Homily for the 20th Sunday after Trinity (29th Sunday of Ordinary Time

The dilemma posed to Jesus by this odd alliance of Pharisees and Herodians should seem familiar to anyone who has seriously wrestled with a Christian conscience in the modern world. The Lord sees the “malice” of the group — the Greek word is the same one for “evil” or “the evil one” at the end of the Our Father — which would ordinarily have nothing to do with one another. They have teamed up, not because they agree, but because they agree in their disagreement with the implicit approach of Jesus. For the Pharisees, cooperation with Rome is just obviously evil. They represent that tendency to sectarianism that remains an appealing option for many Catholics who withdraw as much as they can from any participation in public life. For the Herodians, cooperation with Rome is a necessary compromise, an expedient political path that ensures the survival of Judah as a kingdom. Here we might make a quick comparison with our first reading from Isaiah, where the prophet names Cyrus as a king who unwittingly does the Lord’s will. Contemporary Christians have used this passage to make claims for pagan leaders who, despite their personal failings, seem to promote the good. This is an understandable impulse, though we should recall that the Herodians may have applied just this prophetic rhetoric to King Herod or even Caesar, and perhaps they were right. The movements of providence are often much easier to see in hindsight.

Perhaps the Pharisees and Herodians both are confused and angered at the Lord’s refusal to choose between what they see as the obvious alternatives. Again this seems familiar. But the alternatives presented by the politics of the world rarely represent the true moral question for an individual or community. Is it possible that the choices are impossible to resolve in this life? One commentator here suggests that Jesus’ answer intentionally poses an insoluble problem, the point being that “You know you have a problem, at least if you are a disciple of Jesus, when you do not have a problem.”^[1] In this, maybe, the Pharisees and the Herodians, walking away in disgust, better understand the Lord’s response than the many modern Christians who take it as some sort of clean division in life between the “religious” or “spiritual” and everything else, as if all God wants from us is a brief moment on Sunday morning, and the rest of the time we can just follow the emperor and keep our private “religious” views to ourselves.

But the Lord’s rhetoric here cuts through any simple question about the morality of paying taxes or not. On the one hand, he does seem to say, contrary to the general anxieties of his fellow countrymen, that paying taxes may be a matter of indifference. For many readers of this passage there’s implicit here an affirmation of ordinary justice: Caesar builds roads and maintains public order, so we do owe him something, and we do not need to feel a sense of pollution or moral compromise simply because he is a pagan.

On the other hand, the whole dialogue sets up a deeper point about what we do not and cannot owe to Caesar. Jesus asks, “Whose image is on this coin?” Most of our translations obscure an earlier moment in the dialogue which already plays on this same language. When they approach him, the Lord’s critics flatter him for he shows “no partiality” in vs. 16, but the more literal Greek reads, “you do not look into the face of persons.” Idiomatically the translations are correct, because this is meant to show that he does not judge a person by the superficial qualities of their appearance; but the word “face” brings out other implications. If he does not look at the face, what does he look at? In the very next moment we see that the Lord can see straight through to the evil intention of their hearts.

But then this man who “does not look at the face” asks whose face is on a coin. The language of faces and images touches some deep notes of the Biblical imagination. First, it is quite possible that a pious first century Jew could have seen the coin as in itself idolatrous. Given what we know of the cult of emperors in ancient Rome, this would be a reasonable view. And so the idea to “render to Caesar” can mean “return this idol to the one who made it,” and good riddance. But beyond that we cannot hear this without remembering the creation of man, in Genesis, in the “image and likeness” of God. The human person is the image of God, and the image is oriented to and belongs to its prototype. The coin has the image of Caesar, so give it to Caesar. But where do we find the image of God?

We may owe Caesar taxes, but we certainly do not owe him worship. This claim, perhaps small to us, was the claim of many early Church martyrs. “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). We could also say “you cannot serve both God and the emperor.” Though the precise language varies here and there, the distinction that the Church made in the early centuries between the true “worship” of God and the “veneration” due to images of the saints or the crucifix centered on the concept of service or bond. You can honor the emperor — indeed the New Testament epistles directly tell us to do so — and you can use money without idolatry. But you cannot serve wealth, and you cannot serve the state (whether it’s an emperor or that slippery modern concept of “the people”) in any way that impedes serving God. There are all sorts of natural and good obligations and loyalties, to family, to country, to our own life, but our final and total loyalty can only ever be to God alone. Living in this rightly ordered way is rarely an easy thing in this life, whatever the Pharisees and Herodians want us to think.

Isn’t their criticism of Jesus the favorite ploy in every age? Their own hypocrisy drives them to manufacture it elsewhere. These are all lovely ideals: truth, beauty, goodness. But let us be practical. But the supposed pragmatism here is the malice of the devil: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Authentic Christian discipleship is struggle, ascesis. It can look like retreat, like in the monastery. Or it can look like meddling, as in the heroic witness of someone promoting virtue in the marketplace. There are options, so to speak, in the different ways we respond to the call of God. I think even the most faithful Christians will often be called “hypocrites” by the world, because the world cannot grasp the paradox of a God who claims to offer eternal rest and peace alongside this constant temporal struggle.

As Jesus shows in the wilderness, and on the Cross, along with all his saints and martyrs, choosing to love God above all things does not free us from all conflict, but it does free us from the burden of being in charge of history. We do have to make practical decisions every day, but the difference between Christian discipleship and the mentality of the Pharisees and Herodians is that this practical decision making is not a strategy for controlling history, or even our own lives, but the way we express our love to God and our neighbor one moment after another. We are not made in the image of ourselves, or of Caesar, or of our moment in history, but of God. God determines our meaning, our beginning and our end.

^[1] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos).