29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

At that he said to them,
"Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar
and to God what belongs to God."

Dear Friends,

In our Gospel today, we see the Pharisees testing Jesus by asking him if it is lawful to pay tax to Caesar. With this question, they are hoping to back him into a corner: he will either say that it is lawful, and thereby look like traitor to the Jewish people and a supporter of the Roman occupation, or he will say that it is unlawful and thereby seem like a zealot and an enemy to Rome.

Instead of engaging directly with the question, Jesus tells his questioners to look at the denarii—the Roman coins used to pay the census tax—and he asks them whose image is inscribed on that coin. They reply that it is Caesar’s image, and he answers that they should “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.”

This response from Jesus is not simply an elegant dodging of a difficult question. There is a deep and profound invitation embedded in his answer. The Pharisees are obsessed with Jewish law and with the history and customs of their beliefs. Although they approach Jesus with “malice,” he still loves them and desires union with them, and salvation for them. When Jesus points out Caesar’s “image” on the coin as the reason it should be paid to him, and suggests that what is God’s should be paid to God, he is inviting the Pharisees to consider: who or what bears the image of God?

As devout students of the Torah and Pentateuch, thinking about God’s “image” would remind the Pharisees of the book of Genesis, where, when God creates man and woman, it says “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Rather than squabbling with his critics over the census tax, Jesus cuts to a much deeper and more revealing question: have you given your whole self to God? Are you willing to do so? Jesus’s mission is not about setting a few logistical questions straight for the people of Israel; rather, it is about inviting everyone—each person lovingly made in God’s image—into divine relationship, abundant life, and total self gift.

Like that small Roman coin, each one of us is etched with an image: the image of the God who gives his whole self to us, and who desires our whole selves in return. So, with love and gratitude, let us pay to God what belongs to God.

Jule Heffernan
Communications Director