Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Last week at the Ite Missa Est event (Immaculate Conception Adult Faith Formation Ministry) we dealt with the book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to answer our most important question - why we suffer. The book is by written Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. He was a former pastor. But now he is an agnostic and writes against biblical understanding of the meaning of suffering. Bart says he that does not intend to de-convert people from Christianity but rather that he simply wants to show how the Bible cannot address the issue of suffering—the very issue that convinced him to abandon his Christian beliefs. He takes one explanation after another of suffering in the Bible and tries to give his own reason for his rejection of the biblical reasoning. Tim Gabrielli, who conducted the session for us made an important observation in response to Ehrman’s rejection of God. Most of the time, the rejection of God comes from affluent cultures by educated people sitting behind a desk. The question of the existence of God is rarely a poor person’s question. I may even add that it is a very Western question. These questions rarely originate in the East. I will also add that the question of the existence of God is a modern question. It is a product of the enlightenment. I would like to turn to today’s scripture for help. The first reading today from the book of Isaiah deals precisely with this issue. The people of Israel were taken as exiles to Babylon in 587 BC. For fifty year they lived in a foreign land with no temple to worship, no land to own, and no future to look forward to. This was the single most devastating tragedy to befall the people. The important thing is that no one questioned God because of the tragedy that befell them. In 537 BC, the Persian king Cyrus set these people free to go back to their own country. However, the way the people reflect on the event is very different from the way we are doing it during the tragedies today. The prophet Isaiah and the people of Israel are not afraid to look at the entire episode and relate it to God. They do not try to escape the implications of the tragedy nor do they run away from God. They seem to say, “Yes! The exile is tragic. But God is saying something to us through it.” Isaiah explains even the emergence of King Cyrus as God’s work. In these words Isaiah teaches the most important theological lesson to his people – that only God directs human history. Even if human beings or nature disrupt it, God can redirect it to his eternal plan. There is God and no other. In the strangest way, then, today we are being asked to look at all of history - the good and the bad, to look at life itself – every aspect of it and find God in there… somewhere. And we should not be afraid to do that.

I would like to offer three practical implications of the readings:

a) The first practical implication comes from the gospel reading. The Pharisees come to test Jesus and ask him a very significant question. “Is it lawful to give taxes to Caesar?” Jesus returns the favour by a reverse question: “Whose image do you find on the coin? They say “Caesar.” Well Jesus says give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God (Mt 22:25). What is that belongs to God? Just as a coin has Caesar’s image, so each person is God’s image. Every human life belongs to God. Creation bears God’s image. Even Caesar belongs to God. Every good thing, every natural calamity that happens, every life gained and every life lost belongs to God. And sometimes as modern, educated, self-reliant people we are too afraid to acknowledge that. So today Jesus is gently asking us not to reject God like many are bound to do but rather to give to God what belongs to God – and that means “everything.”

b) If we are the image of God then we give to God what belongs to God. The greatest sacrament of God or the most sacred expression of God is the human person. One does not have to write a book like Ehrman to reject God. The most common rejection of God takes place through the rejection of the human person. How often people reject God by rejecting other people because they belong to another race, or culture, religion or political party or nation. There was a family that left our school because they did not want their child to study with “voucher kids.”

c) To look and find God is all events of life is a very liberating experience. I think of Mary and how she dealt with the tragedy of the death of her Son. I think of the Israelites and the fifty year exile and how they dealt with it in faith. I think of Jesus on the cross and how he cried out, My God, My God.” I am sure each of us has some personal event that makes us ask the deeper question of life. Why did this happen to me? What is the meaning of life now? Where is God now? On the cross Jesus did exactly what he had told the Pharisees, “Give to God what belongs to God!” Sometimes, the best approach to all of life is an unconditional abandonment of our lives into the hands of God. This is the greatest act of faith, of liberation, of salvation.

This Eucharist is made possible because Jesus gave to God what belongs to God – his entire life, and gave to us what belongs to us – God’s love. As we receive Jesus in this Eucharist let us give to God what belongs to God and to one another what belongs to one another. That is liberation, that is faith, and that is salvation. Amen.

Fr. Satish Joseph