Give to God what belongs to God

Following is the prepared text from Bishop Olmsted’s homily for the 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time.

October 18, 2020

Today’s second Reading is taken from the oldest surviving Christian document. It contains the first 5 verses of the first inspired work of the New Testament. The 1^st Letter of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians is the first book of the New Testament to be read and studied by Christians and proclaimed at Sunday Mass, nearly twenty centuries ago. In just these first 5 verses, Paul situates his teaching in the context of the Blessed Trinity, mentioning God the Father, Jesus His Son, and the Holy Spirit. Paul also thanks God for the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, using words that express how Bishop Nevares and I feel about you whom we have the honor to serve:

“We give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians to remind them of their Catholic identity. Notice, for example, the first verse identifies the recipients as “…the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Christians live in God. In good times or bad, we live in God. When we were baptized, we began to live in the Blessed Trinity. I also live in Phoenix, just as the recipients of the first document of Christianity lived in Thessalonica. But, in a far deeper way, the Thessalonians and all of us live in the Blessed Trinity. That’s our identity. In a similar vein, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Cor 6:19-20), “Do you not know that your body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit… and that you are not your own.”

This is our deepest identity.  We are not defined by our place of birth or where we live. Our identity does not come from being rich or poor, famous or unknown. Out of love, God the Father rescued us from the darkness of sin and brought us into the radiance of His Kingdom. None of us earned this blessing. It is a gift won for us by Jesus through His saving death on the Cross. May we never forget who we are and never, by sinning, turn away from God.

At the Last Supper, Jesus exhorted us (Jn 15:4f),

“Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me…Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

Far more important than spatial distancing and washing hands during a pandemic are daily efforts to remain one in Christ. As the French novelist Leon Bloy wrote, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” – La Femme Pauvre

In verse 5 of 1^st Thessalonians, Paul tells us that the Gospel did not come to us “in word alone, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit…” The power of the Holy Spirit helps us to say “yes” to God with all our heart, mind, and soul. It is good for us to profess our faith in the Creed but far more important to trust with our whole being in the mercy and love of the Blessed Trinity. No matter what happens today or tomorrow, we are able, as Christians, to suffer (1 Thess 1:6) “great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit.”

This joy from the Holy Spirit is what accounts for the tremendous growth of the Church in Thessalonica, Ephesus, Corinth, and throughout the Roman Empire during the worst persecutions. The same thing can happen now in AD 2020; in fact, it is happening now, during the pandemic, wherever disciples of Jesus endure hardships with joyful courage. In God, we are fully alive. In Him we find grace to love our neighbor, to forgive our enemy, to face the pandemic with hope and cheerfulness. Having become one in Christ, our bodies do not belong to ourselves.

We are totally His. That is why fornication, adultery, or any impurity amounts to the worship of false gods. It is also why, in our Gospel today, Jesus speaks tough truths to the Pharisees – not out of anger but out of love. They came to trap Jesus, not to seek the truth. So, Jesus showed the Pharisees their own hypocrisy, not to embarrass them but to rescue them from the lies that they told. They were engaging in deliberate deceit and duplicity; few things can be more destructive to the soul than to manipulate the truth to mislead another or to win votes in an election. Jesus exposed the dark hypocrisy of the Pharisees with the hope of freeing them from lies and converting them to the truth.

Then, He went on to answer their question; Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? He said: “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”  Jesus was not putting God and Caesar on equal footing here, as if part of the world belonged to Caesar and part to God. Caesar stands under God and is judged by Him. Every elected official, and every one of us, stands under God and will be judged by Him.

Returning to the Gospel passage, notice what Jesus said after they handed him a coin: “Whose image is this…?” Whose “eikon” or face is on this coin? Notice how Jesus moves the focus to the human person, the starting point for every moral issue: the face of a human being represents their inviolable dignity and worth from the moment of conception until natural death.

Once Jesus got their attention focused on the human face, He said: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” So, what belongs to God? Everything! Psalm 24 tells us: “The Lord’s are the earth and its fullness; the world and those who dwell in it.” There is nothing in the world which does not belong to God. Giving to God what belongs to God means seeing the face of God in every human being and respecting the dignity of each person and defending his or her right to life.

We belong to God; we live in Him – may we never forget that wondrous truth. We are His beloved children. May He complete the good work He has begun in us.