Homily: Belonging to God

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 29 / Sunday

Readings: Isaiah 45.1, 4-6 / Psalm 95 (R/v 7b) / 1 Thessalonians 1.1-5 / Matthew 22.15-21

Have you taken a good look at the contents of your wallet or handbag lately? If you did, you might find dollar bills and coins, credit cards, membership cards, and shopping receipts. If you dig deeper, a photograph or two of family members and friends and a scribbled love-note or a few thank you lines on a post-it might surface. And if you burrow even deeper, you might be surprised to find a Mother Mary holy card, or a prayer card for healing or generosity.

Our wallets and handbags express the struggle of daily life: of earning enough to live and of remembering significant people and events to cherish life. If we had paused to examine the contents of our wallets and handbags, we might have asked, “How am I using these things they contain?” But these contents can also invite us to reflect more deeply on another question my friend, Josh, jokingly phrases this way, “Who belongs to these things?” 

“Who belongs to these things?” or “To whom do these belong to?” is the hidden question in the trick question the Pharisees ask Jesus in today’s gospel story. They aim to trap Jesus in a political bind; whatever his answer, he would be either a tax evader or a disloyal Jew against Caesar. 

Instead of being tested, Jesus tests them—and us—with this reply: "Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."  For Jose Villarin, a Filipino Jesuit,  Jesus’ answer is a great escape; but it is also a cryptic answer. The crux of the matter in Jesus’ answer is not about paying tribute to rulers or taxes for the common good, or about separating church and state, God and government. Rather, according to Villarin, Jesus’ cryptic answer is a code for know-first-what-is yours-and-what–is-God’s.

I believe Jesus wants to turn the Pharisees’ question upside down with his response. He does this to challenge and to reorientate all who listen to him—ourselves included today—to see more clearly that everything we have belongs to God. 

And this includes, our hard earned money. Jesus reminds us that the money we pay our taxes with, that we buy and sell things with, that we invest our future with, is always and already imprinted with God's "image' and "inscription" within and upon it. The coins and dollar bills bearing images of Caesar or Abraham Lincoln or Yusof Ishak we have are first and always only ours because of a provident God. And God fills the wallets of our lives with much more than money; God fills it excessively with the riches of life like love and laughter and the wealth of faith like spiritual consolation and enduring hope.

We should therefore heed Isaiah’s prophesizing about God. He reminds us in our first reading that God not only calls us by name but always provides for us and protects us. This is how God reveals to us that there is no other lord in our lives but God. 

If this is who God is, and if this is how we ought to know God, how then are we to follow Jesus’ instruction in today’s gospel story that we repay God? How do we love this God from whom we have received everything and to whom belongs all that we have? 

Exchange is one way humankind repays God. It has the form of quid-pro-quo bartering, of transacting something for something else. As Christians, this is however a dangerous way of repaying God because it is reductive. This bartering reduces our relationship with God to a tit-for-tat interaction. This exchange reduces God to a mean, narrow-minded judge who dispenses love only to those who do not break the commandments. This transaction reduces the human potential to love God freely and to love one’s neighbor fully to that myopic act of check-listing the do’s and don’ts some in our Church insists is the dutiful way to Christian holiness.

If not by exchange, by bartering or by transaction, how then are we to repay God? The Psalmist sings, "how can I repay the Lord for His goodness to me, the cup of salvation I will take and call on the Lord's name” (Psalm 116.12). We "repay" God by living eucharistic lives.

Eucharist is thanksgiving. We offer bread and wine, fruits of the earth and the vine, back to God. We offer these believing they will become for us the Body and Blood of Christ when we consecrate them to God.  What we really offer in bread and wine is the gift of Jesus, who redeems us for God and who shows us how to properly give thanks to God--eucharistically.

If the proper form to repay God is eucharistic, it makes sense for us to pause before the Eucharistic Prayer and to add to this Church's prayer of thanksgiving our gratitude for the people, events and things in our lives. To do this is to praise and thank God for everything we have because this celebrates God in ourselves, in our sisters and brothers, in our happy photographs and our sad memories, in our love-notes and our work-lists—yes, in all the ways God has already come to us for us to see who we are in God's eyes, beloved.

Paul teaches the Thessalonians—and us—in our second reading that we can see, appreciate and repay God’s goodness because of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit gifts us with gratitude, that attitude of being blest so as to be a blessing by giving back to God what God first gave us and by sharing God’s goodness with others. Indeed, this capacity to offer thanks and to bless is God’s gift to us. 

Hence, our eucharistic celebration would be incomplete if we only offered to God on this altar bread and wine and our moneyed offerings. What we must also offer up is ourselves. Like Jesus who offers himself to God on the Cross, we offer ourselves, however broken we may be, back to God. And like Jesus, we do so believing that God will make real our hope in God's love: that we are destined to be transfigured into the Body of Christ we are called to truly become, and not death.

As we prepare to be nourished at the Lord’s table, let’s pause for a moment or two. Let’s look back on this week. Let’s consider how much we have experienced this past week. The people, the events and the things that filled our week give us a sense of place and proportion. They allow us to confess how each is God’s gift to bless us and our lives today. Yet, none of these, even if ties of love and life bind them to us as, are ours. 

When you open your wallet and your handbags in a few minutes to make your offerings, just pause and take another, slightly longer look at their contents. Are these really yours, your possessions and your own? 

If your answer is no, then, yes, nothing we have is ours and everything we have is God’s. What we really are is therefore what we return to God who has already given everything to us. Yes, self-offering is the appropriate thanksgiving you and I can make today. And isn’t this then the right and just repayment we ought to make to God here and now, at this Eucharist, and together?

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo from the Internet (by dyobmit on flickr)