The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
My parents practiced unwavering patience with teenaged me: I had bleached hair with spiked tips, studded leather wristbands, and a chain that connected an empty wallet to saggy pants. And at the age of thirteen, I was certain I knew much more than the foolish people who had raised me. As I drifted away from church and further into the mall, I’d ask them barbed questions: “If God is so great, why are there homeless and hungry people?”
In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees, with a much more sophisticated understanding of the Scriptures, try to trap Jesus with a paralyzing dilemma: “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” To encourage paying would be an injustice to God’s people, and to discourage it would be to make Himself an enemy of Caesar.
But Jesus does not see any contradiction: What Caesar has made is rightfully his, and in turn, God holds claim over His own creation. Tertuillian notes that while Caesar’s image is on the coins, “Man has been stamped with God’s image, likeness, name, and substance.” What are we to render to God? Ourselves.
For us, the most pressing question is this: To what extent do we recognize ourselves first as God’s creatures? As a teenager, so much of my identity was wrapped up in labels like “emo kid” or “skater boy” that God may have called upon me to render my wardrobe unto Hot Topic or Zumiez. But the problem persists even if my fashion has improved. Now, the temptation is to define myself by career, by status, by wealth. Slowly, Caesar’s imprint becomes more visible upon me than God’s image.
St. Augustine observes that, “We are God's money: we have wandered away as coin from the treasury. The impression that was stamped upon us has been rubbed out by our wandering.”
For God, there is no contradiction in the Pharisees’ question. But the answer should compel us to examine our own lives, since it is our choice whether we are “in the world” or “of the world.” Caesar can take more than our tax; he’ll ask us for everything, for our very selves.
Notably, after the Pharisees hear God’s answer “they marveled” and “they left him.” We are called to marvel and to stay—to enter more deeply into the mystery of the Incarnation, the nuanced relationship between this world and the next, the bewildering presence of suffering and the sanctifying presence of grace. We are called here and now to recognize in ourselves whose we are—God’s—and to offer ourselves up as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing.
Daniel Gray is a teacher and writer living in Central Texas. An adult convert to Catholicism, he loves his faith-filled and inspiring wife, Regina, his toddler son, Ezra, his squishy daughter, Eloise, and an unborn baby whose name is the source of beautiful marital debate. He writes short reflections on the Catholic life at Backward Progress.
