Dear friends,
Today’s Gospel is the coin of Caesar, and Pope Leo XIV preached on it this morning from the window of the Apostolic Palace, less than a day after leaving the hospital.
It comes sixteen days before Americans go to the polls, and it asks how much of ourselves we have handed to the emperor.
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“Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” — Matthew 22:21
The coin at the center of today’s Gospel was a denarius, about a day’s wage for a laborer in Galilee. The silver ones in circulation under Tiberius carried his profile on one side, and the inscription around it called him the son of the divine Augustus.
The Pharisees and the Herodians who bring Jesus that question were not natural allies. The Herodians owed their standing to Rome, and the Pharisees resented every coin that went to it. They set aside their differences long enough to lay one trap, and they bait it with flattery. “Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man,” they begin, before asking whether it is lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar.
Jesus asks to see the coin. “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” They tell him it is Caesar’s. “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” he says, “and to God what belongs to God.”
Pope Leo XIV preached on this passage from the window of the Apostolic Palace this morning, less than a day after his discharge from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital and five days after surgeons removed part of his right lung. It was his first public appearance since the operation, and St. Peter’s Square cheered when he came to the window. He noticed something most of us skip in the story. The men trying to trap Jesus praise him for showing deference to no one, and they are right about that, even though they mean it as bait.
“In Jesus, we contemplate a God who is not afraid of history but comes instead to dwell within it,” Leo said. Giving Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, he told the crowd, means being “truthful, free from servile fear or hypocrisy, free to do good.”
You can watch the passage here:
The Church Fathers loved this Gospel because of the question Jesus asks. If the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image, then something else belongs to God for the same reason. Genesis tells us that God created human beings in his own image. Saint Augustine made the point to his congregation in Hippo sixteen centuries ago, telling them that God seeks his own image in us the way Caesar seeks his on a coin.
