29th Sunday Ordinary Time – A – September 24, 2023
This week, the Pharisees and their own rivals, the Herodians, join forces to get Jesus to publicly implicate himself as anti-Roman, guaranteeing his arrest. However, Jesus leaves everyone amazed with his shrewd reply. Those who choose to engage in Caesar’s currencies of power are bound by Caesar’s laws, but those who live under God’s reign are obligated to follow God’s decrees.
Don’t let yourself be trapped into giving your assemblies a simple interpretation of Jesus’s response. As people of faith called to engage society and transform it, we cannot delineate so easily what belongs to one or the other.
All things belong to God. Still, we must discern together how to live God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. Click To TweetAt times, following the laws of one requires us to break the laws of the other, and even Christians who strive above all to live under God’s laws disagree on how to do that within the civil laws under which they live.
All things belong to God. Still, we must discern together how to live God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. To do this, we cannot be like the Pharisees and Herodians who desired only to be right and Jesus to be wrong. In conversations, discussions, and debates where we try to discern how to fulfill God’s laws and our obligations under a civil society, let us not seek to entrap the other but always strive to engage in the currency of God’s love.
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