Friends
Peace be with you.
One of the books I read to prepare my homilies each week is called, “Food for the Soul” by the philosopher Peter Kreeft. I found something he wrote in his commentary on today’s readings particularly insightful. He says
“The English Catholic Philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe had a sixteen-year-old daughter who was arrested and hauled into court for publicly protesting abortion too close to a “bubble zone” near an abortion clinic. She rejected the offer of a public defender and defended herself in court. The judge lectured her: “I know you are a Catholic. You are here in court because you have forgotten one of the things that your teacher Jesus said about the relations between religion and politics: ‘Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’” Miss Anscombe replied: “The bodies of our unborn children do not belong to Caesar.”
October is designated as respect life month and our readings today speak rather eloquently of the need for us to have a holistic approach to this problem, defending all threats to human life that affect people from natural conception to natural death. Starting with the first reading, we hear from the Prophet Isaiah about a future event in which a pagan king named Cyrus would be the agent that freed the people of Judah from slavery. The people of the Old Testament would have thought God would use one of their kings to free them from slavery but, instead, God worked through someone who would have been seen as an “other” to free them.
Similarly, in the gospel, there is an oddity right from the start that we may easily miss. It says that some Herodians and Pharisees came to trap Jesus in his speech. The Pharisees are religious ultra traditionalists. They know and keep every law and want to overthrow Rome at all costs. The Herodians, on the other hand, were religiously lax because being in league with Rome had made them very rich. So, as one commentary I heard said, this is like hearing President Trump and the members of his administration got Vice-President Harris and the former members of the Biden administration and approached Jesus to trap him. The Pharisees want nothing to do with Roman coins. It had a graven image on it and it boldly proclaimed “Caesar is god” on it. The Herodians, on the other hand, loved that coin because it made them rich and powerful. It appears that someone will be angry however Jesus answers them. However, Jesus does two things that are absolutely brilliant. First, this is taking place on the Temple Mount, the place where both Pharisees and Herodians have agreed to exchange the coin of Caesar with a Jewish coin through money changers. When Jesus asked for one of them to show him the coin, he is showing that he has followed rules they have chosen not to follow by having graven images on the Temple Mount. Second, he asks whose image is on the coin. Everyone would have known it had Caesar’s image on it even if they didn’t physically have one. But in whose image and likeness is Caesar made? He may think he is God but they know he is not but that, like all humanity, Caesar is made in God’s image and likeness. So, Jesus’ response of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s becomes a challenge for them to recognize that all people are created in God’s image and likeness. Even when rendering something unto Caesar, you are rendering it to someone created in the image and likeness of God, granted someone who has distorted that image through sin and alienation from God, but, like Cyrus in the Old Testament, also someone God can use to fulfill his will. When you think about it, God used Herod to accomplish his will when Herod condemned Jesus to death on the cross for the salvation of the world. Herod may have thought he was simply putting down a religious revolutionary of sorts. But, in the end, his evil act of condemnation was an integral part of overthrowing the power of the devil and opening the gates of paradise for all who believe in Jesus.
As Christians, one of the most important things we need to do right now is proclaim a message that all people are created in the image and likeness of God. Whether it’s AI technology and social media being used to radicalize the worst, most racist, misogynist, and violent behavior within society, we must continue to proclaim the unique dignity of the human person. We also must condemn our government’s recent decision to televise an upcoming act of capital punishment. Setting aside whether we need capital punishment in our country today, it must be said that a government livestreaming an act of murder opens the doors for its normalization, not only by radically evil governments and other terrorist organizations but by an ever increasingly morally bankrupt entertainment industry. We must demand our government rethink this decision because any time we diminish the dignity of the human person for one person, even a sick, awful killer, we diminish it for all people. And lastly, we can’t just rely on our courts to make the case against abortion. We have to speak out in love and truth with the same boldness as Miss Ascombe did to make the case that abortion is unthinkable, not just illegal. Part of that has to do with having places like Mary’s Inn in Dubuque and Guiding Star healthcare in Waterloo that help women who are in the difficult situation of not knowing how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. We have to be able to see the dignity, not only of the unborn child, but of the scared woman carrying that child and the woman who may think herself unwanted in our lives or our church because she, in the past, decided to have an abortion.
As we find ourselves in the midst of this respect life month, we hear God calling us to respect all life from natural conception to natural death, even those we think are far away from him. Who have we written off as evil that may need us to recognize the dignity in them?
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