Caesar and the King
The Lord is king over all the earth, as we sing in Sunday’s Psalm. Governments rise and fall by His permission, with no authority but that given from above (see John 19:11; Romans 13:1).
In effect, God says to every ruler what he tells King Cyrus in today’s First Reading: “I have called you . . . though you knew me not.”
The Lord raised up Cyrus to restore the Israelites from exile, and to rebuild Jerusalem (see Ezra 1:1-4). Throughout salvation history, God has used foreign rulers for the sake of His chosen people. Pharaoh’s heart was hardened to reveal God’s power (see Romans 9:17). Invading armies were used to punish Israel’s sins (see 2 Maccabees 6:7-16).
The Roman occupation during Jesus’ time was, in a similar way, a judgment on Israel’s unfaithfulness. Jesus’ famous words in the Gospel this week: “Repay to Caesar” are a pointed reminder of this. And they call us, too, to keep our allegiances straight.
The Lord alone is our king. His kingdom is not of this world (see John 18:36) but it begins here in His Church, which tells of His glory among all peoples. Citizens of heaven (see Philippians 3:20), we are called to be a light to the world (see Matthew 5:14) – working in faith, laboring in love, and enduring in hope, as today’s Epistle counsels.
We owe the government a concern for the common good, and obedience to laws – unless they conflict with God’s commandments as interpreted by the Church (see Acts 5:29).
But we owe God everything. The coin bears Caesar’s image. But we bear God’s own image (see Genesis 1:27). We owe Him our very lives – all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, offered as a living sacrifice of love (see Romans 12:1-2).
We should pray for our leaders, that like Cyrus they do God’s will (see 1 Timothy 2:1-2) – until from the rising of the sun to its setting, all humanity knows that Jesus is Lord.
St. Anthony of Padua (c.1195-1231)
Sermons for Sundays and Feasts of the Saints
Just as this coin bears the image of Caesar, so our soul is in the image of the Blessed Trinity, as one of the psalms says: “The light of thy countenance has been imprinted upon us” (4,6 LXX)… Lord, the light of your countenance, that is to say the light of your grace that sets your image within us and makes us become like you, has been imprinted upon us, that is to say imprinted in our rational faculty, which is the highest power of our soul and receives this light as wax receives the mark of a seal.
God’s countenance is our reason because, just as we recognize someone by his face, so we recognize God through the mirror of reason. However, this reason has been deformed by human sin since sin opposes us to God. The grace of Christ has put our reason right. Hence, the apostle Paul says to the Ephesians: “Be renewed in your minds” (4,23). The light in question in this psalm is thus the grace that restores God’s image imprinted in our nature…
The whole Trinity has marked mankind with its likeness. With the memory it resembles the Father; with the understanding it resembles the Son; by love it resembles the Holy Spirit… From the beginning of creation man was made “in the image and likeness of God” (Gn 1,26). The image in his understanding of truth, the likeness in his love of virtue.
The light on God’s countenance is thus the grace that justifies us and brings to light once again our created image. This light constitutes man’s whole good, his true good; it sets its mark on him just as the emperor’s image marked the coin.
That is why the Lord adds: “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”. It was as if he said: Just as you repay Caesar with his image so repay God with your soul, beautified and marked by the light of his countenance.
Laurence of Brindisi from Sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, 2-5 (Opera omnia 8, 335) “Therefore give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” We are to give back to each their due. Now this is a saying that is truly full of wisdom and heavenly understanding because it teaches us that there are two sorts of power, one earthly and human, the other heavenly and divine…
It teaches us that we are bound in this way to a twofold form of obedience, one to human laws and the other to divine… We are to pay Caesar with the coin bearing the image and inscription of Caesar and God with what has received the seal and image of the divine likeness: “The light of your countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us” (Ps 4,7 Vg.).
We have been created in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1,26). You are a man, O Christian. So you are the money in the divine treasure-chest, a coin bearing the image and inscription of the divine emperor. From now on if I ask with Christ: “Whose image and inscription are these?”, you reply: “God’s”. And I answer: “So why do you not give back to God what is his?”
If we truly want to be God’s image then we must resemble Christ, since he is the image of God’s goodness and “the very imprint of his being” (Heb 1,3). And God “predestined those he foreknew to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rm 8,29).
Christ truly gave back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. He observed in the most perfect way possible the precepts contained in the two tablets of the divine law “becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2,8). Thus he was adorned in the highest degree with all virtues, both manifest and concealed.
Pope Benedict XVI
Homily, October 16, 2011
Let us now come to the biblical Readings in which the Lord speaks to us today. The first, taken from the Second Book of Isaiah, tells us that God is one, there is no other; there are no gods other than the Lord and even the powerful Cyrus, Emperor of the Persians, was part of a larger plan that God alone knew and carried ahead.
This Reading gives us the theological meaning of history: the epochal upheavals and the succession of great powers are under the supreme domination of God; no earthly power can stand in his stead.
