Year A Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Readings: Isa 41:1.4-6; Ps 96:1.3-5.7-10; 1 Thes 1:1-5b; Matt 22:15-21

To paraphrase Saint Paul from our first reading, the Gospel is not primarily a matter of words, but of the Holy Spirit’s power.¹ It is the Spirit’s power that convicts us, at the deepest level of our being, of the truth of the Gospel, the mystery of faith, the Paschal mystery. The Paschal mystery is the Gospel. It is the mystery of faith. What is the mystery of faith? Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

As Christians, the Paschal mystery needs to transform and convert us in every aspect of our lives. For a true disciple, faith in Christ is what integrates every aspect of our being. Faith cannot be compartmentalized. If we use the analogy of making a cup of tea, faith in Christ is not the tea bag that is plunged into the hot water, coloring it, altering both its smell and taste.

Faith is the water into which the bag is plunged. After all, you can drink water without tea, but you can’t drink tea without water. In baptism, we are plunged into the very life of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- the one God, living and true, whose essence is agape, which is self-giving love.²

In addition to being the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, today is the Memorial of Pope Saint John Paul II. Without a doubt, John Paul II is one of the great evangelists the Church has ever produced. Papa Wojtyla always reminded us that to know Christ Jesus is everything. In the arithmetic of existence- Jesus+nothing=everything.

Saint John Paul II started his first encyclical letter, Redemptor Hominis- “Redeemer of Man”- promulgated a mere five months after he became Pope at the relatively young age of fifty-eight, with these stirring words: “The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.”³ In the first chapter of the Letter to Colossians we read:

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation.
For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together⁴

As indicated, everything was not only created through Christ but for him. It is Jesus Christ who holds everything together, making creation a cosmos that can be studied, understood, marveled at, even if never completely comprehended; a cosmos and not chaos.

I begin this way not only because I think it is important to remember Pope John Paul II, but because it is easy to lose sight of Jesus’ divinity, especially during this long season of Ordinary Time as we read through Saint Matthew’s Gospel in a semi-continuous way. In this season, we tend to focus rather minutely, and for good reason, on Jesus’ interactions as makes his way from Galilee to Jerusalem. It is easy to take for granted the gift of faith that enables us to believe and to profess, “Jesus is Lord.” According to the apostle Paul, any genuine confession of Jesus as Lord can only be made by the power of the Holy Spirit.⁵ Making faith one of the theological virtues, that is, a gift from God.

Our first reading, from that section of Isaiah, reckoned to be from the section of that book known as deutero or second Isaiah, written during Israel’s Babylonian exile, shows how God used a pagan emperor, Cyrus, to release his people from captivity. Thus, we see one instance of how God directs history, as in Colossians, as in Redemptor Hominis, towards his ultimate purpose: opening the way of salvation through Jesus Christ to all who believe.

While God works in the world through history, neither anyone nor anything can stop God’s purpose from being realized. In our Gospel today some Pharisees who were hostile to Jesus (not all Pharisees were) thought they had devised the perfect trap into which Jesus would fall. By asking him if Jews should pay taxes to their Roman occupiers, they thought that if Jesus said they should be paid he would be discredited in the eyes of his fellow Jews. On the other hand, if he said Jews should not pay taxes to the Romans, they could denounce him to the Roman authorities, which they ultimately did but only in Jesus’ own time.

It is important to point out that Jesus did not just split the difference, in effect, cutting the baby in two. In his response to this hypocritical question, he demonstrated the power of the Truth. In the end, what the Jews were asked to give to the Roman emperor already belonged to the Roman emperor. Considering this, the question becomes not so much what belongs to God as it is who belongs to God? As to what belongs to God, the answer is simple- everything that is.

Today’s Gospel should also remind us, as Jesus’ disciples, we are first and foremost citizens of God’s kingdom, a kingdom not of this world. In this vein, after the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, in which history shows he played a big part, Pope John Paul II consistently warned that rampant consumerism, which is not so much atheistic as idolatrous, holds as many, if not more, perils as atheistic communism.

Towards the end of Redemptor Hominis, Saint John Paul II wrote:

The Father's eternal love, which has been manifested in the history of mankind through the Son whom the Father gave, “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life…”⁶

And so, for each of us today and every day, the question is To whom do I belong? In his wisdom and lovingkindness, having made us in his image, God leaves the answer to that question to you and to me. The true answer is revealed not so much through our words as it is through our actions and even through our inaction.

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1 1 Thessalonians 1:5.^↩
2 1 John 4:8.16.^↩
3 Pope John Paul II. Encyclical Letter Redemptor Hominis. Holy See. 4 March 1979.^↩
4 Colossians 1:15-17.^↩
5 1 Corinthians 12:3.^↩
6 Redemptor Hominis; John 3:16.^↩