Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity
Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity
+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost
In today’s Gospel lesson we learn of a trap set by the Pharisees and Herodians in an attempt to ensnare Jesus. That the teachings of Jesus so threatened these two groups of rivals that they decided to band together is really quite remarkable.
Both groups sought political independence for Israel. The Pharisees sought the restoration of the Kingdom of David while the Herodians wanted one, anyone of the many, many descendants of Herod the Great to rule, rather than a Roman Governor.
What they didn’t want was yet-another so-called Messiah to fail. They’d already seen that. Round about the year 6AD, there had been an uprising, led by a certain Judas of Galilee, who had led a revolt against the Roman census and the levying of taxes, which was the purpose of the census.
Think about it. Your country is invaded, and then the conquerors charge you for the privilege of being ruled by them. They controlled your trade, your comings and goings, they even controlled who would be named High Priest at the Temple! And while you could maintain your own coinage, you had to pay the tax with Roman coins.
Obviously, no self-respecting Messiah would claim that it was proper to pay tribute to Israel’s occupiers. Yet, Judas’s revolt had ended in death for himself and his followers. The memory of those revolutionaries nailed to crosses dotting the countryside was still very much in the people’s minds.
There was no good answer for Jesus. It was a perfect trap. Either he admits that he was no Messiah, that he was not there to usher in the Kingdom of God, or to commit himself to a revolutionary cause that was doomed to fail. For those were the only options… if one is bound to the world’s categories, concepts of power, and theories about the Messiah.
But when Jesus asks His questioner for a coin, He upended their plans. The man dug into his pocket and produced a Roman coin.
The man could have carried around a Jewish coin. After all, he would need them if he wanted to purchase an animal for sacrifice in the Temple. But the Roman coins were so much more convenient in everyday life. It was worth the cost of paying the fee to the money changers in the Temple for a sacrificial animal. Outside of those rare occasions, you could use it everywhere with everyone.
Trade outside one’s own immediate environs was impossible without Roman coins. It was kind of like using the Greek language. It made things simpler. And using the Greek tongue didn’t make you Greek, just as using Roman coins didn’t make you Roman, right? But of course, that was precisely the problem with the other great religious sect, the Sadducees. They had adopted Greek customs and modes of thought.
Jesus showed that despite their rhetoric and desire for self-rule, they were hopelessly compromised. Jewish law forbade coins with the image of man on them, but the coin the man produced bore the image of Caesar. A man over a thousand of miles away who held absolute power over you and your people. A coin inscribed with Roman words that declared that Caeser was Pontifex Maximus, High Priest, and Divi filius, son of a God.
The Pharisees might follow the law with their bodies and minds, but their hearts belonged to Rome. So too the Herodians, who may speak of self-rule, but whoever they may seat on the throne would still be beholden to Rome for his crown. They may bristle at the tax, but Judea was already in the pocket of Rome.
But our lesson is not simply an interesting anecdote about a specific time and event where we see how clever Jesus was. Like everything in Scripture, it’s there to teach us important truths, and this one has nothing to do with Tax Policy.
Jesus says to Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. That coin bore the image and likeness of Caesar. The question is:
what bears the image and likeness of God?
In Genesis we read, Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.”
We bear His image.
We are the things which we ought to render unto God.
As we say every Sunday, we offer ‘our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice’, but how much of our selves do we actually offer back to God? How much of ourselves do we hold back? We must render unto God the things that are God’s. Everything that we are, including our shame, fears, and anxieties are to be offered up to God, as well. Because only by offering our imperfections can we be transformed. For everything in the world stands condemned to inevitable death and destruction. Governments will fall, all our monuments will crumble, and even our sun will eventually grow cold and die. The only life, true life, is in Christ. That is what is meant by living sacrifice because only in Christ are we truly alive.
Jesus offered up himself in sacrifice on the cross before a world whose only power is death and by that, transformed death itself, so that we could partake in new life.
Just as we offer up the bread and wine in the Eucharist to be transformed, so too does our sacrifice transform us.
In a few short weeks we enter into Advent. For us, it is a new year in which we start by celebrating the transformation of the world by Jesus’s entering into it. So too, we celebrate His entry into our lives. As we prepare to celebrate, we take this opportunity to join together and help one another as we reorient our lives, letting go the things of this world that bind us to it. We fast to loosen the grip of our own vanity which compromises our relationship with God. We sacrifice the small conveniences.
We say no to the things of this world so we can say yes to Christ.
However, and this is very important. In a very real sense, just as when we offer ourselves up in sacrifice, what we ‘give up’ in fasting is not a deprivation. Just as a prisoner isn’t ‘giving up’ a roof over their head and 3 square meals a day when they’re sprung from the pen. Instead, we are released from the prison that we construct for ourselves. The things which play to our vanity, offering temporary pleasure, binding us to the world and its illusions of power and freedom which are really just the slavery of sin gussied up in new paint.
Shedding ourselves of anything that does not partake of the love and hope that find their source in Christ is both the means by which we deepen our relationship with God as well as the result of that relationship.
The things which we give up in Advent are not bad in and of themselves. Imagine if you will, that we are floating in a storm swept sea. The sinful stuff drags us under the surface, but the other stuff we hold onto and keeps us above the waves. These things we hold onto in order to manage our fear, anxieties, pains, and failures. But there is land off in the distance and if we ever hope to reach it, we must let go of the flotsam & jetsam and kick off and start to make a swim for it.
We sacrifice what we are able, and God accepts our sacrifice for what it is, strengthening and fortifying us so that we may, in time, offer up more and more of ourselves until, ultimately, we may reach the point that we acquire the Faith in Christ which will enable us to trust Him so completely that we can give ourselves wholly over to Him because He is our only desire.
It is said that after writing the section on the Eucharist in the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas heard a voice from the crucifix in his room. From the cross, Jesus said to him, “Thou hast written well of me, Thomas; what reward wilt thou have?” Aquinas responded, “Only you, Lord. Only you.”
To get to that point requires that we begin where we are. We cannot reach God, but He will always meet us where we are, but we do have to reach. We must render ourselves so that He may pick us up.
As Paul tells us in today’s Epistle, our citizenship is in Heaven. It is not a citizenship that kicks in after our death, but a reality that exists now. Right now. We have only to let go of the debris and make our way to shore where we can stand, upright, as we are meant to be. We only have to let go and give ourselves wholly over to God and enter into new life. And this we do not fully and all at once, but gradually, moment by moment, day by day, year by year. Each step we take, giving more and more of ourselves over to God, living more fully in Christ, more deeply in love with one another, knowing that no one is more delighted with or celebrates more for even our smallest bit of progress than God Himself.
+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost
