Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22:15 -21

The story in today’s gospel is always brought up when someone wants to show how Jesus was in favor of the separation of church and state.  You will hear echoes of it every time we have a presidential election, each side accusing the other of crossing the line, one way or another, between the religious sphere and the secular sphere.  Of course we also get this quote thrown at us everytime tax season rolls around, but that’s another story.  But if we look at the gospel carefully we might get more out of it. 

The first thing to notice is that the Pharisees and Herodians are working together.  This is probably why Jesus immediately recognized this as an attempt to trip him up.  The Pharisees believed in life after death, but they also believed in a Jewish state completely independent of outside influences; they believed in following 613 rules derived from the first five books of the bible; they had as little to do with the unclean as possible, and the unclean included non-Jews and several professions that even Jews might enter, such as tanning hides, being a soldier, collecting taxes, dealing with anything that might expose you to human blood.  And much like those of us living through Covid, they were always washing their hands.  The Herodians, on the other hand, were closely related to the Sadducees.  The premise was that there was no life after death.  The logical extension was that it best to live an untroubled life, which means going along with the ruling powers, forgetting about all those strange rules the Pharisees were always preaching about, and realizing that there was nothing special about being Jewish; it was just another tribal designation, like being a Persian or a Greek. 

Now Jesus exposes their hypocrisy.  He asks for a tribute coin.  Someone pulled one out of his pocket.  Jesus holds it up and asks, whose image and whose inscription is on the coin?  If we had the coin, we would answer as they did, “Caesar’s” but the inscription is not given in this passage from Matthew.  It would have been blasphemy to even say the words:  “Tiberius, the son of Divine Augustus”.  And for a Pharisee to carry around this coin would have been against their principles.  So either a herodian provided the coin, or a Pharisee who was sort of clueless.  

And finally we come to those widely quoted words, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.”  

If the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image, how can we tell what belongs to God?  What is stamped with the image of God?  You are right -- you and I, and every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, even Caesar.  In fact, if you are to believe the mystics like St. Francis, God’s image is all over nature as well, but especially in human beings.  We, according to the first book of the bible, bear his image and his likeness, which aren’t quite the same thing.  The image of God is how we appear.  We resemble Jesus as human beings.  A dog or a flower does not look like Jesus, but there is some hint of the divine even in them.  On the other hand, likeness is more to do with how our appearance and actions call to mind someone else -- If I say a particular grandson is a lot like his dad, I am not only mentioning the way he looks, but also the way he walks and talks, what he’s good at - those  things as well.  And human beings bear a likeness to our Father.  Again, if you look at Jesus you see how God would act as a human being.  

So what do we give God?  Everything, including ourselves.  There is no separation between Church and State, both belong to God.  There is no separation between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, as Saint Paul says, all are one in Christ.  

And that’s what the Church, what you and I are really all about.  God’s plan for mankind was clear at the beginning; we were to tend to the Garden of Eden; we were given powers over the animals; the plants served us effortlessly.  The image of Eden keeps recurring in scripture -- Ezechiel talks about trees that bear all year long and their leaves are medicine; Isaiah talks about God’s Holy Mountain where you can eat and drink without paying; the book of Revelation describes the heavenly Jerusalem -- all images of how God meant things to be.

Humans, of course, didn't cooperate and introduced division into the world.  Or perhaps they had help -- after all, the word “devil” comes from a Greek root which means “to divide”.  Anytime you see someone trying to divide human beings from each other, you see echoes of original sin, you see the hand of the devil.  And that seems to be happening more and more these days.  

But Jesus, who gives us the power to make the world over to become what God has in mind for it, did pray that all would be one, just as he is one with the Father.  The Church is meant to unite all people, not into some totalitarian community, but into a world where all the good humans are capable of can be exercised -- we will be in Christ then as Paul describes this state.  So Jesus is reminding the Pharisees and the Herodians and you and I that everyone belongs to God, and whenever we meet another human being, we need to remember whose image is on that person.