Pentecost Proper 24, Year A, October 18, 2026

Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thess 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

PRAY…

Good morning! If we haven’t met yet, my name is Ben. It won’t surprise you to know I’m here today because Miles is off with many of you on retreat at Shrine Mont. I’m very aware that the people of Grace are passing through a very significant season of great love and great loss…in the deaths of Bill, Ann and now David and in the tender care of their families, along with the pending retirement of your rector who is pouring out his pastoral love for you to the very end. You have been richly blessed to have Miles as your faithful priest these many years, and I humbly look forward to serving as your Interim priest upon his retirement in late November. Let’s look at today’s gospel:

Jesus said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?”…Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Or as some of us know it from the King James version, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”

What question or questions is our gospel asking us? Is it asking us whether we belong to the Caesars of this world or to God?  Is it asking what we owe our Country versus our Maker?  Is there a question here about discipleship and citizenship? Or is this passage not at all reducible to God and Country?

Today’s Gospel passage always comes up at this time of the church year as we think about our primary identity in God and our ultimate allegiance as Christians, and how to express that through our love and support of the Church that nurtures our faith and spirits.  As we sometimes say at the Offertory, “All things come of thee O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.” [11am…As we will hear more about following the Passing of the Peace from Danielle and Lynn.]

But this gospel story from Matthew is actually more loaded than we might first think.  It involves a confrontation that Jesus has in Jerusalem with Pharisees and Herodians who are working together to frame Jesus in the days leading to his arrest and execution by the occupying powers of the Roman Empire. But it’s important to add that today’s confrontation is followed by two more attempts by Jerusalem’s religious leaders to entrap Jesus through false charges. After which comes an unforgettable passage in which Jesus excoriates all these religious hypocrites (including its chief priests) for not practicing what they preach, and then laments their longstanding pattern of killing the prophets and sages whom God has sent to Israel in the past.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

The failure to recognize God’s messengers in the sage, the prophet, and the Messiah is perhaps the greatest tragedy. It can’t help but shine a light on our souls, and reveals much about our hearts and motives. Yet never to be daunted, God in Christ is still determined to gather us together. The relentless goodness of God is the heart of it that we need to focus on always, true as well in today’s passage:

In today’s story, both camps - the Pharisees and Herodians - collude in a question about taxation, which is posed not so much for the sake of sincere clarification but with the intent of catching Jesus out and putting him a dangerous position bound to displease either Rome or his fellow Jews.

The tax in question was an annual head count tax based on the census, and payment was the denarius representing a day’s wages. The tax financed Rome’s occupation and subjugation over Israel, so it was detestable to Jews. What’s more, the coin bore the idolatrous image of Caesar, the emperor, including inscriptions claiming his divinity, which was blasphemous to Jews.

So it’s more than just a tricky question.  Because if Jesus advises paying taxes to the Roman emperor whose forces occupy their territory, many of his fellow Jews who resent this burden and intrusion into Jewish life and independence will consider Jesus to be collaborating with their oppressors. This would then be used by the Pharisees to alienate other Jews from following Jesus.

Yet if Jesus rejects all imperial authority and counsels non-payment of the emperor’s tax, then the Herodians, who support the tax that funds the Rome-endorsed dynasty of Herod and its military power, will accuse Jesus of insurrection and have him arrested by the Romans.

So this delegation of Pharisees and Herodians represents a potent mixture of both a yes and no on the tax issue.  Simply put, Jesus is being framed and will likely endanger himself no matter how he answers, which is exactly what the Pharisees aim to accomplish without revealing the motive in their hearts.  But Jesus understands that the delegation comes with flattering lips yet hostile intent, and his answer is more than merely clever.

Perceiving the malice that lies behind the question about taxation, Jesus asks for a coin, the denarius, which was used for the required yearly tax.  “Whose head is this, and whose title,” he asks?  “The emperor’s,” they respond.  And Jesus replies, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Do we think his answer is straightforward or intentionally evasive? Is Jesus being deferential or dismissive about giving the emperor his due? Is he speaking of who the coin belongs to, or who they belong to? Or is their question and its intent both misguided, based on their assumption that Jesus is at most a political messiah prepared to overturn Roman rule and liberate Israel? Based, in other words, on a complete misunderstanding of who they are actually speaking to? They simply do not know who is standing before them.

With tension building in Jerusalem during his final visit there, and within just days of his execution as a perceived threat to religious authority and Roman authority, Jesus’ detractors are clueless about his real identity.

For while these very religious hypocrites claim to abhor the idolatrous image of Caesar that they nonetheless carry in their pockets, they are completely oblivious of the fact that they themselves have been made in the image of the very one standing before them, the God-made-Man. The one who has no denarius in his pocket and no malice in his heart. Who plans no political overthrow. Whose kingdom is not from this world yet is world transformative. Who will soon inaugurate and seal his kingdom not with a crown but a cross. Whose cross will forgive and bury all the world’s sins – past, present, and future. Who in rising from the grave defeats not only sin, but Satan and death. Who now lives with death behind him, and prepares the way for us to follow as part of his new creation and the world’s redemption. 

So misunderstanding abounds in today’s reading! But not in Jesus. And not in us. In baptism we have been marked and sealed as Christ’s own forever. And you have been revealing his abundant love for all in the way you’ve been supporting Ann’s family, Bill’s family, and now David’s family, as you hold them in their loss while upholding God’s promises to all. For truly, in the living Christ whose spirit dwells in each of us, there is no place or way we can fall that he isn’t already there to catch us. He is there with us before the first breath and beyond the last breath and in all the others between.

Whoever said we aren’t getting out of this world alive didn’t understand that, in Christ, death is now the portal to life immortal and the life of the world to come! Brothers and sisters in Christ, it doesn’t get any better than this! Which is why we can love generously. Give generously. And be not afraid!

So come to the table, together with all the saints we love but see no more, and partake of Christ’s body and blood given for the unending life of the world he loves so much.

Offered to you in the triune name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN