus on a common enemy. Jesus was that common enemy. In today's Gospel, they finally reach the point where they believe Jesus must be dealt with, discredited and eliminated.
The Pharisees and the Herodians set a trap for Jesus. They asked him if it is right to pay taxes to Rome. They believed their trap to be "fool-proof." There was no imagineable way Jesus could escape.
They had good reason to be so confident. If Jesus came out in support of the tax, the people who clung to Jesus would have quickly rejected him because of their hatred of the tax and of the Romans. But if Jesus spoke against the tax and gave support for not paying it, Jesus would have been an enemy of the Romans. Had that occurred, the Roman response against Jesus would have been swift, powerful and effective. Either way, Jesus would no longer able to speak against the Pharisees and Herodians.
Jesus side-stepped this trap by asking to see a coin. He asked whose image is on the coin. Jesus didn't actually need to ask this. Everyone knew the image was Caesar, Emperor of Rome. An inscription on the coin even declared this fact. When the blatantly obvious answer was given, Jesus avoided the trap with words we know well: "Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God."
The brilliance of this response is that it is so profound on one hand and so open to interpretation on the other. This is a response that people from various viewpoints could all affirm, thinking Jesus to have shown great wisdom, while missing some of the depth and complexity of Jesus' teaching. I could highlight a number of examples across a spectrum of people to make this point. But for the sake of time, I will only reflect upon one.
In the range of options that was likely to happen, the Romans would have dealt with Jesus as an enemy of the Empire. Only Jesus responded in such a way that there was no Roman rage or offense. Ironically, the Romans would have believed Jesus to have affirmed the Empire, especially Caesar. And the degree to which that affirmation would have been felt exceeds our assumptions. When we hear "Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God," we are thinking of distinct things. We are a people who from the foundation of our country have known a separation of "Caesar and God," "Church and State." But that separation was non-existent in the Roman Empire. The Roman coin makes this fact undeniably clear.
Like the Roman coin, our money bears images of priminent persons in the story of our country. We honor those whose images our money bears. But the Roman coin actually identified Caesar as God. To give to Caesar was to give to God; to honor Caesar was to worship God. Caesar was believed to be God Incarnate to the same degree at we as Christians speak of Jesus as God Incarnate. And the fact that the earliest martyrs of the Church were persecuted and killed by the Romans often on charges of worshipping false and unknown gods reminds us that this Empire truly did believe Caesar and God to be one.
It's interesting how the pendulum swings. We hear this wisdom of Jesus from a very different mindset. We are so compartmentalized along a divide of Church and State that we have come to believe that faith has no place in the world and politics no place in the Church. And often these words of Jesus from this very Gospel are used to affirm that separation. When this is done, and one hand gives to Caesar and the other to God, we are equally as affirmed in our minds as were the Romans who with both hands gave to Caesar and God as if they were one.
But there is something we miss when we believe that we have been affirmed. Jesus has also challenged us. Jesus never affirmed Caesar as God. The Romans missed that fact. But Jesus also never affirmed a dividing up of things that earmarks some as "belonging to God" or "given by God" and others as "belonging to Country" or "given by Country." And what is interesting here is that this does not conflict with the foundational beliefs of our Country. Our rights, we are told by none other than the founding fathers whose images are on our money, are not given by the country. They are divinely given and divinely protected. God is the giver of all things. Everything we have has been gifted to us by God.
"Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God." Do you hear what Jesus is telling us? It all belongs to God; all of it. The challenge of this Gospel, then, is that we would look far beyond our money and ponder for whom and to whom we give all that we give. We give everything to God. One hand may work in the world and one in the Church. But when we back up and look at the bigger picture, we see the whole child of God who with both hands gives unto God what is due unto God, who has given us all that we have and all that we are.
This is an image that makes sense at least for me personally. On the one hand, I serve in your midst as a priest, working in the Church. On the other hand, I work in the secular world in between Sundays, outside the Church. There are those who only look at the hands and see a divide. But there is no division. It is all the work of God. That is true for all of us. We work with both hands, in the Church and in the world, and all of it is the work of God. Recall today that all has come from God, and remember to give all that you have and all that you are to God.
+++ ++ Father Timothy ++ +++
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Matthew 22:15-22
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