29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 22nd October 2017)
Give to God what belongs to God – (Matthew 22:15-21)
“Tell us your opinion then,” the Pharisees say to Jesus, not because they want to hear the word of truth from his mouth, but because they want to trap him. Jesus’ reply takes them by surprise, looking at taxes and money in a way that they never would have expected. Then again, he is God, so wisdom is not a problem. He gets them to look at the image, and points out that if Caesar’s image is on the coin it must belong to Caesar in some sense. When God creates us, he creates us in his image and likeness, as we are told in the Book of Genesis. That’s why we can do things like thinking and reflecting, or praying, or sacrificing ourselves because of love, despite our selfish instincts for self-preservation. A dog or cat can’t do that, but God has made us with his image on us. So just as the money can be given to Caesar because it bears his image, we belong to God, because he has made us with his image and likeness in our souls.
When people lose a sense of themselves as being made in the image and likeness of God, they often make themselves in the image of money. On Sundays they worship in the shops, wandering aimlessly, poorer when they get home than when they left. A person who remembers that God has made them in his image stops to think, and remembers that they are immortal, and that Jesus died on the cross because he saw such beauty in them, because they bear the image of God.