This morning, I would invite you to remember back to when you were ten years old and had a best friend you played with every day during the summer. The two of you had so much fun you didn’t want your vacation to end. But it did end, and you had to go back to school. It was then you met this new kid in your class who was pretty neat. Soon you were spending a lot of time with this new kid. Then, one day, the new kid and your best friend from that summer came up to you and demanded to know which one was really your best friend. I don’t know what you said, but this little recollection gives us the focus for today’s homily reflection: Don’t be trapped into rejecting someone when pressure is put on you by others.
How do I get that focus out of today’s classic Gospel quotation: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s?” Well, to begin, we need to take a closer look at the conflict reported in today’s reading. The pharisees and their companions thought they had set a perfect trap for Jesus. The question seemed straight forward: “Is it lawful to pay a tax to the emperor or not?”
If Jesus said “no,” then he would be rejecting the Roman authorities and their Jewish sympathizers like the Herodians, who said it was acceptable to pay tribute to the Romans. If he said “yes, it’s acceptable to pay a tax to the Romans,” he would be rejecting the Zealots and those Jews who found Roman rule to be oppressive and who thought Jesus was the Messiah who would lead them to victory over the foreigners. However, Jesus avoided the trap. He rejected neither Roman authority nor Jewish independence. In fact, in this case, he neatly sprang the trap on the Pharisees, themselves.
As long as they considered themselves to be good Jews and followers of Torah, they were not supposed to be carrying a Roman coin bearing the image of the divine Caesar. When they handed Jesus the coin, they branded themselves as hypocrites. However, it is not the hypocracy of the Pharisees upon which we might focus our attention today, but rather on our own tendency to fall into our own trap of rejecting other people for the wrong reasons.
We’re all familiar with classic cases of rejection. Do you know someone who has an unmarried daughter living with a man, and the parents have rejected her? Or what about the case of a son who has married outside the church? Have his parents or other relatives rejected him?
Twenty-nine years ago, Karen and I were married in the Congregational church. Since then, she has become a Catholic and our marriage was validated in the Catholic church. But at the time, I had an aunt who solemnly informed all of my Catholic relatives they would be excommunicated if they came to the wedding. My parents and one uncle and his wife, a wonderful Methodist woman, were the only relatives from my side of the family who attended.
There are, of course, other forms of rejection. Forty years ago, in the Ohio steel-town in which I was raised, Italians and Poles were not socially acceptable. I have both ancestries and know the sting when someone says: “But you don’t look like an Eye-talian.” Today, there are similar cases with our Hispanic brothers and sisters in Christ.
Rejection comes in all sorts of sizes. We tend to reject the poor by listening to those who say they don’t want to work. We reject the elderly on the grounds some friends say they are no longer productive, cost too much to keep or are hard to get along with. We reject children who don’t live up to expectations conforming to what neighbors say about grades, athletic abilities or lifestyle. And children, too, reject parents whose ideas seem old-fashioned, as judged by their own teenaged peers. Each of us seems caught up in the trap of rejecting anyone who is not exactly like us or who doesn’t live up to society’s expectations.
Each time we feel compelled by others to reject a person because of one specific behavior, we are allowing our self to be put into the same trap the Pharisees tried to set for Jesus. His response was not to reject either the authority of Rome or his Jewish heritage. Instead, he said one must look at the circumstances and then do what is appropriate in order to follow both what society, as represented by Caesar, and our God want us to do.1
We are now beginning the last, formal part of our Renew Program. The theme for these six weeks is “evangelization.” Sometimes, when we hear the word evangelization we think of wild-eyed people forcing us to convert to something. But that’s not what the word really means. Evangelization comes from a Greek word which means “carry the good news.” And what is that Good News? That Jesus is the Son of God, he has come to offer us salvation through his life, death on a cross, and resurrection from the dead.
Each week we hear part of that Good News. We call it the Gospel. But more important, each week we are called upon not only to hear the Good News but to live it out. To carry it to others by the way in which we live out the Good News. And that is really what evangelization is all about. It is reaching out to others after first accepting the teachings of Jesus, the life of Jesus, into our own lives.
During this period of evangelization and our Renew Process, we will be asked to reach out to others. We are not asked to choose between the old best friend and the new kid in our class. Instead, we are called to accept both. We’re also called to consider those whose actions or life style may not be exactly what we would like them to be. We are called to find ways to reach out to them.
In our first reading for today, we heard how the Lord God made use of Cyrus, the King of Persia, to advance the Jewish nation. It is equally possible God calls upon someone who is not of our own liking to help us to our own salvation. But even if that is not the case, do we not have the responsibility to help others, even those who are different from us, on their own road to God’s kingdom?
We began with a Roman coin. Every coin has two sides. Every person has more than one side. Is it not possible to find the side which would allow us to accept that person? Maybe the best way to render unto both Caesar and God what each one is due, is to follow another ancient principle: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Twenty-ninth Sunday in ordinary; October 18, 1987
Is 45:1, 4-6; 1 Thess 1:1-5b; mt 22:15-21
- The wonderful thing about parables is that they allow for multiple interpretations! The previous time I preached on this parable, my focus was on our need to return to Caesar those negative items keeping us from God. Today’s focus is on the positive images of the coins and the situation: don’t be overly eager to reject people on surface characteristics. It would seem that the parable can be used either by “absolutists” — rendering strictly to secular and non-secular society what each “merits” or by “relativists” — not rejecting either a secular or non-secular society but seeing the “good” in each! This year I saw a need to emphasize the openness of evangelization and the Renew Program. Previously my focus was on metanoia: change. In a way, they are the two sides of the same coin!