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<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\nScripture readings<\/a> for Oct. 18, 2026, Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time<\/p>\n Is 45:1, 4-6\u00a0 Ps 96:1, 3, 4-5, 7-8, 9-10\u00a0 1 Thes 1:1-5b\u00a0 Mt 22:15-21<\/p>\n St. Anthony the Great<\/a>, centuries ago, predicted that a time would come, he said, \u201cwhen people will rave and when they see somebody not raving, they will attack him, saying: \u2018You are not raving\u2019; for he is not like them.\u201d I have often wondered that the great monk might have been talking about us and our time. You know what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n Gavin Esler, the Scottish journalist, wrote a book almost thirty years ago called \u201cThe United States of Anger.\u201d<\/a> It was a prescient book. Again, I think you know what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n Anyway, it seems an atmosphere like what we find in this portion of Matthew\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Matthew tells us this right away. \u201cThe Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n But again, they\u2019re not interested in the truth. They ask him whether it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s why the Herodians were interested in this question, because they were card-carrying Roman loyalists.<\/p>\n Yet if Jesus says yes, then what would the zealots that were following him think? Would they feel let down by Jesus\u2019 acquiescence to Roman tyranny and thus leave him? That\u2019s what the Pharisees and Herodians were hoping. They think they\u2019ve 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\u2019ve snared him.<\/p>\n But they\u2019re playing a zero-sum game. Jesus isn\u2019t. 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, \u201cWhose image is this and whose inscription?\u201d They tell him that it is Caesar\u2019s image stamped on the coin. \u201cThen repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,\u201d Jesus answers them (Mt 22:19-21).<\/p>\n Jesus is indifferent to the controversy; it\u2019s a clever evasion. At the very least, he\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n But what are we to learn from Jesus\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Rather, what Jesus is teaching us is that the kingdom will come by another way. It won\u2019t 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\u2019t matter to Jesus, and which shouldn\u2019t much matter to Jesus\u2019 followers either.<\/p>\n Instead, what matters to Jesus is love \u2014 love for the poor, for the outcast, for the sinner, for the Father. That\u2019s what should make the Christian a revolutionary, loving like that, not politics or violence but love. And, of course, love doesn\u2019t care who Caesar is.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n