29th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2011 

Jesus didn’t raise the issue discussed in today’s Gospel about the question of whether Jews should pay the Roman tax.  It was his opponents who hoped to trap him.  Had Jesus said: “Don’t pay the Roman tax”, that would have been seen as civil disobedience; and Herod’s bureaucrats, the Herodians, were there to take note.  To have gone along with the oppressive Roman demands and simply to say: “Yes, pay the tax” would have meant “losing face” before the crowd of oppressed peasant pilgrims thronging the Temple courtyard.

The question came “out of the blue”, as it were.  But it was something that Jesus had often thought about – and it wasn’t hard for him to answer.  Remember one of those three temptations that Jesus faced in the desert right at the start of his public ministry, [and that were so graphically depicted by both Matthew and Luke]: Satan taking Jesus to the top of a very high mountain and showing him all the kingdoms of the world; and then offering to give him all that power and wealth – but at the price, naturally, of worshipping him, the devil.

It is obvious that the Gospels don’t have a high opinion of worldly kingdoms and their obsessions with power and wealth.  Jesus preached an alternative view of human community and social interaction – one not based on violence, oppression or exploitation – that he called the Kingdom of God.  In that Kingdom, the poor, the powerless, the hungry, the dispossessed, the marginalised, would not be forgotten or overlooked but respected and even prioritised.  Knowing everyone to be created by God and loved by God, Jesus showed and preached a profound respect for the inviolable dignity of every human person.  He envisaged a world order based on that vision of the human person.

The big question was [and still is today]: How to bring it about?  In Jesus’ time there were those who wanted to bring about change by violence.  [Barabbas, and the two criminals crucified with Jesus, had gone that way.]  Jesus chose the way of non-violence - what the Gospels somewhat lamely translate as gentleness.  He believed that the only way to genuine justice and peace was the way of conversion, the way of deliberately chosen love.

It is interesting to look more closely at how Jesus handled the question put by the Pharisees and Herodians.  He challenged them to produce a denarius – the coin of the Roman imperial system.  He, apparently, did not carry one.  He asked them whose was the image impressed on it.  It was the image of the current Roman Emperor, Tiberius.  He then asked them to read the words inscribed on it.  The Gospel doesn’t tell us explicitly what that wording was, but everyone of that period knew only too well.  It would have read: “Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus”.  The Roman Senate had made a god of the previous emperor, Augustus, the man who, with his legions, had conquered what was then the known world.  Empires worshipped power and wealth - and those leaders who acquired them.  They still do, although they tend to call it military and economic security.  Jesus’ reply to their question was simply: Give it back.  Have nothing to do with it – at least, if you want true peace, true justice, true well-being for every human person.

And then he added: Give back to God what is God’s.  Next Sunday’s Gospel will tell us what that is: Love God, not selectively, not within the limits of our comfort zones, but with everything: heart, soul and mind.  And, inseparable from that, Love your neighbour as yourself.  In case we are tempted to think that the mention of neighbour lets us off the hook, Jesus had already made clear in his Sermon on the Mount, that life in the Kingdom calls for and empowers loving even those who treat us as enemies.

Do love, respect, non-violence, really work – in the real world?  or Was Jesus somehow “off the planet”?  I suppose that our presence here today at Mass gives an indication of our answer.