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. 

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22: 1 -14

When I read what others have written about this story of Jesus, the king in the story usually stands in for God.  The wedding guests who at first humiliate the king by claiming they had something trivial to do and then the later ones who react with violence to his invitation nowadays stand in for people who reject the Church; either because of indifference or because of actual opposition.  Of course in the olden days, the ones who rejected were the Jewish people.  Maybe we’ve made a little progresso.  And then we come to the actual guests, who are rounded up from unlikely places; when this story is told by Luke, the king has to send his servants out a second time to the hedgerows and the alleys -- and we are those guests, we gentiles, we who are in the church, we who take our religion seriously or at least semi=seriously.  

But maybe there are problems with this standard interpretation.  One of them is that the king is certainly not like the God that Jesus preached about.  He is vain, easily offended, given to violence -- after all he burns a city down because of a few people who treated his servants violently.  And then after he finally fills his banquet hall, he kicks out one of the guests because he isn’t wearing a wedding garment -- not only does he kick him out, he does so after binding his hands and feet.  Is that how you imagine God?  And yet, I think that’s the way my grandparents imagined Him, and that wasn’t so long ago.  The idea that God is hot tempered, violent, and easily offended lurks in the back of our minds, I think.  

As I said before, we tend to see ourselves as the wedding guests who have been rounded up and brought to the banquet, wearing a garment given to us by the king.  But who else might we be?

I ran across an article about Amy Comey Barrett who has been nominated for the Supreme Court.  The article began with the statement, “I am a Catholic” and went on to say that her views were not Catholic; she was against abortion and euthenasia, and more than 50% of Catholics are not’ she opposed artificial contraception; 70% of Catholics see nothing wrong with it.  She believed that marriage was between a man and a woman; and about 50% of Catholics think that same-sex marriage is not a problem.  He went on to list a number of other Catholic ideas she had that many Catholics don’t.  Of course anybody who is adequately catechized could see how ridiculous this serious person was.  The beliefs of the Church, derived from it’s founder, from scripture, from tradition, and from the teaching authority of the Church which we believe is protected by the Holy Spirit, are not based on polls.  And maybe those who ignore the king’s servants, or do violence to them -- maybe those people and you and I have a bit in common.  We don’t mind being subjects of the king as long as we don’t have to do what he tells us to do. 

Or maybe we are the king.  Maybe we are easily offended because our self-image is fragile, or perhaps misguided.  We all start out life thinking we are the center of the universe, and some of us never move beyond that point.  But even if we do, it’s easy to give in to our instincts, which still tell us that.  And when we are offended, when we are dissed, or disrespected, maybe we resort to violence, perhaps only in our minds, but violence nevertheless.  And when we are disrespected we tend to overreact, just like the king who burns down the village, or throws out the man who refuses to wear a wedding garment.  Maybe we still need to work on virtues like humility and charity even toward our enemies.  

Or maybe we are the man who has been bound and cast into the darkness because he is not wearing a wedding garment.  Or maybe that is Jesus, who ultimately was stripped naked and nailed to a cross because he did not conform.  He resisted the authorities of his time, not in a violent way, but by pointing out where they were wrong.  He stood up to power and didn’t concern himself with the consequences.  He spoke the truth people didn’t want to hear.  And I guess I am not that person; I’m not brave enough.  But at the same time, maybe Jesus tells us about this man because he hopes that some of his followers will imitate him, even to accept martyrdom.  Because truth needs to be spoken, even when everyone else is lying. 

When Luke tells this story, there is nothing about the man who is thrown out.  The king does not commit violence.  It’s very different and seems to have a different point.  And I think that when Jesus told his stories, he wanted his listeners to think about them.  Our reaction to these stories is usually to grasp what we think is the point and go on from there.  But when you carry one of his parables around with you all week long, you come up with many different ideas.  So I am sharing some of mine with you.