Sunday Inbox Inspirations
October 18, 2020
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle A
Image
The key word to understanding today’s gospel is the word “image.”
Hold onto that for now – I will come back to it in a minute. There is something else I want to point out first.
The Either-Or Question
Matthew’s gospel tells us that there are some people who are out to get Jesus.
They oppose him because he is attracting a following. He is becoming fairly popular, and that is threatening to some of the religious leaders.
So, they devise a question that, they figure, will be an ironclad trap for Jesus. They ask him: is it lawful to pay the tax to the emperor or not?
If Jesus says yes, it is okay to pay the tax, he will be discredited with his fellow Jews. His popularity will dip because they resent this tax that is imposed by the foreign power occupying their country.
On the other hand, if Jesus says no, it’s not okay to pay the tax, he will get in trouble with the Roman rulers. Maybe he will be put in jail because they won’t tolerate opposition to their authority.
So, these religious leaders pose this either-or question to Jesus. They figure that they’ve really got him.
The Both-And Answer
And then comes the surprise.
Jesus asks his opponents if someone has one of the coins used to pay the tax. Quickly, one of them pulls a coin out of his pocket and hands it to Jesus.
Jesus then asks: “Whose image is this on the coin?” – and here we are, back to the word “image” that I mentioned at the beginning. The opponents say: “Caesar’s.”
So, based on this image, Jesus simply says: “Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.” So, a both-and, not an either-or response.
And, there’s a big hook in Jesus’ response. The coins belong to Caesar because they have his image on it.
The question is: what belongs to God? And the answer is: anything that has God’s image on it.
And that means: all human beings. This is exactly what the Book of Genesis says: that we are made in the “image and likeness of God.”
So, what Jesus is saying is that all human beings, all human life is God’s because it is made in the “image” of God. This means that we owe to God respect and care for human life in whomever and wherever it is found.
Image: Human Life/Humanity
This is why a central piece of our Catholic moral teaching is the respect for human life.
And this includes the life of all human beings. It goes from conception to natural death and includes everything or everyone in between.
Pope Francis has spoken on this, and I want to leave us with what he wrote on two separate occasions. In 2018, he said this.
“Our defense of the innocent unborn…needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development.
Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”
In that 2018 statement, Pope Francis goes on to cite some other human life issues, like the care of migrants and health care for all. And then, in June of this past summer, Pope Francis wrote to us, the American people and adds this.
“My friends, we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of human life.”
Conclusion
So, the word “image” – all human beings are made in the image of God.
And because of that, all human beings, human life wherever it is found, belongs to God, and we need to respect and care for it. That is the clear and challenging extent of our ethic of life.
Father Michael Schleupner
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