October 22, 2023
Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 22, 2023 – Isaiah 45:1, 4-6; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5B; Matthew 22:15-21
Let’s see how much our children know about our money. Whose face is on the penny? Anybody know whose face is on the penny? Who? Abraham Lincoln, that’s right. How about the dime? Whose face is on the dime? She’s hoping Mom would rescue her. Who? You don’t know okay. Did you say Franklin? Nope. Closer to our time but not to your time. FDR’s face is on the dime. Whose face is on the quarter? Whose face is on the quarter? Maybe the most famous president of all. Yes? George Washington, right. For a while, John F. Kennedy was on the dollar, now he’s not anymore. All of our Presidents are dead. The ones on the coins. If you go up into Canada, the current King is on their coins. Until she died, Queen Elizabeth was on the coins. Canada and England put their living people on the coins, not their dead people. Interesting because of who is on the coin that they give to Jesus.
They hand Jesus a coin and He says to them, “Whose picture is on the coin and whose inscription?” The inscriptions are writing around the coin. On our coins, around the coin, we have “In God We Trust.” So, they say, “It’s Caesar’s picture.” But it’s the living Caesar. His name is Tiberius Caesar. And, around the coin it says, “This is Tiberius Caesar, the son of the divine Augustus Caesar.” The divine Augustus Caesar. The Romans believed that Tiberius’ dad was a God. Because he said so. He made himself a God, so he was a God.
Now here’s the problem. Jewish people are not allowed to make pictures of anybody. Nobody at all. The First Commandment says, “Thou shall not make unto thyself a graven image.” You can’t carve a picture of anybody in a stone. So here they have a picture of somebody who’s a Pagan God. Right? Notice that these people, the Pharisees, who are supposed to be the keepers of the law, had, in their purses, a picture of an idol. That’s why they were hypocrites. Because the very people who claimed to uphold the law most perfectly were breaking the law in their own pockets.
So, my next question is: do we need the second half of the quote? Jesus says, “Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar” - that makes a lot of sense – “give to God what belongs to God.” Hmm.
What this is all about is what we call Christian Anthropology. Now, for you guys who don’t know what the word anthropology means, it’s learning why people are the way they are. Ok? So, people who study anthropology, what they do is, they look at the way people have been since the very beginning, all throughout history. And they discover that, throughout all of history, this is the way most people have been. They have been wanting to be in groups. We call that community. They have wanted to share. That means they wanted to talk to each other, have conversations. As a matter of fact, since the very beginning, people wanted so much to have conversations with one another that, if they didn’t speak the same language, they invented signs to talk back and forth to each other. The third thing that they discovered people wanted to do from the very beginning is to be creative. To make stuff and do stuff. Those are the three qualities that represent people the most.
But there’s two other qualities that people have had from the very beginning, and those other two are kind of dangerous. The first one is that, from the very beginning, people have been on the move. Going from place to place all around the globe. All around, all around. Sometimes they went because they were curious what’s over the next hill. Sometimes they were driven by a more war-like people who tried to take their land. That was a problem. And sometimes, instead of wanting to be in community, to get together, and to share, they wanted it all for themselves.
Back about a hundred years ago, there was a priest. He wasn’t a priest like me who had a church to say Mass in every Sunday. No, he was an archaeologist. He dug in the ground looking for old bones. That was his profession. He was not only a college professor, he went out and actually did the work. And his name, for the grownups, was Teilhard de Chardin. He did most of his work in China. Digging up old bones. He discovered one of the most ancient human beings that ever, ever, lived in the world. But, by doing that for almost forty years, he came to the conclusion that this thing I described, how people are, is part of the way God wanted us to be. God has wanted us to be in motion. God has wanted us to be in community. God has wanted us to be in conversation. And God has wanted us to be creative. As a matter of fact, the very first chapter, the very first book of the Bible says that, when God made the human beings He said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it.” What He was saying, in a nutshell, was I want you to take care of the world and be creative.
So, when Jesus says, “Give the image of Caesar back to Caesar.” The second half is, “Give the image of God back to God.” All of you who are in God’s image, who are creators like God and communicators like God and in community like God, need to live your lives in such a way that you make a gift of yourselves back to God.
That’s why I said to listen very carefully for the three words in the second reading that are the most important virtues that we ever talk about. They are faith, hope and love. We get those virtues when we’re baptized. And we get them again when we receive the sacrament of Confirmation. And those virtues are always with us to do two things. They allow us to believe in God, to hope that God will take care of us, and to love God back again for loving us first. But they also let us interact with each other in particular ways.
The virtue of faith helps us to trust other people. You can’t have groups of people if there’s no trust. And you can’t talk to other people if there’s no trust and honesty. The virtue of hope allows us to be confident that what we do will have a good outcome, will work out well. And the virtue of love has two parts. There’s one kind of love that helps us to care about other people, to hope that they will be healthy and safe and go to heaven. The other part is caring for people. The children here care for their brothers and sisters, if they have them, certainly care for their moms and dads, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, probably a couple of best friends in school. They care for them. Parents in church care for their children. The grandparents in church care for their grandchildren. They probably have a whole bunch of other people they care for.- people in a club they belong to, or friends and neighbors next door, or their own brothers and sisters, or people they work with. Two kinds of the virtue of love.
It’s all part of giving back to God what belongs to God.