This Is Not a Homily on Giving to the Church (Seriously)
29th Sunday of the Year
You have probably been Catholic long enough to expect, following the Gospel we’ve just heard, a homily on giving money to the Church. I’m not going to do that. (You can hold your applause). I’m not going to do that, not because I don’t think you should give to the Church, nor because I’m afraid to talk about giving to the Church with all that’s going on today. No, this homily isn’t going to be about money because today’s Gospel isn’t about money. In fact, in today’s Gospel, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that he is not concerned with money at all.
Before defending that claim, we need think about this passage with a bit more context. For the last several weeks, we have heard Jesus describe the coming of God’s kingdom in a variety of parables — parables which were addressed to the chief priests and elders of the people. From the first words of today’s Gospel, we can infer that their purpose in listening to Jesus say these things was to find something in what he said that could be used as evidence to convict him. Finding none, they go off and conspire “how they might entrap Jesus in speech.” The Pharisees send their disciples back to Jesus with a question, not about any of the parables he has taught, for their meaning has totally escaped them, but with a practical matter of heated debate: should Jews pay the temple tax? But to box Jesus in and ensure that no matter how he answers his answer will be condemnable, the Pharisees also send with their own disciples some of the Herodians. The Herodians are those Jews who are loyal to Herod the Roman petty king of Galilee. How controversy makes enemies into friends! The Pharisees oppose the tax, the Herodians support it, and both come to Jesus wanting to know whether it is “lawful” for the tax to be paid.
Typical of Saint Matthew’s style, this passage is dripping with irony; and this irony is meant to highlight the tragic condition in which the Pharisees have wandered so far from the truth that everything they say is sound on the surface but hollow underneath. “Teacher,” they call him. “Disciples,” they are called themselves. Yet they do not regard his authority and are not at all docile to be formed by the words that come from his mouth. They flatter Jesus: “Teacher, we know you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone’s opinion, for you do not regard a person’s status.” This last phrase is important to understand Jesus’ response, but we need to translate it literally to grasp its meaning: “You do not look upon people’s faces.”
Then Jesus asks for the coin—the coin which bears the face and name of Caesar. “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” he says to satisfy the Herodians, and to appease the Pharisees, “and to God what belongs to God.” Both sides, Matthew tells us in the following verse, went away stunned. They are shocked at the fact that he had evaded their conspired plot; but perhaps they are more perplexed that Jesus seems to have no regard at all for the things of this world. In one breath, he declares money and the whole economic order to be irrelevant to his mission, the advancement of his kingdom.
So, what is Jesus concerned about? What are those things that belong to God? The disciples of the Pharisees were right to say that Jesus does “not look upon people’s faces”—that is to say, that he sees beyond mere surface-level appearances. Rather, what Jesus looks upon is the image and inscription each person bears in the depths of their being that mark them as created by and destined for God alone. Christ sees the human family, no matter their race or ethnicity, their wealth or social status, their abilities or interests, as those who carry within themselves the indefectible sign that they are God’s own. And as God’s Son sent into the world to save those who bear God’s image from the destructive powers of sin and death, Christ sees in each person the one he has come to bring home to the Father’s house.
This homily isn’t about money because this Gospel isn’t about money; and the Gospel itself isn’t about money because the mission of Christ the Redeemer isn’t about money; and Christ doesn’t care about money because all the Father cares about is you. This homily, this Gospel, and I would hope that every homily based on every Gospel, is about bringing to complete perfection the image of God that resides in you. Everything that the Church does, from top to bottom, is for the realization of exactly that. The Church does need money to do that; and sometimes the Church needs to ask for money; and sometimes the Gospel encourages us to give alms and be generous with the material resources we have; and sometimes a homily might be a good occasion to draw that point out. But the Church is not a business out for profit. Every coin she has, no matter which earthly ruler it bears, is earmarked for the sole purpose of rending to God what belongs to God.
Everything material in our lives must be so ordered. We were not made by God to become rich and comfortable with worldly riches and possessions. God desires us to use whatever we have, great or little, for the sake of becoming his perfect image that he has destined us and everyone else to be. For the material things we have and own will always be finite, never able to fully satisfy us; and they will always also be passing, here with us now but circumstances can always take them away. But the spiritual goo
d of doing God’s will, to cooperate with him in bringing to fulfillment his plan for us and for all people, is a good the trumps everything else. The saints, one and all, bear witness to the joy that is found in a life properly ordered as Christ today teaches.
You are the most precious work of God’s creation, worth infinitely more than the whole sum of all Caesar’s wealth, for you bear God’s image. And God paid for you a most costly price in his own Son’s Blood shed upon the Cross, so that his image within you can become perfect in the one who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). This is what God cares about. This is what the Church cares about. This is what we should care about in every facet of our lives. And all the belongs to Caesar we should count as naught.
Homily given October 21/22, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Hampden.