kabarsula Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time — Jesus shows us that love, not worldly conflict, is what matters bandar SLOT INDONESIA

Scripture readings for Oct. 18, 2026, Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Is 45:1, 4-6  Ps 96:1, 3, 4-5, 7-8, 9-10  1 Thes 1:1-5b  Mt 22:15-21

St. Anthony the Great, centuries ago, predicted that a time would come, he said, “when people will rave and when they see somebody not raving, they will attack him, saying: ‘You are not raving’; for he is not like them.” I have often wondered that the great monk might have been talking about us and our time. You know what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about all our raving, our fights online and in real life. Culture wars, intractable political partisanship, Catholic infighting and liturgy wars: all of it and more often becomes a kind of raving, rage that loses its meaning, rage that rages for no other purpose than rage itself.

Gavin Esler, the Scottish journalist, wrote a book almost thirty years ago called “The United States of Anger.” It was a prescient book. Again, I think you know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, it seems an atmosphere like what we find in this portion of Matthew’s Gospel. It seems like a similar malice. These are enemies; this is war. Those surrounding Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians in this passage, are not acting in good faith. They are not looking for common ground or for truth at all.

Matthew tells us this right away. “The Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech,” the passage begins (Mt 22:15). Plotting and entrapping are not what good people do. Pharisees, chief priests and elders had been trying to entangle Jesus in controversy ever since they asked him about John the Baptist (Mt 21:23-27). Now, looping in some Herodians, they try to trip up Jesus again.

But again, they’re not interested in the truth. They ask him whether it’s lawful for Jews to pay the census tax. If Jesus says no, then he could be accused of zealotry and, more dangerously, sedition. For not only was it a matter of taxation, to renounce what the tax symbolized, what the emperor’s image on the coin symbolized, was as good as to admit that one was an insurrectionist. It was to renounce Roman authority and power. That’s why the Herodians were interested in this question, because they were card-carrying Roman loyalists.

Yet if Jesus says yes, then what would the zealots that were following him think? Would they feel let down by Jesus’ acquiescence to Roman tyranny and thus leave him? That’s what the Pharisees and Herodians were hoping. They think they’ve got him cornered. They think that to save face he must choose between one or the other, between sedition or selling out. They think they’ve snared him.

But they’re playing a zero-sum game. Jesus isn’t. The Pharisees and Herodians can only see one answer or the other, but Jesus sees another. He asks for a coin; significantly, I think, Jesus does not have a coin on him. He asks for a coin and says, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” They tell him that it is Caesar’s image stamped on the coin. “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” Jesus answers them (Mt 22:19-21).

Jesus is indifferent to the controversy; it’s a clever evasion. At the very least, he’s not trapped, and so the Pharisees and Herodians quietly leave him with their proverbial tails tucked between their legs for the time being. (Mt 22:22).

But what are we to learn from Jesus’ clever evasion? I think a few things. First, Jesus is clearly not confined by the hatred and ravings that surround him. He can think outside the narrow categories of the Pharisees and Herodians. Jesus belongs so completely to the kingdom of God, his kingdom, that worldly power struggles and Roman realpolitik simply do not count as important to the inauguration of the kingdom of God. That is, Jesus exemplifies what some Church fathers called apatheia, spiritual dispassion for the worries of the world, holy indifference.

Yet this is not to suggest that Jesus is teaching us to escape the world. Nor is he teaching us to divide the world between say Church and state, between sacred and secular. He is not teaching us that there are two kingdoms, each with their proper sovereignty, and that we should at one moment obey one and then at other times obey the other.

Rather, what Jesus is teaching us is that the kingdom will come by another way. It won’t come by our cooperating with evil nor will it come by way of zealotry, terrorism or violence. Both the Herodian compromiser playing political games and the zealot aggressor plotting violence are wrong; they both are playing a game that simply doesn’t matter to Jesus, and which shouldn’t much matter to Jesus’ followers either.

Instead, what matters to Jesus is love — love for the poor, for the outcast, for the sinner, for the Father. That’s what should make the Christian a revolutionary, loving like that, not politics or violence but love. And, of course, love doesn’t care who Caesar is.

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books.