Homily for 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
29th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Oct. 22, 2017
Matt 22: 15-21

I prepared this homily for a parish in Washington, then was informed on Friday evening that a missionary would be speaking at all the weekend Masses there (for Mission Sunday).

“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Matt 22: 21).

Tribute to Caesar, by Gustave Dore'

If you’ve ever been to Canada or Great Britain and have used their coinage, you probably noticed that all those Canadian quarters and dollars, all those British pence and pounds, bear the image of Queen Elizabeth.  They remind citizen and tourist alike that she is the sovereign there.

In our country, as we’ve often heard, the people are sovereign.  Our coins are stamped with the images of American heroes—and also with national mottos like “United States of America” and “E Pluribus Unum.”

There’s one other motto on all our coins:  “In God We Trust.”  Our sovereignty as a people rests on a firmer foundation than ourselves, as our foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, states plainly.  Our fundamental rights come from our Creator, and on him we rely to sustain our freedom and our nationhood.  Like Jesus’ audience, we too have a kind of double allegiance, to both God and country, a phrase we hear often, and rightly so.

In 1st-century Palestine, various Jewish, Greek, and Roman coins were in circulation.  Apparently, tho, only Roman denarii could be used to pay the taxes directly due to Rome, as distinguished from money paid at the Temple, or King Herod’s taxes.

Many Jews, of course, resented the Roman overlords and hated paying taxes to their foreign rulers, especially since graven images—like Caesar’s on those Roman coins—violated the First Commandment, and the Caesars did claim divine honors.  So there was a trap in the question put to Jesus by the Pharisees and their unlikely allies, the Herodians.  (The Pharisees were super-devout Jews zealously obeying all the rules of the Torah.  The Herodians were partisans of King Herod, not likely to be pious but jealous of power and influence over the people.)

Could a patriotic and conscientious Jew pay Roman taxes?  Say “yes,” and Jesus is compromised in the eyes of many of the people.  Say “no,” and he’s inciting resistance to the Roman authorities—who were by no means gentle with rebels.    

Our Lord is no fool, of course.  In fact, he’s far more clever than his enemies.  He asks them for a coin used in the Roman tribute, and they produce a denarius.  He asks them whose image is stamped on it.  “Caesar’s,” they say.  That would be Tiberius Caesar, emperor from 14 to 37 A.D.  Many of his coins have been found in Palestine and other parts of the Empire.

What are the implications of a Roman denarius?  It bears Caesar’s image.  A stamp, a brand, a seal marks ownership.  It’s Caesar’s coin.  It acknowledges his sovereignty, like the Queen’s or the inscription “United States of America.  For a 1st-century Jew, it would also challenge God’s sovereignty.

But when Jesus asked for a denarius, the Pharisees and Herodians had at least one in their pockets!  They had no qualms about using Roman money, about acknowledging Roman authority.  If they had any nationalistic or religious principles against Rome’s lordship, those principles didn’t extend to their pockets.  Roman money was good money.

So Jesus tells them, if it’s Caesar’s money, give it to him when he demands it of you.

After dealing with the direct question about Caesar’s taxes and authority, Jesus deals with the indirect one about God’s rule in Israel:  “Give to God what is God’s.”

But he’s not specific, is he?  What belongs to Caesar, besides his denarius, and what belongs to God?

Well, what bears the image of God?  Where is God’s likeness stamped?  You know the answer very well:  “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).  Human beings, male and female equally, belong to God.  He is sovereign over our lives, our doings, our words, even our thoughts and hopes and desires and fears.

Modern men and women, especially in the Western world, don’t like to hear that.  We prefer to be independent, to be autonomous, to be self-directed, to be sovereign of our own wills and doings.  We’re proud sons-of-guns!

But you know what?  The only limit on Caesar’s power is that image of God:  give to God—and not to Caesar—what is God’s.  That’s why totalitarian regimes—Henry VIII, Napoleon, Hitler, Communist tyrants from Lenin down to China and North Korea today, and the Chavistas in Venezuela, demand to control religion or to destroy it.  That’s why the Church resists anything that infringes human dignity, anything that doesn’t respect the image of God.  The Church has a large body of social teaching, teaching that applies the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the lives of men and women living together in society.  How is a good and just society ordered?  What leads to authentic peace, to balanced relationships between people?  If we don’t adhere to God’s directives, divine principles, then Caesar—or Big Brother—will step in.

One of the biggest stories in the news in the last 3 weeks has been about Harvey Weinstein—him in particular, and more generally, how women are treated in society.  I hear a lot of confessions, and those confirm to me what I’ve read a lot about and heard a lot about:  Americans, especially American men (but not only men) have a serious pornography problem.  It’s an addiction.  It’s a plague.  It’s one of the biggest businesses in the Western world.  It reflects and feeds the same attitude that produces Weinsteins and Hefners and a sex trafficking racket.

If we respected all human beings as images of God, we wouldn’t have a pornography industry.  We wouldn’t have Harvey Weinsteins.  We wouldn’t have date rapes, a sex “industry,” high divorce rates, tens of thousands of kids growing up without fathers, and HHS mandates for contraception.

If we respected all human beings as images of God, we wouldn’t need a Black Lives Matter movement, and we’d be able to repair our immigration laws, and we’d have trustworthy politicians, and we wouldn’t dread the next Columbine or Las Vegas, and we wouldn’t be slaughtering millions of unborn children worldwide every year.

Caesar has no business claiming rights over human beings as tho they belong to him.  But he does have rights and obligations for the good ordering of society—in international relations, in business, in public safety, in education, and so on.  Making policy in such matters isn’t the Church’s business, altho those subject matters are religious concerns insofar as they concern human dignity, the respect due to men and women stamped with the image of God.  And it is, emphatically, the right and duty of individual Christians to guide Caesar’s doings thru their participation in political life, school boards, community organizations, etc.

Jesus’ words have as much import today as they did when Rome ruled the Mediterranean world.