Scripture Reflections

TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY

"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God " (Matt 22:21)

I live on the "near west side" of Chicago and I frequently ride the #12 CTA buses that run between South Indiana Avenue and the Veteran's Administration Hospital complex. The #12's riders represent a large spectrum of Chicago's population, from the upper middle class to people who are destitute and homeless. Each trip occasions a meditation - if not an adventurous encounter with - the "here but not yet" reality of the Kingdom of Heaven.

At first glance, our readings from Isaiah and Matthew's gospel appear to be related with the refrain to Psalm 80 providing an interpretive key: "The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel" (Is 5:7a).

We hear a familiar story from Matthew on this Sunday: the parable of two sons of a vineyard owner, who asks them to work in the vineyard.  The first says 'yes' but doesn't go; and the second says 'no' but does go to work in the vineyard.  It's important to note that Jesus introduces the parable by asking the chief priests and elders "What is your opinion?"  And, he concludes with the question "Which of the two did the father's will?"  It's evident that what one does is more important than what one says.

One of the most plaintive cries of childhood, was: "But I only thought ...". It was a cry of injured innocence in the face of parental criticism. And it was as pointless as it was plaintive. The response was always the same: "Don't think. Just do as you're told!" Clearly, elders saw things differently, and thought very differently, from us. Childish good intentions were never good enough if we failed to carry out instructions.

While it may seem an unusual image for a liturgical book, one might consider the Roman Catholic Lectionary almost as a kind of sacred roulette wheel. I say that because, although the readings for Sunday Mass are mapped out in a 3 year cycle, there is little predictability what readings will coincide with a particular anniversary, national holiday, or somber memorial.

Our lectionary places three slices of Scripture before us every Sunday. The first reading has been selected because it has some relationship to the Gospel. Either it is the Scriptural foundation which Jesus references or it may contain the stories which are alluded to in the gospel passage. But the second reading is often a selection from an epistle, which is read continuously. Last Sunday, the second reading was from Paul's Letter to the Romans Chapter 12. This Sunday we hear from the next chapter, Romans 13.

The price of fidelity

Nobody wants to suffer! Every living being cringes from pain. It is almost as if we have within us a driving force to run away from it. And then we come across readings like today's that admonish us "to offer [our] bodies as a living sacrifice." Today's readings actually exhort us to respond joyfully to God's invitation to intimacy regardless of the cost, and not simply to embrace suffering in itself.

The question Jesus poses in today's Gospel is not a pop quiz for the disciples. Since it comes half-way through the Gospel narrative, at a critical turning point, we might be tempted to think Jesus is giving a kind of mid-term exam to see how well the disciples are understanding him and to test whether they have what it takes to go the rest of the journey with him. However, the scene may also reflect Jesus' own development of how he came to understand his identity and mission. Taking Jesus' humanity seriously, and recalling Luke's assertion that "Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor"(Luke 2:52), we might say that in today's Gospel and that of next Sunday, we see a glimpse of Jesus' deepening understanding of what it meant to be "the Christ, the Son of the living God" (v. 16).

For most of their history, the biblical peoples wrestled with the tension between their unique identity as God's chosen people and their relationship to the wider world of the "nations" - the peoples and cultures that surrounded them. One thing was always clear: the God they worshipped as the "God of Israel" was no mere tribal god, but was also the "God of the Nations" as well.