29th Sunday Year A - Homily 6

Homily 6-2023

In saying, Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, Jesus may well have been suggesting something like, “Do not let its hollowness become yours. Don’t be the dupe of the advertisers! Don’t let yourselves be kidded by the smooth-talking and the emptiness of the sloganeers!

What is of greater interest to us is what Jesus may have intended by Give back to God what is God’s. What is God’s? … when all is said and done? Everything is! Everyone is! – our very existence, and everything else consequent on that. In saying, Give it back to God, he is indicating that everything, everyone, are already gifts given to us by God. Everything, everyone, is gift! 

What would our world be like if everyone understood that everything, everyone, were gift of God? It would powerfully affect our attitude to our world. For a start, it would suggest a profound respect for everything. Our world would no longer be approached as something to be exploited at will. A humble stance of contemplation would replace that of domination. None of us could any longer be centre of the world. We could no longer see our world as something to be dealt with simply as we like, or used simply as we choose.

I would love to spend time talking with one of our First Nations individuals — [someone like Miriam-Rose Ungemerr-Baumann, for example, whom I have only briefly met], and sharing with her how she looks on “country”; what country means to her; how she feels about mystery. I remember about forty years ago talking quietly to an Aboriginal woman in Broome. She worked as the priests’s housekeeper in the presbytery there for some years. I asked her casually if she prayed much. She replied, “Oh, most of the time, I suppose.” I asked her did she read much, and her reply was, “Whenever Fr Mick [the parish-priest] finishes one his spiritual-reading books, he hands it on to me to read afterwards”. I regret now that I did not make the most of the prize opportunity there to be treasured.

If we only deliberately used our opportunities, our attitudes also to ourselves would change. Again, we would see everything about us as gift: our creativity and initiative; our capacity to appreciate beauty, to seek truth and to understand reality; our ability to relate and to work out together what is just; above all, our ability to love and to see with compassion. All gift — not given to individuals to be hoarded but given to everyone to be shared.

Give back to God what is God’s. Give everything, everyone, back to God. Whatever about the practicalities, it would presuppose a conscious orientation, a deliberate choice. And I wonder if our giving back would be reluctant? or free and joyful? That may depend on how we view God, on whether we see our God as rejoicing, loving, creative, surprising, gifting and gracious. Is that how we do view God now?

Today is Mission Sunday, the occasion for us to re-examine what we are doing tomake disciples of all the nations". We have a wonderful message to communicate, a beautiful vision to share — a message and vision that we keep discovering as we dialogue with our world. 

God’s greatest gift to our world is the Spirit. That Spirit is already present, here and at work, needing only to be recognised. In the unity produced by that Spirit, together we give our world and ourselves back to God. Through, with and in Jesus we move forward into our Eucharistic prayer of thanks and praise of our extravagantly gifting God.