Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

The Puzzle Of Caesar And The Coin

Rev. Marcel Emeka Divine Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, October 22, 2023

We are not looking at a parable of Jesus, rather a riddle of Jesus. Our Gospel narrative today can rightly be called the riddle of Caesar and the coin. After the Parable of the Wedding Feast, which we read last weekend, Matthew says that the Pharisees secretly met, and the result of their meeting is to send their disciples to Jesus, along with the Herodians. What for? To entrap Jesus in speech. To set him up with a question that has serious political and theological consequences. At the time, Israel was under Roman rule; and the Herodians were totally loyal to Rome. The Pharisees, on the other hand, held that God alone was their King and Lord and viewed the payment of taxes to Rome as acts of surrender to the despised Roman emperor, Tiberius Caesar, a foreigner and a pagan at that. This hot issue was worsened by the fact that Rome’s tax burden on the Jewish people was extremely heavy. So, the Herodians’ loyalty to Rome and the Pharisees’ hatred for Rome and its emperor, Tiberius Caesar, made the Pharisees and the Herodians mortal enemies. But on this occasion, we see two groups of bitter rivals coming together. They set aside their hostilities in order to confront their common interest— which is, setting Jesus up and in the process getting rid of him. They tried to get Jesus to give a yes or a no answer to the question of whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not. If for instance, Jesus says, yes, it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he will anger the Jewish crowds. He will be accused of being a Roman sympathizer. In the first century AD, there were Jews famously called the zealots who vehemently opposed the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and to the land of Israel. They saw the Romans as pagan overlords who had no right to be in their land and they also saw Jewish tax collectors as the equivalent of Gentile sinners in part because they were colluding with the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, if Jesus says no, it is unlawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he will anger Rome and will be accused of sedition or of rebellion against the Roman government.

But as is always the case in the Gospels, you can’t just trap Jesus. You are always going to end up being trapped yourself. Responding to the Pharisees Jesus says, “Show me the coin that pays the census tax.” He is referring to a particular kind of coin called the Denarius, stamped with the face of the Emperor and with an inscription that says, “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, Son of the divine Augustus.” Some of these coins produced by the Emperor, Caesar Tiberius, from the time of Jesus’ life, that is around AD 14 to AD 37 are still available today. People still sell them for big bucks online. Think about this again. When Jesus was handed the coin, it not only had the graven image of the Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar, it also had the inscription that called the emperor “the son of God.” His father, Augustus was deified and regarded as divine by the Romans. In the 1st century AD, the two previous emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar were both divinized. They were both elevated to the status of gods by the Roman Empire. If you read the book titled “Lives of the Caesars” by Suetonius you will find this. By the way, there were 12 Caesars. When the author, Suetonius got to Julius Caesar and to Augustus, he called them the life of the deified Julius and the deified Augustus. In essence, the coin that they handed to Jesus had on it the image of Caesar who was claiming to be the son of God. What Jesus does now is really ingenious. He takes the coin with all that is written on it and then asks, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” As they answered “Caesar’s,” Jesus drops what has become one of his famous one-liners, “Then give to Caesars what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” In a very shrewd way, Jesus escapes from the trap and endorses payment of tax to Caesar. The money can go to Caesar, it can be paid lawfully to Caesar. Up and down the centuries, this passage has been used to enjoin and teach Christians to be dutiful to the state, to be responsible citizens, and to give to the state what is due to the state, which includes paying taxes and being contributing members of the society. That is the part of what Jesus is saying but not the heart of what he is getting at. Yes, he is telling the Pharisees to give their money to Caesar but then to give their life, their very self to God. Upon hearing the Lord, what was their reaction? The final verse of this Gospel passage, which the Lectionary leaves out but which is very important says, “When they heard this they were amazed, and leaving him they went away” (Matthew 22:22). In other words, they marveled at the truth of what Jesus said and the fact that they couldn’t catch him in their trap. His answer was simply too brilliant to refute. 

Now, what belongs to Caesar? The taxes he claims by law. The laws that he enacts. The demands of the state as long as they don’t require us to transgress God’s command to love. What belongs to God? Everything! Your life! Your political life! Your social life! Your religious life! Your professional life! Your business life! Your family life! Your entertainment life! Your civic life! Your love life! Your married life! Your academic life! Everything! All of it! We should not read Jesus’ one-liner as a demarcation of political life and religious life. We should not interpret it as though some aspects of our life belong to us or to Caesar or to friends or to family and not to God. Sometimes I hear some Christians utter heretical comments like, “Please, please, don’t bring God into this matter,” “Please, keep your religion to yourself, I don’t want to hear it,” “Uka di n’obi” that is, “religion or spirituality is a personal thing.” Now, when someone, a Christian echoes any of these expressions, what’s usually the goal? To keep God at bay. To dethrone the way of God, which is love and to allow division, tyranny, unforgiveness, and darkness to reign. Whenever an attempt is being made to clearly demarcate ordinary life and religious life, it is always to enthrone the devil’s way of divide, divide and divide and to spread darkness everywhere. Giving God what belongs to God means giving God everything about you. It is everything you do here in the church, at home, at work place, in secret and public. The greatest gift of offering you can give to God is not money, but your life, your whole being and everything associated with you.

Veni Sancte Spiritus!