This is a homily that was offered at Morning Prayer and at the evening service with the youth group on October 19.
In our gospel reading today, representatives of two groups united only by their desire to diminish his influence confront Jesus with a question on the subject of God and money. Disciples of the Pharisees, a Jewish sect that had the backing of the common people, and the Herodians, who supported the Roman regime, approach Jesus in front of a crowd with the intention of hanging him on the horns of a false dilemma. They pose a question to which he can give one of only two answers. They ask whether it is lawful to pay the Roman tax or not. Yes or no? (Has anyone ever set you up like that, with a question to which you can't respond without appearing to align yourself with a view you don't share?)
To answer that yes, it is lawful to pay the Roman tax would give Jesus the appearance of saying before questioners eager to establish a Jewish state that Caesar, not God, is sovereign. To say no, it's not lawful to pay the tax would make Jesus vulnerable to accusations of inciting rebellion.
Jesus grabs both horns of this supposed dilemma and shows that a third option exists: One can return to the emperor the coin manufactured by his mint, which bears his image and an inscription honoring him as divine, while at the same time rendering to God the things that are God's.
We might at first thing that Jesus was offering too easy an answer--what's Caesar's is Caesar's, what's God's is God's, and that's that. But how does the situation look if we hand Jesus one of our coins, bearing the image of a political leader and inscribed with our national motto: "In God We Trust"? Can Jesus escape the trap as amazingly now?
