~ Homily given at Saint Augustine and Sacred Heart parishes in Jeffersonville, IN - October 15-16, 2011: 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Not long
after the earthquake that hit Virginia and shook much of the central east
coast, including Washington, D.C., I came across a reflection that highlighted
something simple and yet profound. Now,
I don’t remember who wrote it or, for that matter, how I even came across it,
but nonetheless the point that the author made stuck with me. In it, the author focused on the earthquake’s
effect on the operations of our nation’s capital, causing government offices
and federal courts to close for the day.
What the author found to be so profound about this is that the
government of what is arguably the most powerful nation in the world was forced
to close shop and go home by a power over which it has no control… a natural
phenomenon or, what we might call, an act of God. In other words, for a brief time on an August
afternoon, the men and women who govern our nation were faced with the fact
that, in reality, a greater power was in control of what would happen that day. The author concludes without making any judgments
about the earthquake being a manifestation of God’s wrath (which I remember
being somewhat popular at the time), but rather expresses his humble
satisfaction in this reminder that, in spite of the powers of principalities
that surround us, God still truly is in control.
In today’s
Gospel, Jesus finds himself in a “double-bind.”
The Pharisees, feeling unjustly indicted after hearing the parables
Jesus was teaching—the parables we’ve heard over the past three weeks—go off to
plot their revenge against him. After
all, they believe themselves to be the acknowledged religious authority and so
they refuse to be undermined by Jesus.
Soon, they send their “cronies” to test Jesus and to see if they can
catch him making a comment that they can use to turn people against him. The double trouble comes in the form of the
Herodians, King Herod’s cronies who many commentators suspect were the ones
responsible for collecting taxes. The
test that the disciples of the Pharisees propose is essentially a “catch 22” in
which a key phrase has a double meaning and, thus, can trap the respondent into
making an answer he or she wouldn’t otherwise make. In this context, the phrase “is it lawful”
would have conveyed two meanings. For
the Pharisees, the law that they are concerned with is the Law of Moses, which
states that allegiance is to be paid to God alone (thus, the first commandment:
“I am the Lord, your God. You shall not
have strange gods before me.”). And so,
paying the census tax—at least to them—was akin to “splitting” your allegiance
between Yahweh and someone else. For the
Herodians, the law they were concerned with is the civil law, in which it is a
crime on the level of treason to refuse to pay the tax. Thus, to not pay the tax is akin to an act of
a revolutionary, which is something the Romans were quite sensitive about. And so we see Jesus’ double bind. If he says that it is lawful to pay the
census tax, then he is contradicting the Mosaic Law and splitting his
allegiance between God and Caesar. On
the other hand, if he says that it is not lawful, the Herodians will likely
report him as “inciting acts against Caesar,” which will probably get him
arrested.
As Jesus is
wont to do, however, he sees the trap for what it is and steps right around
it. He sees the limited perspective with
which they both viewed the problem and then expands it to show them yet a third
solution, the “both/and.” Jesus’
answer—“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to
God”—demonstrates that he sees no conflict in paying the tax on one hand and
maintaining allegiance to God alone on the other. In other words, Jesus is saying that what
Caesar demands is of little accord, so pay it if you must, but do not let it distract
you from giving to God his just due, which is of much greater importance.
For us,
this calls us to consider how we live our lives as Christians subject to a
government that is at times hostile to our religious convictions. Are we going to cower, sulking frustratedly
because our government doesn’t rule the way we’d like it to (which is the model
put forth by the Pharisees)? Or will we
acknowledge that our God is in control, in spite of our government’s
limitations, and realize that what we owe God is of much greater importance
than whatever it is our government exacts of us? The thing that we tend to overlook, it seems,
is not what we owe to the government (I suspect that no one here is unaware of
what they owe to them), but rather what we owe to God. Now, perhaps at this point you are looking at
me and asking, “What exactly do we owe to God?”
Well, in a
word, everything. There’s nothing that
we have in this world that hasn’t come from God and so to “repay … to God what
belongs to God” means that in some way we owe him everything we have. However, let’s take a look at the Psalm that
we sang today to see if we can get a little more specific. The psalmist states, “Give the Lord, you
family of nations, give the Lord glory and praise; give the Lord the glory due
his name! Bring gifts and enter his
courts.” Therefore, it seems that our
worship is what we owe God, first and foremost.
You know, as Americans, we have a certain cultural attitude in which we
feel obliged at times to “keep the score even.”
In other words, when we receive a gift or kindness from others, we feel
like we are then in debt to the other person and thus look for some way to
repay their kindness. When we are faced
with the graciousness of God, however, we are forced to acknowledge that we are
unable to repay God for what he has given to us. Yet, we tend to discount the simple acts that
God desires from us. We fail to
recognize that, in truth, there is absolutely nothing that can take the place
of our coming together as a faith community to worship God in thanksgiving for
his gifts that sustain us each and every day.
From this standpoint, then, it makes sense that giving glory to God is
our first priority. Of course, that’s
not all we are called to do. Our giving
back to God from the gifts he’s given us cannot be limited simply to a Saturday
afternoon or Sunday morning; rather it must spill forth into our daily
lives. “Tell his glory among the
nations,” the psalmist proclaims, “among all peoples [tell] his wondrous
deeds.” At the end of each Mass, we are
sent forth into the world to bring the Good News we celebrate here into our
homes, our communities, and our workplaces, completing “works of faith” and
“labors of love,” all the while “enduring in hope”—true hope—that God indeed is
in control and that one day we will see him face to face.
My brothers
and sisters, when earthquakes shake our lives—whether they be physical acts of
nature or, more commonly, events that shake up the status quo of our lives—we
are forced to face the ominous question: “Who really is in control here?” For some, the answer is frightening: a cold,
malicious God who exacts suffering on both good and bad, seemingly without
discretion, or worse yet no God at all, leaving them with no way to ascribe meaning
to the suffering which they endure. For
us, however, it is God, our Father and Mother, who protects us and nourishes us
and most importantly never abandons us, even if we try to abandon him.
Perhaps we
can remember this today as we do what the psalmist charges us to do, “bringing
our gifts into his courts” so as to repay to the Lord what truly belongs to
him, “the glory due his name.” The glory
that is our lives of service, gratuitously given and united to the one who paid
the price for us all, Jesus our Lord.
God is our father and mother?? I thought that was a no no?
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