29th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005 

The Herodians mentioned in today’s story were the agents used by Herod to enforce and administer the system of taxation imposed by Rome.  One of the imposed taxes was a head tax, equivalent to a day’s wage, to be paid by every Jew without distinction.  The tax was paid in Roman coinage, and the coin at that time carried the imprint of the emperor Tiberias, with the inscription: Tiberias Caesar, son of the Divine Augustus, High Priest.  For the Jew that was blasphemous.

The Herodians would have seen any suggestion by Jesus that Jews not pay the tax as politically subversive and would have had him arrested.  During Jesus’ childhood, in fact, some Galileans had refused to pay the tax.  They were crucified by the Roman military.  For Jesus to suggest, on the other hand, that Jews pay the tax would have been seen by the Pharisees and by the people as his going along with the whole Roman system with its blasphemous making a god of Caesar and its occupation of the land, the land of Israel, God’s land.  The Pharisees would have accused Jesus of betraying the very heart of Israel - though they compromised in practice.  They provided the coin.

Jesus saw through the trap.  His response: Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.  Jesus was not confirming the separation of religion and politics, unthought of in those days, even by Jesus.  For Rome, the emperor was the son of divine Augustus, and was also automatically chief priest.  In Judaea the civil as well as the religious administration of the province was in the hands of the Sanhedrin, made up precisely of the chief priests, scribes and aristocrats.

As he so often did, Jesus did not directly answer the question.  Their consciences were their own.  He went deeper to the heart of the issue.  Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.  Give back to Caesar: Distance yourselves from all that Rome stands for: state worship, the whole business of making gods of emperors, acquiring wealth by the brutal conquest of weaker nations, ensuring a life style based fairly and squarely on the ready supply of slaves from conquered lands.  Instead, what Jesus was on about - what he called people to - was to give to God what was God’s due.  And what was God’s due will be made perfectly clear next Sunday: Love God with everything – heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbour: the total opposite of everything Caesar stood for and Rome was built on.

You can’t give your soul to God on the one hand and sell your soul to the imperial ethos of Rome on the other.  It is not a case of room for both, each in its proper place.  It’s still true today.  Either it’s “capital G” God, or it’s the “small g” gods of wealth and security, and their spin offs of consumerism, hedonism, and national self-interest, at the price so often of oppression, injustice and violence.

We have come to celebrate Eucharist, as sons and daughters of God, as brothers and sisters.  We see our openness to each other and celebration of diversity as symbol of how we want our world to be.  We rejoice that Jesus freed the world from sin, from indifference, exploitation and violence, because he loved his neighbour as himself; and he did that because he loved God with everything.  It cost him his life.  He now nourishes us with his crucified flesh, and with his blood that bled from that wounded flesh, so that our gathering around this one table might not only symbolise what our world could be but will empower us to do all we can to ensure that it will be.