The theology of history is an important and essential aspect of the New Evangelization because the people of our time, after the inauspicious season of the totalitarian empires in the 20th century, need to rediscover an overall look at the world and at time, a truly free, peaceful look, that look which the second Vatican Council communicated in its documents and which my predecessors, the Servant of God Paul VI and Bl. John Paul II, illustrated with their Magisterium.
The Second Reading is the beginning of the First Letter to the Thessalonians and this is already very evocative because it is the oldest letter that has come down to us of the greatest evangelizer of all time, the Apostle Paul.
He tells us first of all that one does not evangelize by oneself: in fact he too had collaborators, Silvanus and Timothy (cf. 1 Thes 1:1) and many others. And he immediately adds something else that is very important: that proclamation must always be preceded, accompanied and followed by prayer.
Indeed, he writes: “We give thanks to God always for you all, constantly mentioning you in our prayers” (v. 2). The Apostle then says he is well aware of the fact that he did not choose the members of the community, but that [God]: “has chosen you”, he says (v. 4).
Every Gospel missionary must always bear in mind this truth: it is the Lord who touches hearts with his word and with his Spirit, calling people to faith and to communion in the Church. Lastly, Paul leaves us a very valuable teaching, taken from his experience. He writes: “our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (v. 5).
Evangelization, to be effective, needs the power of the Spirit, who gives life to proclamation and imbues those who convey it with the “full conviction” of which the Apostle speaks. This term “conviction” or “full conviction” in the original Greek is pleroforia: a word that does not so much express the subjective, psychological aspect, rather the fullness, fidelity, completeness, in this case of the proclamation of Christ.
It is a proclamation which, to be complete and faithful, asks to be accompanied by signs and gestures, like the preaching of Jesus. Word, Spirit and certainty — understood in this way — are therefore inseparable and compete to ensure that the Gospel message is spread effectively.
Let us now reflect on the Gospel passage. It is the text about the legitimacy of the tribute to be paid to Caesar which contains Jesus’ famous answer: “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21).
But, before reaching this point there is a passage that can be applied to those who have the mission of evangelizing. Indeed, those who are speaking with Jesus — disciples of the Pharisees and the Herodians — compliment him, saying “we know that you are true, and teach the way of God truthfully, and care for no man” (v. 16).
It is this affirmation itself, although it is prompted by hypocrisy, that must attract our attention. The disciples of the Pharisees and Herodians do not believe in what they say. They are only affirming it as a captatio benevolentiae to make people listen to them, but their heart is far from that truth; indeed, they want to lure Jesus into a trap to be able to accuse him.
For us, instead, those words are precious: indeed, Jesus is true and teaches the way of God according to the truth, and stands in awe of none. He himself is that “way of God”, which we are called to take. Here we may recall the words of Jesus himself in John’s Gospel: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6).
In this regard St Augustine’s comment is illuminating: “It was necessary for Jesus to say ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’, when knowing the way by which he went they had to learn where he was going. The way led to truth, it led to life…. And where are we going, but to him, and by what way do we go, but by him? (In Evangelium Johannis tractatus 69, 2).
The new evangelizers are called to walk first on this Way that is Christ, to make others know the beauty of the Gospel that gives life. And on this Way one never walks alone but in company, an experience of communion and brotherhood that is offered to all those we meet, to share with them our experience of Christ and of his Church. Thus testimony combined with proclamation can open the hearts of those who are seeking the truth so that they are able to arrive at the meaning of their own life.
A brief reflection also on the central question of the tribute to Caesar. Jesus replies with a surprising political realism, linked to the theocentrism of the prophetic tradition.
The tribute to Caesar must be paid because his image is on the coin; but the human being, every person, carries in him- or herself another image, that of God, and therefore it is to him and to him alone that each one owes his or her existence.
The Fathers of the Church, drawing inspiration from the fact that Jesus was referring to the image of the Emperor impressed on the coin of the tribute, interpreted this passage in the light of the fundamental concept of the human being as an image of God, contained in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.
An anonymous author wrote: “The image of God is not impressed on gold, but on the human race. Caesar’s coin is gold, God’s coin is humanity…. Therefore give your riches to Caesar but keep for God the unique innocence of your conscience, where God is contemplated…. Caesar, in fact, asked that his image be on every coin, but God chose man, whom he created to reflect his glory” (Anonymous, Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 42).
And St Augustine used this reference several times in his homilies: “If Caesar reclaims his own image impressed on the coin”, he says, “will not God demand from man the divine image sculpted within him?” (En. Ps., Psalm 94:2). And further, “as the tribute money is rendered to him [Caesar], so should the soul be rendered to God, illumined and stamped with the light of his countenance” (ibid., Ps 4:8).
This word of Jesus is rich in anthropological content and it cannot be reduced only to the political context. The Church, therefore, is not limited to reminding human beings of the right distinction between the sphere of Caesar’s authority and that of God, between the political and religious contexts.
The mission of the Church, like that of Christ, is essentially to speak of God, to remember his sovereignty, to remind all, especially Christians who have lost their own identity, of the right of God to what belongs to him, that is, our life.
